Asus N56VZ-DS71 first impressions

..unless it turns into an explanation about how sausages are really made, and what they contain, and so on.

Um.. well, you need to resize your existing partitions so they will fit on the new disk. And then.. hope nothing else breaks.. *cough* I've never managed to get it to work properly.

 

Edited out post

 

From your reply I would gather that you feel the stock screen is good enough that the screen upgrade, especially without a better warranty, would not be worth it.

 

So I have installed a Samsung 830 256 GB SSD, installation of windows without problems (no problems with UEFI or so).

I didn`t install the realtek audio driver and the crackling sound problem is not existing (its definitely a realtek driver problem).

But another thing: Before the installation of windows I had in Windows Experience Index a 7,1 for both graphics, after installation only 6,7 for both. I downloaded the newest graphic drivers from the Asus website. So why is there a drop?

One more thing: The SSD has only 238 GB, is that correct, when they sell it as a 256 GB unit?

 

TOUCHPAD... The same here, clack sounds. I believe it's not supposed to do so.

BAD KEYS. Furthermore all of the keys aren't as smooth as they are supposed to be. Some of them gives some resistance on the half-way, and delays just a bit when it returns to the original state.

RECOVERY DVD'S DOSEN'T WORK. I did the 4-dvd AI-recovery on two n56 now, none of them worked. No safety there...
Anyone else?

BRICK-NOISE. The power supply makes high frequency tunes now and then. Totally mess up my tinnitus...

GLITCHES. In 3DMark vantage, i get glitches. Any one else? Think this applies to MW3 as well, but haven't tested it properly yet.

This is my second n56, and I believe I will send this one back as well. I think it is a kind of embarrassing that I have now received two of the same model, that has not been properly assembled...
I am not sure if this is extreme bad luck, or they just get away with that kind of standard, or because people just don't know what to expect, and isn't experienced enough and to impressed with the design. I can only urge anyone who get a machine with flaws, to send it back, so they will improve the assembling procedure... Unless I just have been in extremely bad luck twice

BIOS 204. The UEFI-option is left out, I belive it autodetects. The option left, I believe is for booting from MBR like in the good old days, but not sure.

NIPSEN CLEAN INSTALL. Would be nice. Dual boot as well. And some debate on UEFI vs. MBR. Why not UEFI?
These ISO's enables UEFI install:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-from-digital-river/

 

Hmm, those are pretty bad news. Has anyone else got the same issues as elmer?

 

1. no problems on mine.
2. no problems on mine.
3. have not tried recovery.
4. yes. brick has little coil whine when PC is in sleep mode. Its silent otherwise.
5. no problems on mine
6. havent tried.

 

With my luck, I usually have all of those things with new devices. So if something I get actually works, it's usually means the build-quality is extremely high.

But this time I had none of the problems, so I don't know.

 

I have the same "clack" sound that you guys are whining about and I believe it's completely normal. It's there so you know you clicked the pad without actually pushing it in hard enough to press the physical button.

All the keys on my machine are fine, maybe you're just picky. I'm not too sure.

Glitches? It sounds like a user-error. Update your drivers. I have absolutely none.

You have a choice to boot from the DVD drive in either UEFI mode or not. Don't boot from the UEFI drive option if you want to do a reinstall of windows.

Do you have the power brick right next to your ear? I'm 20 years old and haven't noticed it in a completely silent room.

Seriously, the laptop is FINE. Do some research about an issue you have, keep your drivers up to date, and everything will be A-OK. Not everything is Asus's fault.

I have no hardware problems. I'm not extremely picky, sure. Laptop is running at 42C for the processor and 35C for the processor while typing this. I did a Windows re-install perfectly fine, downloaded the latest drivers from Asus' website and Nvidia/Intel for the more important things like the videocard drivers. I added 2GB more ram and a hybrid SSD hard drive. No issues.

The only thing I'd like to see is a way to access the fan/heatsinks. I'm not sure what other way to clean the fan or heatsinks besides blowing compressed air where the hard drive/ram bay is and into the fan exhaust on the left side of the laptop.

 

#459 Assume I did all those things, and maybe consider rewriting your post, try assuming people might be right about what there eyes see and there ears hear

This is a pickture, of the previous laptop I returned. The only thing I was picky about was the spacebar, and i kind of regret that now. I don't know about you guys, but I need my brand new laptop to be brand new, when I unbox it!!!

Photo Album - Imgur

What the previous I returned didn't have compared to this one:

Problems with glitch and any drivers.
Casual feel to the keys.
Noise from the brick.
Actually a loose arrow-key that I had to fix my self(I do put in an effort you know )
Dent in the chassis, just between touch and space.
Touch that clacks, and which I all so my self had to press in to place, resulted in a huge gap at the dent.

So may that be my lesson. I love the design though, could I just get one that was almost flawless

Been wondering about the brick, and graphics. Perhaps it doesn't deliver the juice needed. It's like gaming on battery, just with glitches in small scale compared!!!

 

...and DO boot from the UEFI mode, if you want to install UEFI!!!

 

Huh. Sounds like you got the notebook I was supposed to get.

By the way - wrote a bit about that in the guide-thing. But what determines whether you have a uefi boot is if the disk is partitioned with GPT. If you have a gpt, then .. I think most win7 oem installs are going to add it's own efi-compatible boot. And then you have to just add this in the UEFI boot manager to boot it later.

But if you switch disk-drive, then the uefi boot manager is gone, so the bios will fall back to an mbr scheme (unless you install a different efi manager, etc. Which is possible.. just don't see the point right now).

 

#462 Yes... Please don't jinx me!
Ahh. It's too late. In the past year I had a brand new lenovo with similar flaws, and a screen defect after a couple of hours use. A clevo, about every thing I was told by the salesman, didn't match the product actually sent. A brand new nokia mobile, that mess up the sound, which needs to be returned. And it's not only electronics. My tailor back home made the legs on my new suit too short, so I had to post them back.
Perhaps that's the reason I've become picky, if it is so...
Seems like I should stay away from everything that needs handling by mail!!
How long did your jinx last, if mine lasted a year, how long to go???

What I got from reinstalling n56 a thousand times, is it detects whether there is gpt and an EFI-path it self, so you just have to choose which one to use. Am right.

 

Taichou - to be clear, I have the same SSD that you have and mine *appeared* to be working fine with UEFI enabled...right up until it became totally corrupted. Before reading up on the compatibility issue, I thought the drive had simply failed. I couldn't even reinstall windows from an OEM disk.

Samsung appears to have confirmed that these drives are only meant to run with an mbr petition rather than the gpt partition required for UEFI. Check out: SSDs are incompatible with GPT partitioning?! - AnandTech Forums

 

This worries me even more ...

Sorry to repeat the question I've asked a couple of days ago: has really "UEFI disable" option been REMOVED into the latest 204 BIOS?

If yes, could we assume that 204 could "adapt" itself to MBR or UEFI boot, sensing the kind of partition present on the disk?

Has Asus released some info about this possible issue (UEFI/MBR no longer explicitely selectable)?

 

^no, it just prefers UEFI, then falls back to mbr. Did that before and after the new bios.

..oh.. about 30 years?

This is bull. But it's definitely possible that the partitioning scheme windows uses would break when mirrored to a new ssd. They have something that looks like an efi-setup for the file-system when you install it fresh, in that the last present partition on the system will contain a bunch of status and recovery files that are necessary for the thing to work. So if you installed it, and there's an error, Windows would do it's good old "recovery to ruin" routine, as usual.

 

For the record, I wasn't using a mirror. I did a clean install on to the SSD from a system builder copy of windows 7 64-bit.

All I can really attest to is that when my drive became corrupted (less than one week after putting it in my machine), it would not boot, and I could not repair the drive or reinstall windows through any of the following means: (i) repairing from a windows disk image, (ii) booting and reinstalling off my bootable flash drive, or (iii) even reinstalling from my oem windows disk.

In fact, only the oem disk allowed me to access the windows partition and format utilities, but my attempts to use these utilities failed/resulted in errors. I was planning on rma'ing the drive when I stumbled on that AnandTech thread. Been smooth sailing since I turned off uefi and repartitioned as mbr /shrug.

 

hi escapist,

I looked in Samsung 830 Properties - Volumes - Populate:

Partition style: Master Boot Record (MBR)

Am I now on the safe side?

 

Very likely the repartition part fixed things rather than anything else. I've had corruption on a disk.. a hdd.. because of the exact same thing. The win7 setup writes info to the end of a disk in some unknown, weirdling MS-format, that corresponds to the windows bootloader/manager in some way. But you can circumvent it and still access the data without that partition info being consistent. Then certain operations start to tresh around, such as recovery points, hibernation, etc.

..honestly have no idea how the partition checks actually work. But I'm guessing this turns up as a problem because the "bug" happens when the partitions are shrunk down, and that last sector has to be rewritten. Which happens more often with ssds than normal hdd changes, right..

 

Does anyone have a definitive answer to all of the questions regarding 16GB RAM compatibility and how the resellers are offering this item with that option??

 

hi, may i know where can i get n56vz with spec as below?:

Asus N56VZ:
i7 3610QM -
Nvidia 2GB GT650M DDR3 -
4GB DDR3 1600Mhz -
750GB 7200rpm

is this spec available in sg? or hk? thx

 

So what is all this talk with SSD + UEFI bios ? Do some SSD not work well with this bios. I am still old school and still like to use the old bios format.

I am planing to buy a SSD for this laptop, just want to be sure, or aware of any issues that may arise... Thank you.

 

It probably comes up because people are using mirroring software, or backup solutions that copy the partition information, etc. The when they extract that partition back to the ssd, they run into two issues:
1. The new disk doesn't contain an efi bootloader, and falls back to an mbr boot (for example after running windows recovery). This is different from usual, since the asus disk comes with an uefi bootloader.
2. The partitions need to be shrunk to fit on the new disk. The new disk is smaller than the old disk. Happens often if you switch to ssd..

Both will cause corruption, because the partition table win7 uses doesn't deal gracefully with resizing, or switching from efi to mbr. There are a million small things that can go wrong here, but they all cause corruption on the actual disk, that usually won't be recovered. Worse, it's still possible to access most of the data, but Windows can't actually recover from mistakes, and they happen in the weirdest circumstances - such as depending on the size of the hibernation files, or when they were written, etc.

If you then just install another win7 install on top of it, the partitions are rebuilt and you get a working boot back again, no errors, with the same data that wasn't corrupted yet.

And this happens with all new hdds you might want to change to if either situation 1 or 2 takes place, ssd or not.

So it has nothing to do with an ssd as such. ..And a new install using an mbr setup is going to work just fine. And so will a new efi-boot, if we for example had Asus' efi-boot available somewhere.

An alternative, if you want to use efi on the new disk, is to use rEFIt. Install it on the disk, etc. Bit difficult, but that works (..maybe you would want a triple-boot with win/linux/mac, for example..).

 

zonx-
I'm pretty sure (not completely) that it comes stock with 8 gigs of ddr3 1600 ram (two 4 gig slots). I bought here: ASUS N56VZ-DS71 - XOTIC PC - Asus 15.6" Notebook but that is in the US, you would need to find a reseller that serves your area (if your buying out of the US).

 

When you placed your order from xotic, did you get any customizations like a screen upgrade, ssd, or wireless?

Thanks

 

musteq-
No sry i didn't, but i can inform everyone that the laptop i got is amazing. Ive been downloading games from the steam summer sale for most of this afternoon and the laptop has stayed relatively cool while i download/play games and has run smoothly even when i do alot of processes at once (maybe i'm just biased because my last laptop was a Dell Latitude D630). I haven't had any issues with the laptop whatsoever. The only heat that i feel is a tiny amount on the palm rests but not enough to make it uncomfortable at all.
Edit:
People that complained about the trackpad being hard to click on the outer edges: i'm pretty certain its meant to be that way. If you have to click fully down do it near to the middle, otherwise just do a light touch to click.

 

cartmen838213,
Thanks for that. I haven't found anyone that upgraded the screen, so maybe I don't need it. It would be nice to save the money, but I would pay for it if the difference was great.

 

@nipsen
do you know if that also applies for the samsung ssd 830? because many users had problems with that ssd.
thanks

 

..I'm not psychic, obviously. But like I said, you're going to have more problems with this as more people switch to ssds. And the 830 is one of the best deals you can make right now. So I wouldn't worry about it just yet.

There's.. this practical thing as well, right? The only way to actually get one of the uefi loaders from the manufacturers on to an ssd right now, is to use a ghosting software backup of some sort. So if you are booting from an uefi (other than using rEFIt, going for a new install, etc), then you have very likely already set yourself up for disaster on beforehand.

 

Follow-up to my previous RMA. I just received my replacement N56vz, so far things are looking much better:

1. Trackpad is flawless, no glitches, clacking, misalignment, etc.
2. All keys, including the f9 key are properly installed and tactile
3. Subwoofer does NOT make farting noises, but instead depth and bass (it looks like an updated version of my RMA-ed woofer (has ASUS logo on top)
4. the USB-ports are NOT too tight like before, but just right

One existing problem, Diablo III on ultra, full HD res, lags noticeably, with stutters and choppiness. Updating Intel graphics, nVidia, bios 204, still did not improve performance. Any suggestions are welcome.

 

Hi, is this laptop suitable for portability? I know its not exactly lightweight but I love the specifications and design and was wondering whether, as an university student, it would have sufficient weight to carry this laptop around.

 

I'm glad that your problems got solved with the RMA. I can't help you with the stutter problem in D3 but would like to ask you a question:

Do you get a high frequency beep sound out of the power supply when your laptop is fully charged and the monitor turned off (Standby Mode)?

 

Yes, I do. The power supply makes a high frequency whirring noise that goes away when the notebook awakes from standby mode. It is noticaeble enough to get annoying at times, so I've made it a habit to disconnect the power supply when I'm not using my laptop :/

For this price, power, and screen size, you'd be hard-pressed to find a notebook lighter or smaller than this Asus N56vz. That being said, is it still portable? That is subjective, but being 6lbs, somewhat wide, but not too thick, it may take some getting used to. I plan on carrying mine around campus. I could think of other notebooks that are much less portable (Sager NP9130, MSI GE60, Lenovo Y580), and other notebooks that are slightly more portable (Samsung Z5C, HP DV6T).

 

Ah, that sucks. I thought they finally fixed this issue. Did you report this issue to Asus? Maybe, they will work on this when a lot of people going to complain about it.

 

Bump down resolution or quality. I had same problem and it seems D3 is too heavy at fullHD and ultra for this card. I had avg mid 40ish fps, but dips and spikes made it feel "choppy". Also HDD working causes lags in the game, only way to avid that would be upgrading to an SSD.

 

Hey, wondering about throttling on this laptop while gaming. I heard there are throttling issues with the CPU while playing games.

 

Thanks for that, it makes a lot of sense, my -DS71 has the 5400RPM HDD as well. I thought I read that it could handle D3 but perhaps that was at 720p.

 

Anyone tried this ? 296.67 from asus n56vz page.
ASUSTeK Computer Inc. -Support- Drivers and Download N56VZ

 

The graphic card is GDDR3 and not GDDR5 .???

 

What category is that driver version number for and what is it for?

That's right.

 

As far as i know. Only Samsung and rMBP have GDDR5 versions of 640M/650M so far. All the rest are DDR3.

 

I wonder why no 296.16 driver on asus page since mine came with it btw this is in that page..



Not many information/comments from google about it got no problem with current driver so..

 

Don't download the graphics drivers from ASUS. Get them directly from NVIDIA and Intel.

Latest driver links as of July 15, 2012:

Download the Intel HD 4000 drivers from here and the NVIDIA drivers from here.

 

Gonna read more comments on this nvidia beta tho.. Cheers mate.

 

Just two quick questions. How is the overall build quality/battery life? And are there any throttling issues while gaming? I read a review that said it got throttled down to 1.2 Ghz

 

Take a look here - post with pictures, observations, explanation for the results.

If the cooling fails and the processor hits the temp set for the limit (105 degrees?) it's going to be throttled. Like all other processors like this. If it doesn't hit that limit - which this laptop won't on the standard clocked speeds.. not by a long shot - then it's going to have normal boost at 3.1-3.3Ghz, depending on core distribution.

Battery life is bad. That is, perfectly average in that segment and power class.. But it would have been all kinds of awesome if they had a bigger battery, since the actual power-consumption is fairly low compared to a few other setups with an i7/650m/1080p screen..

Build-quality feels surprisingly solid for what it is. I've expected some seams to come apart a bit, etc., since it's so much plastic on the less visible parts. But they've really outdone themselves this time.. it looks and feels like a "luxury laptop"..

Of course, that impression is based on the one single unit that had no defects, of course j/k

 

I play Battlefield 3 on ultra graphics and medium other settings and the game runs perfectly, i haven't tried putting the settings up more, but it looks amazing the way it is. The only thing with extreme gaming is the side of the laptop where the exhaust comes out gets a bit warm/hot from the hot air being blown out, but its understandable and simple that as the hot air gets carried out it will heat up the chunk of metal next to it. I will probably be uploading gameplay to youtube and i will link it here when i do.

 

Might be a Stupid question, but can someone post the link for the intel chipset drivers from intel ? The nvidia ones I can seem to find, but just wanting to make sure i have the correct intel ones...

If there are any other drivers you want to post that are handy links that would be great as I am trying to make my own driver disc/usb for a clean install of windows....
Also someone just said leave the default reltek audio drivers also (windows) which eliminates the 'popping' sound correct?

 

Gaming video for those who want to see:
Asus N56VZ-DS71 Gameplay - YouTube

 

Okay thanks! How bad is bad for the battery? I saw you mention in your review 4-5 ish. Is that the max you get?