Asus N56VZ-DS71 first impressions

Do you mean the Intel chipset drivers or the Intel HD 4000 graphics drivers? Either way, here are the correct download links for both:

Chipset Driver - Scroll down and select your OS and then expand "chipset" and click the global download button.

Intel HD 4000 video driver

Hope these are what you're looking for.

The question should be "How good is the battery?" For the hardware, you can't beat it. I run my laptop on power saver, the lowest brightness on the screen and keyboard and I can get about 4 and a half - 5 and a half hours out of it while browsing the web and typing this. The key is to make sure you don't have a ton of junk running in the background. I think you'll be satisfied.

 

hi im a newbie here , i dont get sager in my country , but would a samsung 550p5c stand a chance with the asus .. im confused in which one 2 buy , both have the same specs...

 

Yes it stands a chance and in fact i think the 3D gaming experience in the native resolution will be better. And thats because the resolution is smaller. However, i havent seen the samsung from close. For the Asusu i can tell you the quality is much above the average. The only thing that suffers (at least in mine) is the small missalignement of the Blue-Ray Case. But a lot of laptops have this issue. And it can be different from laptop to laptop.
Oh also concerning the TouchPad...Yes, it seems the buttons are to be pressed more to the center for them to work..It seems like if you dont, it will brake! I am not sure but it seems like this. Also a weird thing is that it happend to me 2 times to click the right button further to the side and not to the center and instead of right click it left click! I am not sure why... Maybe my fingers touched the touchpad or something but i am not really sure. Nevertheless it is one of the most accurate touchpads i have used. And i mean it...And i hate touchpads!

 

Ok, and since people here are making kind of review on the Laptop i will make one short with my
keypoints.

Build quality

This Laptop looks nice, feels nice and i hope it will stay like this. The chasis is Half Aluminium half
plastic with very good refiniment except of the holes to the aluminium for the Connections (they are not
refined and are a little sharp to the touch). The hinge of the screen looks ok but their is a small step
of 3 degrees at about 60 degrees (which is really close to viewing angle). Not heavy for its size and
what it offers. Keys look stiff but someone said he had problems. I hope not! Blu-Ray Disc drive has a
small missalignement to the case (but this is used to laptops). Touchpad quality is excellent except
that the buttons are to be pressed close to the middle and not at the sides.

Noise

this Laptop is silent...I love it. You really cannot except a Laptop with such power to be extremely
quiet when you play 3D games! Up to now no weird vibration to the Disc Drive and the HD is almost
silent. I run this Laptop a lot in Performance Mode (gaming u see) and for long time. The fun is really
not making a lot of noise. I hope it will remain like this,

Display

Yes, i am a freak of images quality... Watching in this screen is just wonderfull. I could say the black
is a little more bright than it should but still is really acceptable. I got the one with 1980p
resolution. You can see so much detail...It is really a good screen. not to mention bright...so bright
that in the night i can put my camera and people see me only by the light of the screen. And they see me
really good!The colors also look very alive and you can always use a tool of Asus to make them closer to
what you prefer.

Sound

It is wayyy above the average...The sound is very good but i would prefer a little more high sound. No
rpoblem though. Hey dont expect from the subwoofer to deliver you extraordinary sound ok? But is doing
its job cuite good and if the quality of the sound that is playing is well recorded there are no
glitches! Yes guys, this Laptop has a very good Sound Quality. Though not to high level. But come on,
you are not making a party with this!

Performance

WEll here what is going on...It should and it is fast...Hard disk is fast, cpu is fast, memory helps and
graphics... hmmm graphics...Are fast yes!BUT, i think the optimus architecture is not very mature...The
way the system chooses the card i am sure can be improved. I have a feeling that there is something
going on with the card...And not to mention the problem a lot of people have when in battery. It seems
like the laptop has up and downs to the graphic speed. In plug everything ok (though still i fill there
is something not going good) but when you go to battery there are ups and downs. After a long chat
discuss with nvidia stuff, and after he proposed me to install the new drivers, it is still an issue.
Actually, the guy told me that sometimes the manufacturers (ASUS) are doing some stuff to the laptops
that the drivers dont control...Should i beleive him? I say no. I really dont think Asus would mind
messing around a lot with these stuff. In general the GC is really good. Probably you will have to FORCE
the game to run with nvidia graphics card because the autodetection sucks!


Other and Conlcusion

A lot of software there and a lot of 1 month trials. Not the best not the worst... i dont like that the
software controling the small pop ups when you do something with the fn keys has glitches...it seems
that is not steady at all. also the Laptop is not getting too hot...I had a clevo and beleive me that
was hot! Of course it had 9800GTS but ok... No i can certainly say the laptop is not getting too hot.
Also consider that Aluminium is easier to be penetrated by temperature than plastic so beleive me, this
thing doesnt get too hot. Is not so heavy for each size and the quality is much greater than most of the
laptops i have seen. I seriously prefer it more than the G series of Asus. Those are heavy bricks! i
would love to see the inner structure of the chachi if anyone opened it. I am an engineer and i am
interested to see the inner strengthen of the structure. Aluminium is a new material for the companies
and they are still have a lot to learn...

Its a good Laptop ASUS...Well done...Thank god Apple raised the Level so that we can enjoy better quality products!

 

What are your thoughts when comparing to the new Samsung NP700Z5C?

 

Well this Laptop seems to have good quality...I expect the Graphics card to have similar "problems" due to optimus technology but smaller performance. I say i expect because since i have no benchmark (and a little bored to search) i just look at the numbers... 640 vs 650...I wouldn't expect it to have a big difference BUT!!! BUT!!! Like i said in a previous post, it is a little tricky. You see the native resolution of this laptop is lower than the one on the ASUS with 1980p. Therefore, the 3D performance could be similar or better to the Samsung on native resolution. The resolution really affects 3D performance. However if you put the same resolution i am sure ASUS will be a little faster.
Also note something i forgot to mention in my Review. The rescaling of the image in nonnative resolution is really good! It just seems like a screen with different resolution. I am not a fan of blur rescaling and i prefer clear pixels. Like on our old CRTs

Now for the built quality it seems good and it has a slim drive which i love (though you cannot put small discs, which is a problem if yu have a recording camera like me). But if i dont see it and touch it i cant tell... It doesnt look bad though... And 640 is a good card. However, if YOU want to buy something, i really suggest you go and check it with your eyes and touch. The screen for example is i mportant to check it on your own to see which one you like most...For example i think that the ASUS has a little brighter Black than it should...

 

Thanks for posting the new HD 4000 drivers! Repped

 

i accedently broke the screen bezel, anybody know were I can get a replacement?

 

hi,

check an alternate version of this model @ $1498 singapore dollars

Asus Notebook N56Vz-S3108v

Wish to try the 16GB upgrade on this

 

thanx alot , its Asus All the way then.....

 

I appreciate the post above for the drivers ... Does the webcam auto install with Windows 7 x64 (fresh install) I am trying to make a FULL DRIVER SET for this laptop so I can then post it for everyone to use... just what is needed.

Thanks for the help ... I can't find this laptop in BLACK anywhere, So I think I have to settle for silver :-(

Also has anyone found a complete disassembly guide for this laptop, I would like to know how it breaks down /opens up

 

..that would've been really nice. If they spilled some graphite into the magnesium/aluminium solution. Until it would crack into a billion tiny little strains of razor-sharp twine.

Still. Black aluminium.. hm..

 

The Black model just looks nicer, but is not available.... least Ill be getting the model with the newer Ivy Bridge ... guess that is a bonus, sucks the 750gb is 5400 rpm... Might buy a Corsair Force Series GT 120GB SSD SATA3 Solid State Disk 555MB/S Read SandForce SF-2200 , for it... I use that drive in my desktop and seems to be working well....5400rpm just seems like the stone age... figure it would had least been 7200rpm

 

No, makes sense for a laptop. Would be a good solution to get an "ancient" spinpoint drive with the acoustic noise set to as low as possible. As a perfectly fine and silent, low effect, primary drive. Or a backup drive to a small primary ssd with the boot and so on (a combo like that could cost.. 150 euro, for 128Gb+500Gb).

Instead of buying either an expensive 750Gb 7400rpm drive with maybe 30mb/s difference in transfer speed. In return for noise, higher effect-draw, noticeable heat, etc. Would also be more expensive. Most of these new drives actually have higher random access times than the first generation 500Gb drives as well, which is more valuable than transfer speed, specially on a laptop.

And who don't enjoy falling asleep to Western Digital's subtle scorpio careening, for example, and then dream of cats sitting on the roof. Lovely.

Anyway. Can recommend the corsair ssd-drives. And you really should get one with 500mb/s read and write, since the bios isn't locked to something fanciful on this particular model for that particular setting, at least *cough**cough**AAHAHAHEEEMMM**

 

I see what you are saying ... I wasn't saying I was buying a 750gb, the stock drive in the Asus was 750gb@5400 rpm ... So I was going to buy the corsair SSD i said above (I realize the laptop is only SATA2) but most SSD are SATA3.
Since I don't need a ton of space on my primary drive for too much figure it would be a good bet... I am surviving with that exact drive in my desktop right now... seems zippy fast, so I hope that will add to the performance of this laptop.... Ill just pull out the stock 750gb and toss it in an external cage for storage.
Keep me posted with your thoughts, and thank you !

Corsair Force Series GT 120GB SSD SATA3 Solid State Disk 555MB/S Read SandForce SF-2200 = $109.99 Canadian,

which is a pretty good deal right now (on sale) So I was thinking about ordering it... if you have any other recommendations on SSD drives for this laptop let me know and I will take into consideration

 

That's the same disk I have. 100%, imo. See that dot up in the right hand side on Sisoft Sandra? That's the one.

The OCZ ultra awesome drives as well have finally come to the point where they work reliably. No more "yeah, it corrupts the entire disk randomly sometimes. We've been aware of this for a long time - you just need to install this firmware update that we couldn't be arsed to get the retailers to install for us". They also have a very good price on the 250mb write/500Mb read drives, if you want a 256Gb drive. You won't truly notice any difference in practice. 250Mb/s write is still faster than any hdd can read..

And the n56vz bios is set to support up to sata3. No problem with that. Standard/default settings, autodetect highest possible.

The ram-timing is the problem. It's forced to something specific, and it stops a lot of configs from booting altogether. No one can guarantee that if you buy a new set of ram-chips, that the n56 will boot.

And Asus is not commenting on that one... I guess they're saving up for when a retailer gives them a call about all the customers who returned the ram they bought, and said they'd never buy from either them or asus again.

Because obviously they're sitting on one hell of an excuse, that will explain everything completely. And they're just creating a good build-up, like any skilled comedian would.

 

Right on, Well I think I will order that SSD now since it seems like a great deal... so when I get my N56VZ, I can just toss it in and install Windows fresh.
I assume everything I need driver wise is posted on the Asus website to allow me to make my DM clean (but DON'T install the AUDIO DRIVER) correct ??

Any other pointers ? I assume the webcam is detected automatically with windows install since I did not see a Webcam driver posted on the website, just saw webcam utils ....
Update BIOS out of the box ??
Anything I'm missing ?
Feel free to chat back

 

Yes. Webcam works on a standard usb driver. Bios didn't remove any features, relatively safe to install. Audio driver.. not sure I see the problem. If you don't have desktop effects running (with one click for every action, then silent again)... and you like to listen to the desktop effects at full volume.. it's not going to be a problem with the switch off/on noise. And it does save a bit of battery when they're powered down.

 

So I am going to go ahead and order:

ASUS N56VZ-DS71 Intel Core i7 3610QM GeForce GT 650M 8GB 750GB 15.6in Blu-Ray WIN7HP Notebook Silver

This model has the newer Ivy Bridge chipset ... the cost is $1239.99 cdn -- As much as I wanted to black model, it just seems to be out of stock in some places.

Does anyone use this model with the newer 3510QM ?

 

..3515? The one with 35tdw and higher boost frequencies? Not sure anything comes with these processors yet. Same with the next batch of i5s with lower tdw. Might be interesting.

 

Hi,

I have couple of questions about my new laptop and strange problems, hope somebody can answer and give some help.

1. When subwoofer unit is plugged in and you drag windows in your desktop it keep low "brrr" noice. Anybody else noticed that? It also comes sometimes when you rotate your mouse wheel. Also sometimes subwoofer does random brrr noice in youtube videos that doesnt sync at all with audio of video.

2. I dont know what happened but use to play skyrim with ultra (filterings off and all water reflections on) with 50-60 fps until it go as low as 20 fps (it still uses nvidea 650m not intel 4000) and i have no idea where is problem. I have installed driver again now about 3 times and tried beta driver also from nvideas websites. Only clue i can give is that also sometime nvidea control panel shut down immediately whe i open it (something to do with that).

Please answer if you know anything useful.

 

FYI there is an N56dz-rb71 on sale at micro center for $1k. I can't seem to find any difference between it and the ds71 except the hd is faster (7200) and the res is 1920x1080. Thoughts?

 

i want to know too the diferences with Micro Center - ASUS N56VZ-RB71 15.6" Laptop Computer - Black Aluminum N56VZ-RB71
Please!

 

Hi,
Does anyone here that has one of these have experience with a Lenovo y580 too? I'm trying to decide which to get, graphics for gaming isn't hugely important but build quality, looks and screen quality are pretty important.
Any views would be appreciated
Thanks

 

From what I've been able to tell so far:

Price, HDD speed, and warranty:
RB-71 vs. DS-71)
$999 vs $1159
7200rpm vs. 5400rpm
1 year parts & labor vs. 2 years parts & label plus 1 year ADD

Yes, the more expensive DS-71 has a slower HDD.

Has anybody discovered any other differences?

 

Other differences I could find:

Video
RB71 = Nvidia GT 630M 2G
DS71 = NVIDIA GT 650M 2GB

Display
RB71 = 1366 x 768
DS71 = 1920 x 1080

Multimedia Drive
RB71 = DL DVD±RW/CD-RW
DS71 = Blu-Ray Disc Drive (Reader) + CD/DVD Burning Feature

 

I have a new question.

Got a Seagate Momentus XT 750GB hybrid drive. Now getting surface temperatures about 5 degrees higher than with the old 1TB 5400 RPM HDD. It's even hotter at the palm rest than it is on the bottom. Everything was VERY cool at the palm rest before, now I'm getting quite intense heat even when idle. The laptop has essentially become unusable.

Is this... normal? I was expecting a small climb in temp, but this is ridiculous. Should I just change back to the older disk, because this laptop won't cool my HDD, or could there be something wrong with either the disk or the laptop?

 

Um, no? The N56VZ-RB71 I got at Micro Center has the 650M, the 1080p, and the Blu-Ray drive.

 

Mm. Would have been a bit too much to divide the skus twice, using the same major version..

Difficult to say. But unless you're overheating somehow (not likely, since then the entire thing would just shut down or hang altogether, as it is now) - it's probably a driver conflict between the intel and nvidia drivers of some sort. I know they have at least a few overlaps, so if the switcher application for Optimus isn't working (control panel breaking down, core library panicking), you're going to run into a few problems.

It's.. the same as if you auto-update flash, and it automatically installs the 32-bit version, for example. Happens, the install is just fine - and then everything hangs or partially works.

Honestly, I've no idea how to reliably get around something like that once it happens. Best guess: restart in "safe-mode" and revert to some standard vga-driver. Then reboot with the vga-driver, and uninstall the nvidia drivers and the intel drivers you have program file references to. Then reboot... the five six times it instructs you to every time something's changed, and then reinstall the drivers again. And begin with the package on the driver disc, or from the download on the asus pages.

Hopefully the windows won't helpfully "revert" to an "earlier version" without telling you somewhere along the way..

 

Apologies. Specs I pulled were for the N56VM-RB71, not N56VZ.

 

I am now comparing the Asus N56VZ-DS71 to the MSI GE60 0ND-047US

This MSI has : Intel i7 3610QM 8GB 750GB 15.6in LED GTX660M 2GB DVDRW WLAN Win7 Notebook

The price point is a few hundred lower then the Asus.... any thoughts ?

 

I just purchased an N56VZ and would like to swap the HDD for an SSD. Can anyone give me basic step by step steps on how to do this? I made ASUS recovery disks. I would do a clean windows install, but where would I obtain the disks? So basically I'm looking for a quick guide on how to install the new SSD, and install a clean version of windows. Thanks

 

Swapping the drives is easy: unscrew one screw located on the bottom side, you have to remove a small rubber cover before doing so (not the rubber feet), then slide the cover off and swap your drives.

You can get a Windows 7 ISO from Microsoft's digital river: Official Windows 7 SP1 ISO from Digital River « My Digital Life

Make sure to get the one you have a license key for.

The product key is found on the bottom side of the laptop.

 

OK my decision has been made I do believe to pick up the Asus N56VZ-DS71

before I do purchase I was wanting to know if there are some do's and don'ts perhaps to do. My plan is to purchase a SSD for the unit and install a fresh copy of windows on it. As well there are no issues with any of the Asus drivers (as per Asus website) ?

Should I be getting the official NVIDIA drivers from the NVIDIA website (NVIDIA doesn't have driver support for the 650M) ... wonder why that is ? Any other drivers I should use from manufacture website, or just stick with Asus ?

How is performance and heat (I want to make sure it doesn't heat up all too much) should I be thinking about getting a laptop cooler pad for the unit ?

Is disassembly easy to do ? Is it easy to upgrade RAM and HDD ? as well is it easy to disassemble for cleaning ?

Since this laptop has 4x USB 3.0 ports, can you plug any usb 2.0 device in and it will just down-clock to usb 2.0 ? (flash drives / mouse / etc.) ?

Let me know anything you can recommend me or let me know for hind-sight as this laptop is looking to be the best for me right now. I plan to have this for a few years so I am trying to cover my bases. I was going to go with a MSI G60 OND but after reviewing that, it seems to have a lot more issues then the asus.... to be honest the Asus is hardly reviewed or any bad things said against it. I am guessing because most people do not have any issues with it.

Thanks again!

 

Ok so I installed the SSD, clean windows, drivers, everything working great! Only problem is it says I have 3 days left on my windows license because my key was invalid. I took the key directly off the bottom of the computer. Should I call windows about this?

 

How big is the difference in using the SSD as apposed to the stock HDD?

 

..biggest difference is noise, heat and access times. They are low. If you're doing some heavy lifting with databases, photo-editing, 3d modeling, rebuilding programming projects with millions of files, that kind of thing, you're going to want an ssd for the access times alone.

Also the hdd will have about 180Mb/s transfer max. An ssd will have 500Mb/s at best. You will notice that very quickly in Windows as well, since everything is made so boneheaded, and everything that runs is IO bound on the "first" access to every single library on the system..

And definitely call Microsoft about the keys. They absolutely adore helping you with the product key.

No, no problems. Use the driver-disc, or pick up the drivers individually. Install the new bios, though. Didn't remove anything critical, made a few things better, added bitstreaming via hdmi. Put the bios on a memory card and use the in-built tool (while plugged in, charged battery, and the usb-key firmly slotted in the port) - and it's safe and quick.

There's a driver update with specific support for the 650m. But there are no particular performance gains or compatibility issues with the driver version asus has so far. The only thing is a bunch of problems with the intel drivers, that I think they've solved by just changing the profile from hd4000 to the 650m for now. The next major version will turn up in the mainline soon enough.

Not necessary. It's extremely well made that way. It's not "it doesn't get warm (unless you start the graphics card)", etc. It's "it doesn't get warm in the chassis when running a game for hours on overclock. What does get warm is the edge near the exhaust. I haven't seen a laptop with as good and well-dimensioned cooling as this one. Ever.

No issues with the hdd/ssd, bios settings automatically set sata speeds, etc.

The problem is the ram, because the timing settings are forced to some.. not very optimal settings that only make sense at Asus' labs. I hope they're going to react sooner or later and throw out a bios update that softly allows spd-timing (for 1.35v ram, to possibly 1866Mhz ram support - but generally better compatibility for higher delay-timed ram for general 16Gb support, etc.). Take a look in the other thread if you're upgrading right away - the Gentech reviews guy has been kindly testing a few combos for us and listed the ones that work. ...note that they also will work better after a soft spd-timing bios setting..

Yeah. Works perfectly well with 2.0 devices via bios support. No need for a new driver, and then a reboot without usb 2.0 devices before they work, etc. I expected that would be a problem, but it wasn't.

There are three problems with the laptop: slightly bleeding backlight under the keys. It doesn't bother me, personally. I actually think it's very helpful, even if it's probably not meant to be that way.

Second thing is the battery. It's not very high capacity. So you get, practically speaking, 3-3.5h if you use the laptop. Turn the light up and run something semi-graphical on it, and you're down on 1.5-2h. The speakers draw a lot of power as well, and there's no underclocking on the intel setup - so there's no way to slice it and have an underclocked processor running Spotify or something with low processor draw. You get at most 5h on this computer, by basically turning off everything and only having a word-processor open. By contrast, an amd/apu quad-core setup can easily be underclocked and achieve the same battery life as that while running low-draw processes while wifi is open, etc. (We're talking 9-10w draw on an n53tk/ta, against minimum 15w on the n56. Max 35-40 against 50+ just on internal graphics). Note that that effect-draw is still statistically speaking very low compared to other laptops with the same class of components. In fact, the battery-life is actually higher on the n56 than many other laptops that come with a 650m card.. Performance-wise, it also performs well while running battery.. Still doesn't make it as good as it could be, though.

Third thing is the ram-timing. They're set, or forced, in the bios. Which makes.. no sense whatsoever, since there are a bunch of retailers with different kits out there, who will have to test a bunch of configs to get one to boot.. There are popular kits on the market right now that aren't even going to work. The timing also actually make the notebook draw more power than necessary, and become warm if you're really lucky. And it's going to cause errors on some configs. So you would think that Asus would be forced to change this. And respond in the way they did with the thermal throttling.. which they did by basically turning the throttling off altogether, which really wasn't a very good idea either because that's going to threaten to fry the processor if the cooling fails for some reason. By the way Asus folks speak, I'm not sure what to think - they seem extremely unhelpful in every possible way, going so far as to directly insist that since they didn't launch the computer with an ssd, or 16Gb RAM, etc, then they're not going to support you if you try to install one on your own. Had one guy at Asus support saying that I should shove off because I'm also a linux user, and asked unreasonable things (I wanted to move the media-keys, and they weren't even going to apologise for not being able to help - it was just "we're not going to help you", period. There's also nil specifics coming back from very detailed reports or suggestions.

So I'm not going to hold my breath until they fix it, to put it that way..

But other than those three things, the notebook is very good. And the cooling, the chassis and construction, panels, screen, touch-panel (software and hardware), design (with thought about wear and stability) and so on are particularly good for a notebook.

I mean, it's rare that I'm happy with something. So consider that high praise

 

Wow, thank you so much for explaining, really kind of you.
So basically I am going to get my laptop out of the box.... going to open the drive bay, and install my SSD... from there I am going to boot for the first time to BIOS (to get to BIOS I think what I read is you hit the 'DEL' key) Have the BIOS update on a USB flash, and use the built in BIOS tool to flash the new bios.
Once this is done I will be installing windows 7 ultimate/enterprise from USB key. From there I will use all the Asus drivers provided from the website to install for a clean device manager.

From above you said : " There's a driver update with specific support for the 650m. But there are no particular performance gains or compatibility issues with the driver version asus has so far. The only thing is a bunch of problems with the intel drivers, that I think they've solved by just changing the profile from hd4000 to the 650m for now. The next major version will turn up in the mainline soon enough. "

What do you mean by the profile, is there an intel specific profile you need to set once everything is installed ?

As for RAM I am just going to leave it to the stock 8GB for now. I don't really plan on upgrading it any time soon, it seems safer just to use the stock RAM as you said some RAM kits may not run properly.

It is nice to know USB 3.0 is backwards compatible, and if you have a USB 2.0 device plugged in as I think if I am understanding this correctly, you just need to reboot to re-initialize USB 3.0.

The laptop ships with a driver disc ??? Most cases that is rarely seen these days... confirm ?

Has anyone been able to test the webcam ? I am on the road a lot and do enjoy to Skype here and there... I am not overly concerned a webcam is a webcam usually, just curious

I think I am going to be happy with this laptop. Many thanks for the detailed response, this forum has been really helpful !

Thank you again, feel free to follow up when you are able to

 

HUGE! All I can say is wow, this thing is fast! I am extremely happy I discovered these forums and read through this thread, it made my decision to purchase this laptop and throw an SSD in there very easy. The SSD I installed is a Crucial M4 256mb. Boot up takes less than 30 seconds. Restart even quicker. Awakes from sleep in 2 seconds. I have an overall Windows rating of 7.1, before I believe it was 5.9

I am not super PC tech savoy, however I had no difficulties swapping out the HDD for the SDD and installing a clean version of windows. I was able to solve my product key issue quickly by calling Microsoft.

 

Finally got the Asus N56 (writing from it atm). I am very impressed so far:

- The touchpad and keyboard is just awesome compared to my Acer Aspire! Acer, never ever again...
- It's so silent and you don't even hear the fan, just the air that streams out.
- The screen is very bright and brings clear colors with it.
- The overall looking is very good, quality seems very nice. Couldn't find any flaws yet.
- Temperatures are low for office applications and surfing (didn't try out games yet).

Only thing that I noticed is that the Asus logo on the back side doesn't glow. Any idea why? The notebook is plugged to the power grid.

 

No, the switching between the nvidia card and the internal hd4000 card. It's taken care of by a profile switcher application, that you can set yourself, or you can use the default profiles. The driver updates have tweaks to the settings for different applications.

My understanding so far is that the current nvidia drivers are actually solid, and that what we're waiting for is to have the 6xxM cards inserted into the main driver module (they did that on the last big revision, I think, a few weeks ago). Meanwhile, the few problems people have turn up when using the internal graphics card.

Mm. And feel free to write the retailer and explain that you won't buy an extra ram-kit because you're not certain it will work, since Asus don't have their shop in order.

No, don't need to reboot either.

Includes the fn-key application, not too many annoying extra things (they can be uninstalled anyway), and an easy power-profile switcher app. They've replaced the annoying flowing waves with the black on white boxes from the ROG laptops. Looks and works fine. Then you have the asus-update tool that checks once in a while for updates on drivers via asus. That tool use the same ones that are available on the web. You don't really need to use more than that to get the system working perfectly fine.

 

Awesome, everything seems pretty straight forward with this laptop. I will be getting it this week ..... finally lol. I just placed the order this morning. I will be sure to look into some RAM in the future just for the sake of emailing the retailer and telling them that. Perhaps that will push things in the right direction for Asus and they will develop a BIOS that works well with various RAM kits.
I will have to play around with that profile thing once I get things installed. As well it is 'DEL' to enter BIOS if I am not mistaken (not 'F keys')

Thank you for answering the questions, I am sure I may have some more, but this has really helped with my decision making. I was going to choose a MSI, someone I was talking to put it in my head, but after reviewing that laptop, there were too many cons about it that people were posting. Most people went with the MSI because the video RAM was GDDR5 (Asus GDDR3) but that is that a 10-15% performance gain at best ?

Thank you again nipsen !

 

No, it's f2 or f8, I think. It prompts you on the boot-screen.

...I'm not going to start on that. But the performance gain is difficult to measure between the models. Basically, it's the same gk107 chip on 640le, 640m, 650m and 660m cards. They only have different memory timing configs (or a severe underclock for the 640le versions). And for any amount of different possible reasons, the difference in performance between the cards basically disappear at the same clock-frequencies, regardless of gddr5 or ddr3.

So it's not a surprise that a 660m is 10-15% faster than a 650m. But the question is how far you can push any of these cards with the cooling the systems have. That's what really is interesting, that the benchmarks and reviews generally don't answer.. If you can't run the msi at full burn for an hour, for example.. or if you can overclock the n56 and still run comfortably..

So if you know that gddr5 ram works on higher frequencies internally, and draw more power, for example. Along with the over/underclock potential.. Then all of the talk about performance gain is.. more about a question whether you get anything useful at all.. if you choose gddr5 ram over ddr3.

Sorry.. was another rant, wasn't it..

 

No man not a rant at all, to be honest you are on the ball when it comes to explaining ... I am absorbing all this information you are telling me. Thank you ! Sucks I couldn't find the Black N56 had to go with the Silver model, oh well, color is not important it is what the hardware can do
So I picked up the laptop for $1239.00 CDN + I am adding Corsair Force Series GT 120GB SSD SATA3 Solid State Disk 555MB/S Read SandForce SF-2200 which just shipped today. I am pumped to see how this laptopt performs with a nice SSD in it... picked up that SSD for $84.99 CDN (awesome deal) I have been using that exact drive in my desktop and it works well.

However do you have to play with any TRIM settings with the SSD ... I remember I was enabling and disabling TRIM on my desktop here to see how performance was... currently I have:

DisableDeleteNotify = 1 (Windows TRIM commands are disabled)

I have not had any issues.... thoughts ?

 

There are two different colors of the N56? I didn't notice this. Do you have some pictures? :O

 

I would very much appreciate any insight.

 

Short answer... since sandforce 2: ignore it. Disable trim, don't worry about it. Consider every comment about read and write speed peaks, and how long the drive is going to last before errors, and so on, as... monks discussing the virtue of brown vs. black leather bindings on bibles.

Long answer.. the way you write to an ssd involves a two-layered approach. You write something to the controller, then the controller on the ssd packs things based on it's controller logic. Every read is just a read, even if it's two layers. Every write, unlike on an hdd, will involve a reset of the current "sector" in that second layer, instead of a file-operation to a sector. Since for example windows tends to not actually write deletes until the data is overwritten, this suddenly means overhead.

Earlier on, a drive without a clever controller would basically have the controller pack the data towards the reset sectors, until the drive would have had all the data written to. At which point the write (and general speed) would be consistently lower, since you would add the reset to every new write inside the controller. Which was kind of a problem when the write-speed already was much lower than the read-speed. To prevent that you would have the option to run TRIM (it's a command the ssd-controller would implement) in the OS, either scheduled or with some logic or other after or during program runs, to prepare the disk.

Other problems would be that the controllers would write to the same areas of the flash-disk over and over again, which would shorten the life of the disk (each "sector" will only last so many amounts of rewrites). So if the OS layer would do a few things to prevent 1. performance drop and 2. rewrites on the same sectors - then that would be a good idea, right?

But now the controllers on the disks take care of all of those things, and the lifetime on your average ssd-"sector" is going to last years upon years even on full and continuous load. There is some discussion around this, but unless you're setting up a server that is going to last for a very long time (10+ years), and require very large storage space that cannot be changed later - there's no real discussion to be had when it comes to longevity and so on. It's just not an issue any longer (if it ever was for consumers - but you still have these "theoretical" analyses of situations like this on pop-tech sites that are based on situations that have never actually been much of a concern for any commercially sold products).

You still also have these functions in the OS, though. Enabled by default. With conventions that survive forever. Similar to the RAM x 3 size on the page-file in windows. They still keep that in Win7, even though you probably won't find a computer now, even an EeePC, that will ever actually have a 100% commit charge. But it defaults to the behaviour that expects less than 1Gb ram anyway. Basically, new programs and libraries are actually written to need a large page-file to function properly. Are a few strange problems with disk-operations that turn up because of this. Variations in performance based on when pre-fetches and cache-misses happen, because of internal program buffer sizes, that kind of thing.

But no, you won't run into any problems by disabling trim. At worst we're talking about missing some performance peak eventually in special circumstances. But it could just as well go the other way around in practice, since there's going to be more disk-activity during program execution overall. Which again would hurt the lifetime of the disk, not help it.

 

That is great. I figure that I have had it disabled since I basically built my desktop maybe a bit over a year now, and have not ran into any issues, I wanted to ask if I should do the same on the laptop. That was once again an excellent detailed response and assisted me in understanding the pros and cons of TRIM. You have been a excellent help!

 

Hello everyone, I recently bought a new laptop, being the Asus N56VZ ( this model to be specific). When I got the laptop I immediately formatted it (like I do with all my other laptops) but to my surprise WiFi was not working. So I downloaded both drivers from the Asus driver page and installed them. This managed to get my wifi working but I get very low speeds!

I put my old laptop next to my new one and the old laptop gets more than double the speed of my new one. (14 mbs vs 4-5 mbs)
I don't know what could cause this and would like to see this resolved, could this be a hardware error?

The FN shortcut to disable the touchpad does not work either, all the other FN shortcuts do work though.

Thanks,
AK

 

Hi guys,

I was planning for the Y580 but reading about heat issues and I have one unanswered question that would also concern switching to the N56VZ instead of Lenovo.

Can the N56VZ output for 3D gaming via HDMI to externa 3D TV ? Has anybody tested and actually played 3D on external monitor/TV yet ?

thanks in advance for quick hint