Asus U31SD Optimus Problems After Reformat?

Hi everyone,

I purchased an Asus U31SD today and did what I always do with a new machine and went to reformat it. I downloaded all of the latest drivers from the Asus website under my model and all hardware is detected correctly under device manager. I decided to try playing a little Counterstrike 1.6 to test the 520m only to realize that Optimus doesn't toggle to the Nvidia card when the game launches. I did some googling and found some people said Windows 7 updates can affect Optimus so I uninstalled the Intel HD Graphics update it gave me as well as the Nvidia drivers and cleanly reinstalled both -- still nothing. The only time I can get any application to launch on the Nvidia GPU is when I run the Windows Experience Assessment.

I have tried changing the 'Preferred graphics processor' to Nvidia and attempting to launch hl.exe with the Nvidia card but the option is greyed out. I should also note that the context menu to run off the Nvidia doesn't show up either.

Does anyone have any ideas for this at all?

My Dell Vostro would always notify me it was switching video cards and the screen would blink black, I can't even tell if/when something is happening on this Asus (is that normal?).


Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit

 

Most probably Counterstrike 1.6 just doesn't require enough performance for Optimus to kick in..Meaning Optimus detects that it doesn't need to switch to NVIDIA since the integrated graphics can handle the application fairly well anyway..Putting it in the white list (preferred GPU) only means it's "preferred" but still not 100%. Think of it as placing google chrome on "preferred GPU", even if you do that, Optimus detects that it doesn't need to switch to NVIDIA since the application doesn't require much performance anyway, so it stays at integrated graphics. Try heavier games like Modern Warfare or Black Ops and see if Optimus still won't switch to NVIDIA.