I wouldnt spend 1 cent more on an Asus product!

I bought an Asus ROG-GL502VS-7th-Gen-Intel-Core notebook from HIDevolution via Amazon for 1900€. (7700hq, gtx1070, ssd, 120 hz) It was sent to me as defected. I am pretty sure they knew it was defected before selling me. Because they shipped it as possible as late (1 month after purchase), so I missed returning right that amazon provides. Anyway!

Notebook has got 2 problems:

1- Battery drains when playing games although it is plugged in of course.

2- FPS drops occur very often. In other words, when playing games, games freeze for a second then flow every a few minutes. It is hell frustrating and I am afraid issue will become bigger after warranty time will end.



I sent the notebook to Asus service 3 times and they sent it back to me without doing anything! They just say they couldn’t detect the issue I claim.

Also, when I sent it last time, they formatted my drive D for no reason. Notebook has 2 hard drives. 1 ssd for windows and 1 TB hdd for storage. You really have to format 1 tb hdd to be able to reinstall windows on SSD right? Good job Asus service. Your skills really impressed me.

 

Asus won't find any hardware issues with it that they can fix for a reason - the reason being the notebook is badly designed.

1. Battery drains because the notebook needs more power at peak loads than the PSU is providing, so it supplements it with battery power.
If they used a higher amp PSU that would not be a problem.

2. I assume that is due to thermal throttling. I would undervolt to begin with and re-paste if that has not been done already by HID.

Either way none of your problems is particularly surprising to me - I've seen the same thing with other Asus notebooks including my own (GL553VE). I've pretty much resolved throttling by repasting and undervolting my 7700HQ by 0,11V. As for battery drain it still does happen in very few games when the notebook is under very high load - it's not an issue in my case because it was 1 or 2% per hour of gaming so I've never drained the battery more than 5-6%.

Either way - Asus service won't fix design issues.

 

Reducing clock of GPU, solves battery draining issue, but it doesnt solve FPS drop issue. PSU provides 230 watt. Its more than enough. I believe GPU is defected since games freeze even when gpu clock is reduced and battery doesnt drain.
Another strange thing, when I force cpu and gpu via AIDA64, battery doesnt drain, just playing games cause it.

 

@storm_999_ You are probably right on the PSU front - there is an issue with GL502VS with 6th gen Intel PSU that Asus admits exists (see here) but in that rather long thread there are also people with 7th gen CPUs that complain about the battery drain - that according to Asus is not a design issue.

Check for thermal throttling anyway - CPU and GPU have two heat-pipes that they share so if CPU or GPU is overheating it might exceed thermal capacity of the cooling system. CPU throttling would have an effect that you describe. Older version of that laptop with i7 6700 reached 92*C on full load when notebookcheck tested it.

 

@storm_999_ That looks rather bad although this test is more demanding than any real life situation, but still.

 

I reduced temperature of cpu to 70 by downclocking. Battery drain was significantly reduced but FPS drops still occur.

 

@storm_999_ Did you underclock or undervolt? Does the fps drop occur in all games/benchmarks - maybe it's driver-specific and related to a particular game/engine?

 

i underclocked gpu and both undervolted and underclocked cpu.

I play counter strike. It runs smooth persistently on gtx770 and 4770k desktop pc. Why should valve engine have problem with newer hardware though? I didnt test another game by underclocking and volting but i dont think result will be different.

 

@storm_999_ Check that regardless - it helps to narrow it down. If it doesn't happen in games other than CS we might waste a lot of time trying to figure out what's wrong with the GPU when in reality there is nothing wrong with it.

There seem to be lots of recommendations regarding CS:GO and fixing lags that might be relevant here - some seem to be game-related but some seem to be Win 20 related (see those)

 

that one second freeze probably has to do with the intel rapid storage

i was getting freezes for no reason, and I remember i disabled that. I haven't gotten a freeze ever since.

battery drain is a design flaw though. I have heard other brands have battery drain as well.

 

230watt isnt enough unfortunately.

My Alienware 15R3 with the 1070GTX also can show signs of slow battery draining without an undervolt. Mine came with a 240watt PSU.

It disappeared after I undervolted both the CPU and GPU. The Geforce can pull up to 150watt if the cooling is sufficient which mine does. It boosts up to 1850mhz on stock which is similar to what a founders edition desktop card does.

But those freezes, It might be the chokes/vrms getting too hot. You should check the thermal pads if they make good contact.

 

Previously, FPS drops was occurring in all games. I just didnt test other games after undervolting and clocking. But okay tonight im gonna try another game. Since they formatted my 1 tb hdd for hell no reason, i have to redownload things.

 

@storm_999_ Just on the off chance - make sure that the game is installed on SSD. I remember cased when WD Green drives in particular would park their heads and the lag was caused by that - slow response time.

 

I also thought that slow reading speed of hdd might be causing but in games I wasnt moving anywhere just staying in the same spot to prevent new graphics being loaded from hdd. Installed harddisk is Toshiba btw. Drive #2 - TOSHIBA MQ01ABD100 (931 GB)

 

IRST software is not even installed. I just checked bios, there is nothing about it in BIOS so it cant be activated.

 

If you have intermittent FPS drops it could be due to nVidia vbios changes made by Asus regarding either power limits or cut off temps being lower than it should be, to top it off, it could be compounded by bad thermal design of the laptop.

Had a similar issue on an Asus with a 8 Series GPU I had to mod the vbios to disable GPU boost otherwise GPU clocks would intermittently drop like a rock for a split second every few minutes and sometimes every few seconds. With Pascal having an encrypted vbios which is checked by the Bios for validation you can’t even make changes with the new GPUs. I’d try for a refund from Asus or at the least a different model.

Their support honestly is almost non existent. For all the flak Dell may get, at least they sometimes give a fully loaded/maxed out version of a newer gen model or at the least an equivalent model as compensation if you have issues two or more times with a particular model like happened in my case.