K53TA.. The best deal ever... could be!

I am trying to do a clean windows 7 install on this machine but during the install I get a message saying "A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing...." My research tells me I need some kind of ATAPI driver but I can't find it on the ASUS site.

Any ideas what I need to do to get it to install? I am running Windows 7 install from a usbkey if that matters. I have tried 2 different usb keys that always work around the office.

 

Found the answer hope it helps someone else.

This is the solution.

I assume all of you is using USB drive to install.

When Windows is asking for driver, just click Cancel. You will be brought back to the welcome screen. At the welcome screen, remove your USB drive, insert it back to DIFFERENT USB PORT. Click Install Now again. The installation process will be like usual.

This problem happened to all new version of updated Windows 7 installer. I think, it is due to failure of Windows installer to remain its detection to the USB drive. It lost the connection, and became confused, don't know where to find the USB drive it used to read before.

When we re-insert the USB drive, Windows installer will detect the USB drive back, and continue like usual.

Good luck and cheers! TQ.

 

clean install is the easiest and fastest way since you only have to install atk, kbfilter, nic, and amd drivers, and you're done.

got my clean system running in 30 minutes.

no more nagging trialware and popups

 

Thought I would give a quick update. Got my KillerN-1102 wireless card today. Just installed it and everything went fine. Haven't really done any measurements but latency seems to be lower now. Range seems to have improved. Picking up networks I've never seen before.

The original wireless card would randomly drop and would have to disable/re-enable to get it working again.

Also ordered a 4gb stick of ram and that should be here today as well.

 

Awesome. +rep for you.

I just picked one up off Fleabay. It should be here by Friday, along with a RAM upgrade. I'm going to forgo the WD Scorpio Black hard drive and go straight for an SSD, a 256 GB Crucial M4, which cost almost as much as the notebook itself.

 

Wow, how odd. I'm going to test and see if I get lower temeps with the DVD drive open vs having it closed.

 

Also, update: really considering installing an A8-3530MX CPU. That 6620G + ability to use 1600 mhz RAM will improve crossfire performance immensely, probably 20-40% depending on thhe game. Also, should be able to hit higher overclocks at lower voltages since those CPU's (in theory) should have better overclocking abilities.

I'm going to guesstimate I could do 3-3.2 Ghz stable on a 3530MX.

 

If you take a gander over at the DV6z forum, you will see that the 3530MX won't overclock really much better than the lower clocked A6/A8. Most users are staying at 2.2-2.4GHz primarily due to heat. I can run at 3.0GHz for short periods trying to push benchmarks, but longer than a few minutes temps run > 90C. I think the Asus has a little better cooling though than the HP but not by a whole lot. I think you'd be disappointed in the performance improvement you'd get. Just trying to save you some money.

 

has anyone noticed that sometimes when you disable crossfire that you get some screen tearing? i get this but it will go away if i restart the system... i hope my system isnt crapping out on me.

 

I've found that using vsync is almost required with crossfire to eliminate micro stuttering and tearing.

 

Does anyone know where I can download the usb 3.0 drivers?

Thanks,

 

They're included in the chipset/GPU driver package.

 

Just a question. When you install the new ASUS chipset driver, do you still apply the 11.8 CAP2 profiles? Or do you do both the 11.8 driver and profile

 

I got my computer. So when I go in video adapter I got these 2 in there :

6500M and 6600M

Is this right?

On the computer there is a sticker which says Radeon HD 6720G2 1GB

 

Hey guys, this is my first post here, been watching this thread and decided to pick up this laptop after reading so many good things. I've got another 4gb stick of RAM on the way but the above post got me thinking about something.

On the Asus website it says bluetooth 3.0 is optional on the k53 series. I've read nothing that says the K53TA includes this option so I was wondering if anybody had looked into adding it. I've done a good deal of Googling around and can't find any info on what module it bay be using. I've got no issues (even less after the quoted success story) cracking this thing open to install one, was hoping maybe someone who has already opened theirs up noticed an internal header of some type. Were I in the states I would just order a few of the cheap 3.0 modules from Ebay and try them but my current location means expensive shipping and a 2-3 week wait time

Anyways, had a friend do the in store pick up for me about 2 weeks ago, should have this thing in my hands this week, tired of "gaming" on my netbook. I guess that's it, long first post.

 

Driver and then profile.

Yes the 6520M + 6630m = 6720G2

 

Thought I'd report back with an update on my previous issue. I had a problem where the computer was dropping to p1 occasionally while on battery power even though I told it not to do so in my balanced profile. I believe that high power and power saver profiles offer additional (but subtle) features compared to balanced, so I'm using an app called Power Plan Assistant which automatically sets the computer to "power saver" while unplugged and "high performance" while plugged in (which does seem to offer an advantage over simply using balanced with different plugged in/unplugged settings). My high performance profile is set to max everything out and my power saver profile is set to min everything out. I'm using the voltages/clocks from the OP of this thread.

The combination of that stuff gives me ~5 hours of battery while unplugged and good performance while plugged in.

Hopefully someone comes out with a 9-cell battery for the k53 series--I'd sure love 7+ hours of battery life!

 

BatteryBar and BatteryCare are free apps that will also change performance profiles on battery or A/C. Also the reason it's dropping is you will have to look in your advanced power profiles and set CPU speed to 100% at minimum and 100% at maximum. That's all high performance does with the CPU for the most part.

The battery life is one thing that turned me off about the machine. I was getting barely over 3.5 hours with regular surfing, and playing netflix I was lucky to get 2.5 hours, even with optimized settings.

I did a little looking into a higher capacity battery and nothing available at the moment. Likely not either.

 

Ran into my first "game" issue, last night I purchased Deus Ex - Human Revolution on steam. Could not install it from work it is eight gig in size and even my hot spot could not handle it at 400kbps

Got it installed at home and tried running it at work, got nothing but crashes seems a bad module atidxx32 would not let it run. This could be from the 11.8 driver install or one left over from previous driver?

Anyway, removed the file and so far all I can say about Deus Ex - Human Revolution is WOW

 

last night, I tested my battery at idle, and it said I had 58whr of juice. Lasted a full 8 hours with 10% left.
So far, this is the best unit I've gotten in terms of battery life and build quality- no dead pixels, no case warp, minimal kb flex, and an LG burner drive.

If I cap cpu at 1000mhz, I could probably do light internet surfing and squeeze out many hours

based on amd's history, I agree. They take a bunch of high performance chips, and gimp them to meet demand.

The A6 we have is just a gimped A8, priced to meet certain targets. so, max performance is about the same across the whole A6 A8 line up.
If there were a way to unlock the 80 shaders, I bet our A6 could easily run them.

 

Interesting. So is my A6-3400M an anomaly considering I can do 2.7-2.8 Ghz all day @ 75-85c with small spikes to 90c? I would think that the 3530MX would be able to handle higher frequencies at lower voltages. I'm probably wrong though. The 35xx series would be nice though because of the 6620 integrated GPU and the ability to use 1600 Mhz... that'd increase crossfire performance by quite a bit, especially once AMD improves support/speed of the asymmetric crossfire system with new drivers.

I really really need to repaste though, but looking at the teardown guides make me feel very lazy. Looks like a huge hassle to repaste these things, you have to take out everything except the LCD screen!

Actually, from what testing I've done, Vsync + triple buffering INCREASE microstuttering. I'd rather have tearing than microstutter. I just max out the detail settings so that the game(s) won't go over 60 FPS. Also, some games have an FPS limiter so you can make sure it doesn't go above your refresh rate.

 

what is your idle temp?

we can't really say whether yours is special until we see what idle temps are.


Mine idles at 40 C. My room temp is 85 F. I don't use a/c.

After one hour of prime95 or intelburn, my 2ghz maxes out at 75C, and just stays there.
Every 200mhz increase results in 2-3 C increased heat.

I'm happy with 2ghz. I get enough performance, and it kills the core i3 sandy, and the fan is quieter than any HP i've handled.

 

Well one thing to consider with the speeds. Make sure you run HWInfo and monitor the core speeds, because they can start to throttle down on their own to maintain temperature. I think it's built into the chip to prevent damage. They will "bounce" down for a short bit (like less than a second) then back up to the P0 speed. This can cause erratic performance in games that tax the CPU. I noticed it in Bad Company 2.

I will have to try GTA IV because I have been using just the dedicated GPU, albeit with GDDR5 in the HP, but can get 50-60 fps in Bad Company 2 and have had no issue with it being detected in games. Also, perhaps disable ULPS and see if that helps with detection.

I also haven't had issue with DirectX 9. Performance is about on par with DirectX 10 when it should be a good 20% faster, so I just use DirectX 10.

Even though the GPU in the HP is better, I'm beginning to regret keeping the HP over the Asus, and the Asus are no longer available. I think the cooling is better for some reason, not sure why though because the heatsink and fan seem comparable to the Asus. Here's the HP heatsink/fan from my teardown.

 

Hey guys, I'm trying to install the new bios update for banding which is linked in the opening post but when I load it it says that the bios i downloaded is older than the one I have, so I can't install the 206 since I already have it for some reason (just got my computer today)

So am I good already?

 

Where are you getting your Sekisui thermal tape? Lowest I can find is $28/roll at some place I've never heard of before..

BestByte.net - Discount Computer Hardware & Reliable Service: Thermal Compounds & Adhesives

 

Sorry I'm not particularly deft right now but is this a picture of your HP tear down, or a picture of your ASUS before you traded it in? (Sorry, I haven't seen the pics on the ASUS teardown yet.. Finals coming up so I can't even think about a tear down yet).

 

Re-read the last sentence of the post you quoted.

 

ebay.

you only need a few inches

any double sided thermal tape will do. Buy the cheapest.

 

see, that's a good HSF design.

1 pipe to the discrete, another 2 pipes to the cpu.

I'm not sure what the asus has, as I haven't opened the case yet.

but for comparison, some Intel + discrete laptops have the gpu heatpipe going over the cpu, so that the heat from the gpu heats up the cpu a little bit too. The new Acer timelinex has this kind of setup, mixing gpu and cpu heat, and if you read in the Acer forum, you'll see they're having heat/throttle issues.
now that's a crappy hsf design.

 

Sorry, I should have given a brief history. I bought the K53TA and then thinking the HP DV6z was a better laptop, with a better CPU (A8-3510MX), better GPU (6750m), better screen (for me at least 1080p matte), and blu-ray (which I wanted) for about $200 more.

Well the cooling in the HP DV6z seems to have a little to be desired.

I noticed this post in this thread with a pic of the heatsink and heatpipe:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/601808-k53ta-best-deal-ever-could-64.html#post7869968

But not sure what I'm looking at now because that's only the CPU, and don't see where the GPU would come in.

I was just making the point that not sure how the DV6z doesn't cool as well as the Asus since the HP seems pretty adequate. However, the fins at the heat exchanger at the vent are very thin and not real large.

 

I thought you might regret your choice to go with the HP DV6z because you were having a lot of fun and investing a lot of time in the Asus K53TA. You said you couldn't live without the better screen or 1080p, or the blu-ray and it's not as if you've traded down so you've got to live with the choice you made unless they still have the model you turned in at the store.

 

When using my undervolt profile with 2.4 Ghz P0 with a 700 Mhz P6 @0.7v, idle temps are 38-39c and full load is like 72c. When all P-States are set to 2.8 Ghz, idle temps are like 58c and load temps are 78-85c depending on the task.

 

Well guys...this is my first post on here and I joined this forum because of this amazing thread and for that fact that I bought one of these amazingly powerful, budget friendly laptops. I have read through all 69 pages and now I am ready to post and ask a few questions.

First of all, I just want to let you guys know what I have done since I bought this. I have upgraded the RAM and put another Samsung 4GB 1333MHz CL9 stick. ( Newegg.com - SAMSUNG 4GB 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Laptop Memory Model MV-3T4G4/US) I have removed Power4Gear Hybrid, ASUS fancy start, Splendid video enhancement, smart logon, and lifeframe. I have updated the BIOS to version 206 by downloading the file from ASUS's website and then using winflash. I have also downloaded the AMD Chipset Driver package v8.861 on ASUS's website, unpacked it and installed it. When I bought the computer, it already had 8.861 drivers on it for both display adapters but I wanted to install it again and Ill explain why a little later.

I bought Deus Ex Human Revolution and I want to make sure I am using the best setup to play this game. I have never overclocked a computer in my life and it's something I really don't want to do at the moment...maybe in the future. I saw a post where ryanlecocq mentioned the 11.8 drivers give the best performance in Deus Ex with crossfire and dual channel memory setup. Here is the post:

What I'm wondering is, do I just need to go to AMD's website and download the 11.8 package and just install it and that's it?

Lastly, I have been experiencing a very strange, intermittent anomaly with my display. It has happened three different times now and I have not been able to pinpoint what may be causing it.

Sometimes a line will appear that runs horizontally all the way across the entire length of the display. The best way I can describe this line is, say when you pause a VHS tape and you get all of those lines on the screen...it looks like that but its only one, very thin line that has an animated distortion to it. The first time it happened it was up at the very top of the display and eventually went away on its own after about a minute or so. I was just browsing the web when this happened. The second time it happened in the middle of the display and eventually went away after about a minute. Also during this time I was browsing the web and this is when I decided to re-install the latest chipset driver package thinking that my fix it. The last time was last night while I was playing Deus Ex and I exited out of the game and it remained. It was up at the very top again. This time it was not going away on its own. I tried doing many different things to see if I could get it to go away including tapping on the back of the display but it still remained. I restarted the computer and that made it go away. It has not come back since. Does anybody have any idea what this could be?

As always with any forum, thank you all for your help and wonderful information.

 

Use these 11.8's, out of 3 different sets I've gotten, these are the only ones that install + work. Multiupload.com - upload your files to multiple file hosting sites!

 

Ok thank you. So I should not download from AMD's website because they will not work for this laptop? Also, are these unofficial drivers? Where did they come from?

 

i'd say that's within spec. Undervolting should run a little cooler.
I didn't undervolt my p0, so i'm running a little hotter.

On my first k53ta, I OC'd to 2.3ghz without undervolt, and was getting up to 90 C on burn testing

sounds like tearing. google it. not really a defect.

 

Well...low and behold it is happening again. I have recorded it so you guys can see what I'm talking about. Does anyone have any idea what this is?

http://youtu.be/G9wcPdYprZE?hd=1

Be sure to watch in HD.




UPDATE: Instead of restarting the computer I tried simply putting it to sleep and then woke it and that made it stop...very strange...

 

you guys, the disassemble instructions are missing an important tip.

there are 2 screws holding down the kb behind the F4 and F12 keys. You need to unscrew those on the underside of the laptop before the kb will come out. They are marked with a "K"

don't force anything, or else you'll warp the kb.

you can then apply a few small pieces of thermal tape to places where you have kb flex.
Actually, you probably don't even need tape. The kb base is flexible/malleable. Just keep bending it a little until your flex is gone.

Just remember, if you're gonna disassemble the whole laptop, don't force anything. If something won't pop off with a simple twist of a credit/plastic card, then most likely there is a screw holding it down. As long as you remember that, you won't break anything. Everything just pops off.




and here are the guts. It's interesting that this mobo is not made by Asus. it's made by Hannstar.

The heatsink design is good- 2 separate heatpipes going to the fan. Neither touches the other, so the heat doesn't mix.

The HP dv6z has 2 heatpipes going from the cpu and more heatsink fins, so that should carry away heat a little better I would presume.

 

Yeah, his undervolted temp seems a bit high. My machine, which is currently bone stock (awaing RAM, SSD, and WLAN upgrades) idles at 37-38.

 

yeah. that's not tearing.

that's a graphics glitch. Could be anything- gpu, mobo.

Just keep watching for it. You may need RMA in the near future.

 

ive been getting the same thing.. i asked about it a few post back but no one answered about it. just like you if i restart the computer or put it to sleep and then back on it goes away and it happens rarely... but i notice that it will happen most the time if i switch crossfire on or off or come out of a game... i think it might be a driver issue but im not sure.

 

Well, I actually bought one of these last night from my local Best Buy. They didn't have any more in stock so I bought the floor model. It looked like it was in great shape. So 5% discount and the total came to... $427.49

8^)

I haven't had time to unbox it yet (we had to pick it up late late night because they have to uninstall that Archie self-destruct software) but if this thing works decently for 3D Studio Max and some of the other 3D apps I use, I'm going to be a happy monkey. I can't thank you all enough for your contributions in this thread- please keep posting anything and everything about this laptop. This'll be replacing my 5 year old Pentium 4 3ghz 2 gigs of ram with an NVidia 7300 GT that sometimes flakes out because the power supply can't keep up. I assume this laptop will probably beat those specs, anyone have any comment?

Anyway, I'll be updating the bios and other things in order to find out exactly what I'm going to be dealing with (color banding, etc.) and running some burn-in software in hopes of exposing any flaws. Thanks again and keep posting!

 

i just been noticing that im also getting the tearing in some games as well
im gonna try some different drivers and see if that helps.

EDIT: well tried a bunch of different drivers... no luck still tearing

 

Try turning down or disabling any overclocking.

 

but that horizontal line is not tearing.
it's flickering.

hopefully it's just a driver issue, and not hardware issue

 

yeah no overclocking going on when this is happening

EDIT: though maybe its just the game im playin lol does anyone else play dragon nest? maybe they could reproduce the effect im getting

 

Then I would definitely say it's a driver issue. These are still pretty new notebooks so the software will take some time to sort.

Best bet at this point would be to fill out the Catalyst Crew Feedback survey and report your findings there. Everyone else having these issues should do the same.

http://www.amd.com/us/CatalystCrewSurvey

 

so just a little promotion for anyone wanting to upgrade RAM, here:

Newegg.com - G.SKILL 8GB (2 x 4GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Laptop Memory Model F3-10666CL9D-8GBSQ

 

No point in buying 2, because just 1 will work just fine. The Samsung 4gb RAM that is included has the same specs and is therefore compatible! In fact, I just got the 1 GSkill stick.

 

Hey guys,

first time poster here, i just came across this thread after searching for a overlocking tutorial on google and i have a question.

Is it possible to replace the keyboard on this asus with a chicklet style keyboard like some of the other k53 models. I found a chicklet style keyboard for $25 dollars here and i wanted to know if i could change the keyboard out and replace with the chicklet style keyboard?

Thank You,