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

What is this preset people keep referring to? Where is it in the Catalyst Control Center?

 

Right click the catalyst icon in the system tray and its under "invoke preset." Alternatively, you can access "presets" by going into catalyst itself. Its just a power profile that sets your CPU at max and a few other power settings changes like dim display and whatnot.

 

Ok I just did this. Fairly easy process. Now should I install the 11.8 CAP2 profiles? These ones: http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/crossfirex-app-profiles.aspx

 

Thanks. Meh, ain't happening. Have two kids to cart with me, and can get one for $549 shipped on eBay which would be almost cost of gas + tax anyhow. But may be an easier argument at best buy to have it shipped to my local store than from Georgia.

I wish. That's part of the problem, the default fan profile just SUCKS and have no control over it at all. They have three options: coolest, performance, quietest. Coolest will throttle your CPU down when temps approach 80C, usually starting at 75C, so that's no good. Performance doesn't ramp the fan to full until CPU reaches 85C or more, and funny things happen with the CPU over 80C (like self throttling). Quietest just barely runs the fan.

 

Thanks to you both!

 

I don't understand why people keep spreading this BS. Deus Ex HR performs best with Crossfire On in DX11 mode. You can measure it yourself with FRAPS. It's a clear 5-10 FPS in every situation, just make sure you have 11.8 CAP2 installed!

 

Thanks. +rep

I tried a bit of overclocking and have it set for 2.2 GHz at 1.075V. It's stable with Prime at temps of 72-73, which I am more than happy with. I'll only invoke it when gaming and leave the system at stock for everything else.

 

Can you guys put up some more bencharks
Call of Duty, Need For Speed, and stuff like that, stock/clocked and singe/cross modes ;-)

 

Disgustipated: can you post up your new undervolt and gaming k10stat profiles? I've been using your previous with no issues but would like to oc it a bit more to try.

 

Is the information stored in the k10stat.dat file?

If so this could be shared with other users like me who can not seem to figure out the program?

Although I suggest if this works only sharing a profile where stability is the 1st process

Just a thought

 

weird. I've had 4 units, and they all had the elantech touchpad.

 

In the control panel before format I could have sworn the mouse utility was sentelic. It was a red icon. No one has a sentelic pad?

 

Nope. Elantech here.

 

After searching google images for "sentelic control panel" and "elantech control panel" the elantec looks more familiar, and red.

Perhaps I just have to uninstall the sentelic drivers before trying to install the elantech drivers, instead of installing over them...

edit: I am at work which is why I cannot just test this and I am pondering.

 

If you're willing to buy it for $549 on eBay I could pick one up for you when I go to get mine, check it for dead pixels, and how well it overclocks and sell it to you at the same price or less.

 

I've been playing some Amnesia: The Dark Descent off and on and I seem to be getting very poor performance from my K53TA. On high settings, I average 10-15 FPS. My older desktop with a Radeon 4850 and an older AMD dual-core (clocking in around 2.8 GHz) can run this game at 60 FPS+ consistently, so I'm a little disappointed in the performance here.

I've noticed that there is little or no difference in performance whether I select "power saving" or "high performance" in the switchable graphics. The game also only displays "6500m" in the "detected graphics card" area. My performance also goes DOWN when I use crossfire. Is the machine using the discrete card? If it's only using the IGP, that might explain the poor performance.

It also makes absolutely no difference when I change the clocks on the GPU in afterburner, which also supports the idea that the system is using the igp instead of the discrete card. That includes overclocking it to 700/1000 and underclocking it to half of that--absolutely no difference in performance.

Processor is currently oc'd to 2.4 ghz, everything else is otherwise stock. Thanks if anyone has any helpful advice.

 

That sucks, that's one of the games I want to play, how well does it do on medium or low? Which of the high performance settings did you select (it has a few that it warms will drain performance).

 

Haha. Yes. Definitely use an external mouse. Playing a FPS game with the touchpad is just madness.

 

Hey guys...AMD's headquarters is just down the street from me. I'm gonna go ask em about Crossfire technology. lmao.

 

My advice is to be professional and to question them specifically about crossfire on this notebook. Keep questions short and to the point so you don't come across as wasting their time.

 

Um....I was just joking about going over there...lol. But if you really want me to...

 

please will some one give me a hint,
shell i swap my dell n5110 with i7 2360QM and GT525 for this ASUS?
im not jokeing, seriously i have big time dillema, will asus preform better ??

 

So has anyone managed to find a way to OC the GPU on this unit with the 11.8 drivers? I tried installing AMD Overdrive but it always gives me the "failed to start" error

 

no. because you can OC the GT525 to ~GT540, which is about the same level as the 6650m in this asus.

the asus would be a big downgrade.

 

yeah, you should walk in there and ask why their crossfire sucks so much.

i'm serious.

and ask them why they can't make split rendering crossfire- i.e have the igp render 1/3 of the screen, and the discrete card render the other 2/3.

 

If you have anything you want answered by them then by all means go and ask them.

It all depends on what you need your notebook for. What do you intend to do with it.

 

well i need it for collage, internet, multimedia in general, maybe some encoding now and then and gaming aswell also i find battery life important and build quality, i like the display on this dell tho..

btw i will return n5110 anyway cause it heats palms too much, and get that ASUS or go for N7110 wich has much batter position of chipset processor that doesnt heats palms up,

so GT540 is better then Crossfire of this GPU or 6650 alone?

3d mark 11 shows oposite, im confused! :S

edit: does this AMD processor comes any close to the 2630QM when OC'ed?

 

I've tried it on medium and low, and the performance improvements are only marginal. I'll post back with my settings later on, but I mostly used the standard "high" settings in the menu.

On a side-note, I just ran a 3dmark 11 test and only got P1131. Even stock, the OP got 1300, so I don't know what the hell is going on.

Edit: Just ran a few Heaven tests, all at 1366x768. Got 9 stock with no OCs and crossfire disabled, 19 with processor at 2.4 and gpu at 700/1020 with crossfire enabled. Only problem is that with crossfire there are massive dips in performance every second, not sure if that's the stutter people keep referring to.

Final test was with crossfire disabled but the OCs active, average was 13 fps.

 

The Dell will be more powerful processor wise which will speed up encoding but for gaming I'd say the Asus is more powerful (someone correct me if I'm wrong). What games do you want to play, the Dell might be adequate for your gaming needs, how much you intend to encode might be a deciding factor whether you want the Dell or the Asus.

You might want to see if there are any units at your local BB you can exchange it for.

 

The 6650m alone is as fast as the GT540, and in Crossfire the two GPU's destroy the GT540.

 

Here's a stable gaming profile I made that should work for everyone, it's 2.6 Ghz which is the 'sweet spot' for performance/temperatures.

2.6 Ghz @ 1.15v on PState 0-6. Give it a shot, it works very well for gaming and the temps are much lower than running it at 2.8 Ghz.

 

yes, that's microstutter that plagues sli and crossfire setups.

someone here said that running windowed mode may eliminate stutter.

 

Go to CCC, go to Profile switching, change the amnesia .exe to High Performance. Turn off CF.

 

destroy....... by 5 frames/second ?

let's not kid ourselves. Crossfire 6720g2 is pretty crappy relative to the 6650m alone.

I wish I could see a 66% frame rate increase, but often, crossfire shows negligible performance gain.

I still think parallel gpu processing would give us higher frame rates. I don't know why nvidia and amd insist on doing serial alternate frame rendering.

 

I don't see a "profile switching", but I have "switchable graphics" under the Power menu. Amnesia.exe is set to High Performance--but like I said, it makes no difference whether it's this or Power Saving. Do you happen to have the game? (If so, is your performance much better?)

 

not even close. amd gets slaughtered and then pee'd on. Then again, your dell is $250 more expensive

check notebookcheck.net for performance comparison.

 

is your cpu overclocked? maybe that game is more cpu-dependent.

Go to windows control panel, and set your power options to High performance. Not the power4gear crap.

then test the different benchmarks- 3dmark11, vantage, etc.
Then compare score to notebookcheck.net

I doubt there's anything wrong with your laptop.

 

Just did some fiddling around: In the rather ugly 1024x768 at 'medium', Amnesia runs at an average of 32 FPS.

 

I doubt there's anything wrong in terms of hardware, but I think my configuration isn't getting the most out of the machine for some reason.

 

Disgustipated:

Thanks..i'll give 2.6 a shot...2.8Ghz @ 1.235v froze my machine and had to do a hard reboot.

When you set k10stat profile, do you check enable clock control? if so which control function do you use?

 

I just installed the 4gb stick I got from new egg and my 3DMark vantage score went from 4500 to 5500 no other changes. Is that due to the integrated chip running faster now due to the dual channel ram? 3DMark06 didn't change really still around 7600. I have the processor running at 2.6 with the boost set to 3.0. I can't run 3DMark11 it keeps erroring saying it lost exclusive control of the monitor or keyboard I dunno what that's about

 

don't worry much about 3dmark06. that's old.

3dmark11 shouldn't error out. lower your clocks, and see if you still get errors.

 

Sorry I checked out for a few days and didn't answer some people's questions. I got sucked into WoW briefly. I read up on the 25 pages I missed and dropped some +s as necessary.

link626: Thanks for posting the photos of the heatsink, I meant to do that and didn't. As your picture shows the heatsinks are separate pipes linked at the fan. You can lift them separately to repaste independently if you're getting good temps on one and don't want to break the seal on both.

Disgustipated: You rock, always.

gumba213: That weird texture effect in Deus Ex is your "Active HUD Augmentation." It's part of the game. In renders that grid of little triangles on objects you can pick up and doors you can open. If you're talking about something else I'm not noticing, my apologies, I'm blind.

AMD_Swole: That's hilarious your custom Lego stand was blocking your vents. Don't feel bad. I run a computer business and write a tech blog and I still make facepalmers every day. I once spent 4 hours messing with the jumper blocks on an IDE hard drive until I realized I was reading it backwards.

For people asking about RIFT performance: RIFT runs best by far in crossfire with dual-channel RAM upgrade. I tried both running with only the 6650 and in crossfire with my second RAM stick removed and both tests got the same 25-30 FPS max that many people are getting. You need the RAM upgrade and the 11.8 CAP2 profiles and be running in crossfire to get the 30-50fps I got in my test. RIFT is the best example of a game that not only runs better by far in crossfire, but benefits from running dual-channel memory.


New line of inquiry: Does the K53TA board support the 3530MX and 1600MHz DDR3? Did anyone who's opened their K53 write down the motherboard info?
I ask because say for example the bios will support the 3530MX but only supports 1333MHz RAM no matter what. That would make the $120 upgrade a little bit less worthy in price/performance.

 

Thanks link ill give it a shot it usually will run the first 2 tests and then error out with that stupid message

 

even though they are two separate heatpipes, it doesn't look like you can repaste just one chip.

the whole thing is one rigid piece, so you'd have to repaste cpu and gpu together if you remove the heatsink and fan.

 

You don't have to enable clock control, but I do it for reassurance. Ganged or Unganged doesn't make a difference because all the P-States are the same.

 

Wait til better drivers and support for Asymmetric Crossfire come out. I have the feeling that ACF is going to be BIG, especially once more iGPU + dGPU Llano (and future Llano-based AMD) CPU equipped laptops hit the market for the right price.

I don't have the game, sorry. Those kind of games scare the out of me.

Thanks, I appreciate that!

I'm really, really curious about the 3530MX support + 1600 Mhz support myself as well. I'd love to throw on a 3530MX but I have other projects to work on right now so I don't know if I should.

 

I left crossfire on, stock clocks all around, latest Asus chipset drivers, 3DMark11 is 1395. Before format, older drivers, no crossfire, but 700/1050 GPU and 2.8GHz CPU - 3DMark11 was 1301.

So avg FPS is up in all game tests with xfire, but the stutter is crazy bad.

edit: 1687 @ 720/1075 GPU, crossfire on, 2.8GHz CPU.

 

I just picked this laptop up and I'm loving it so far, but I'm running into a couple of issues.

When I run stock GPU clocks and 2.6ghz CPU clocks I'm BSODing on Team fortress 2 after about 3 minutes. Any reason why that's happening? I'm also just running the dedicated GPU instead of crossfire (I've noticed that it runs better like that)

Also I just bought a 4gb stick of ram from newegg to upgrade this to 8, am I better off buying another one so that they're the same? Or will there be a negligable difference?

As well as I'm still using the 5400 rpm hard drive in it, is it worth investing in a 7200 rpm one? I'm also considering buying a SSD hybrid (Or a glorified higher cache 7200rpm one).

If anyone is willing, I'd love a screenshot of your k10stat and if you overclock your GPU a screenshot of that as well (I'm using MSI afterburner) that's running great for you.

Thanks again, and if it wasn't for this thread I wouldn't be a proud owner of this laptop

 

Sorry for asking again, should have my K53TA in hand in a few days But if possible could someone tell me if this laptop has working bluetooth? It's not mentioned in any specs I can find but the ASUS website now has bluetooth drivers for the K53TA. Just trying to find out if I should continue trying to research which module I'd need to buy to add it, fingers crossed for that being unnecessary though. Thanks guys.