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

Hi happy K53TA owners,
I'm about to get me a K73TA (not the optimal choice I know, just like bigger screens), does anyone know about it's OC?
Will it work with the CPU/GPU overclocks posted in K53TA the Owners Lounge + K10stat?
Basically, it should just be a K53TA with a bigger screen, right?

Also, the link to the 8.863 chipset driver is for 64 bit windows. I tend to use 32 bit OS for my personal use. Has anyone a link for this file in 32bit?
I see on Asus website the 8.903 version (latest): no luck with that one either?

Also, after reading some parts of this post, I think it would be very helpful to post some guide about overclocking the CPU like this one:
A6-3400M overclocking guide

 

Good morning,
i I bought a K53TA with A6-3400,RAM 4GB and hard disk 640GB.I have solved the "banding screen" problem installing the 207 bios.
But now, my monitor have the "grainy screen" problem.
I have a CMO15A7 panel.
Asus will solve this problem or or is it impossible to resolve?
Thanks.

Sorry for bad english.

 

It's a known issue, no fix yet

 

I installed the k43ta's 211 bios on my k53ta and it didn't blow up. Made a post about it a few pages back. Gist: no real difference. I have no idea what it's for as the description is a bit cryptic. No new options or anything.

 

I've had my K53TA for 7 months or so now, and it overclocks well (2.2GHz, 2.6 boost - 700/1050 GPU) and been repasted with Arctic Silver 5. I've upgraded the RAM with another MicroCenter brand 4GB stick, and the hard drive has been replaced with a 750GB WD Scorpio Black.

But, these 2 things are unfixable so far, and quite annoying:

1) CD Drive doesn't work most of the time. For some reason I put in a disc, blank or otherwise, and it acts like nothing is there. If I delete the drive in device manager and reboot, it works for a bit, sometimes. It seems to be getting worse. I think the drive is mechanically failing - so any ideas on what would fit and sit flush for a replacement would be nice.

2) It won't restart. It will shut down, it will boot, but if I restart it just shuts down to a black screen and stays there forever. I haven't reinstalled windows to try to fix it (too many things installed I don't wanna reinstall), but I haven't heard it or the CD drive problem mentioned yet.

 

How does the BF3 run on this laptop? I just got it, so I wanna know before I open it up. If it runs well can you tell me what settings you use in game and etc., along with fps? Thanks.

 

I have everything maxed out except AA Deferred which is off and I get about 30 FPS

 

Does anyone know about this?

 

On my OC'ed k53ta

BF3 medium presettings + ultra textures.
Stable 30+ FPS in 64 players multi

U wont gonna be super uber pro with that, but its still enough to play.

 

Someone is able to activate crossfire and play bf3? when i try in crossfire mode its unplayable! i got to play with my 6650m only.. its good but it can be better!

 

i complained about this same problem since last october.

but eventually, you forget about it, as long as you don't visit many websites with gray color background.

other dell and hp laptops aren't much better. They show gray color shades as a uniform pixelly texture.

 

What do U mean by activating?

I had some issues with BF3, dont tested with new drivers, but on old:
I had to run battlefield with crossfire off, then (while game is runing) go to catalyst settings and enable crossfire. Effect is like +5 FPs

While i start game with crossfire ON, i have micro lags.
(Probably changing xfire mode in radeonpro can help)

 

How? I try that and I get 15-20 fps

 

Nevermind. For those of you who have problems with bf3 crossfire, let me tell me what i did. First I took the 'preset' high settings from game and it was laggin as hell. I've switch to Ultra and Oh.. no more lag! so I went to custom, select everything to Ultra except Shadow to Off and No AA. Running very smooth in crossfire now. Hope it helps someone!

 

How much fps you get?

 

just did canal map outside roughly 20-30 and inside its 25-38 approximately.

for a 400$ laptop its not too bad

 

What Drivers are you using, and what do you have it Oc'ed to?

 

Hmmm.. got 2 BSOD while crossfired.. went back to single 6650 and no more BSOD :O No OC as well on gpu but underclock a bit on b0.. can wait my stuff to mod my heatsink and go back on cpu and gpu OC

 

This PC can run Crysis 2 with settings set to Ultra if you use MaLDoHD Mod

Avg FPS 30+ (drops to around 19 or 20 in some areas with a lot going on but 95% of the time its 30+)

If you turn on AA/Tessellation then Good luck to you xD

 

New to overclocking and unsure of what to do. The guide at the beginning isn't very specific as far as steps go.

I'm trying to play The Old Republic on this guy (just got him two days ago) and am currently running everything on low settings, crossfire off, and am getting FPS in the low to mid teens during PvP or in heavily populated areas. During PvE it jumps anywhere from 19 - 35.

How are you guys running it on high with 35+ fps all the time?

All of my drivers are up to date (is this the issue, as the frequency slot is grayed out when I get into K10 to try and mess with the processor).

Do I need a fresh install of windows? The included one, as you all know, was full of bloatware.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Are U sure that game is using dGPU? Checkout by using Afterburner or smt

Catalyst beta 12.1
GPU@ 690/1060
CPU@ 2,3 GHz

 

It's using the DGPU, but I'm noticing that while running the game it's only using 30%.

Frame rates are still annoyingly low.

 

Just got a refurbished K53TA and had a question about the display. There seems to be a heavy amount of light bleeding through. It's mostly at the bottom of the screen, but the whole display looks a bit washed out. Blacks in particular just look gray. I knew the display wasn't one of the high points on this laptop, but I just wanted to make sure that this was consistent with what everyone else is experiencing. Other than that, after updating BIOS/drivers/etc, everything seems to be running quite well and I'm pretty happy. Thanks for any info!

 

Use RadeonPro for crossfire settings, it should help.
Somewhere is guide how2.

Or if U dont have RP, or U dont have time.
U can try (Works for me in BF3 and Crysis 2):

Set crossfire off, run game, minimalize to deskop, set crossfire on, back to game.
(Some games start runing in Xfire mode if u have enable it in driver, i belive that this default mode is quite bad for assymetric Xfire)

 

Make sure you set the switchable graphics to "High Performance"

It didnt pop up for me, so I had to find the .exe on my own. Pop up "Configure Switchable graphics" from CCC, click on Browse -> Program Files (x86) -> Electronic Arts -> BioWare -> Star Wars: The Old Republic -> swtor -> retailclient -> and select the "swtor" exe. Then set it to "High Performance" to max out the DGPU

 

I love this laptop have had it since August, but now the first issues are starting to arise. First the usb plug on next to the 3.0 blue one has stopped working, it will not recognize any device that is plugged into it. Second when watching videos there is no sound at all, sometimes restarting the videos seems to bring up the sound but only on occasion. A restart of the computer will always do the trick, but if i start a video after it comes out of sleep no dice. Can anyone give me insight on how to go about fixing these issues?

 

Whenever I click apply after assigning "high performance" it flashes and goes back to telling me it is not assigned.

 

If I want to go dual-hard drives in my K53TA and place a 120GB SSD as my primary and a 750GB 7200rpm as my secondary, which would replace the optical drive, I need a bracket to hold the secondary drive in the optical tray, correct?

Is there a universal bracket that "fits all"? I noticed for the G53's, resellers were providing brackets if one was to purchase a secondary drive through them.

Anyone know where I should look?

 

You gotta do it a few times for it to apply, I had the same problem

 

So just to be sure. We "Do" need an older chipset to overclock the GPU? or do we just need the 11.12 catalyst and older?

btw does anyone have a low/stable voltage for 2.3GHz on the CPU, I want to try and keep my PC as cool as possible and dont feel like trying to go lower till I bluescreen.

 

I can OC with 11.12 amd driver. Found that 675/975 is more stable than 700/1000 for me.

I ran 2.4Ghz OC at 1.15v while playing BF3.. no BSOD so far. Running like the default clock profile, but undervolted the b0 and overclock the b0. The rest is the same. On idle I'm running @ 44-49C. While playing with this setup I max @ 75C.

 

No matter how many times I try it, it still tells me "Not Assigned."

--- Frame rate has gotten better overall in PvE content, but still in the low teens during warzone matches, making them unplayable.

 

I have an HP dv6 witih an A8 and I can get a stable OC at 2.4GHz with voltage of 1.175. So try that or something close to it with 2.3. Mostly I use the 2.2 setting at 1.0750v and it's rock solid stable and doesn't get too hot. In most games I can't even really tell the difference.

There are apparently a couple of different screens that are common on the K53TA, and some are much better than others. I get the feeling Asus has a big pile of 1366x768 15.6" screens left over from other production runs etc. They just grab whatever's at the top of the pile and toss it in.

 

Im usualy using 2,3 GHz @ 1,0750v at my A6-3400m
And do im only one person that gets heat max to 85C. while playing for over hour?

 

I have 11.12 and I can overclock it sometimes. It's weird sometimes clock speeds save, but usually when I press apply it just reverts them to default value. Also it always resets after restarting pc.

 

Every computer is different. do you use a cooling pad with usb fans? i got one with 2 fans maybe thats why. and i make a hole into the ram cover. ill post pictures of my cooling mod when ill get some

 

Ahh, Thats what i wanted to know. I though that U have such an low temps w/o any mods, and i started to suppose that smth is wrong with mine, cooling paste etc.

Hmm, i also though that cooling pad is not necessary since the laptop dont have much holes in back. But after u cut a hole....cant w8 for photos.
(Maybe smth like ASUS K53TA DISASSEMBLY AND COOLING MODS - YouTube ??)

 

So, is anyone using duo hard drives in their K53TA?

If so, where can I grab a caddy to hold the second hard drive in the optical drive tray?

 

Well its gonna be a mixup of.different website.ive searched for the last 2 weeks. repaste, fan addition, heatsinks addition and case mod. but for now the only thing i did is.a.hole in the ram cover and with my cooling pad shooting air directly in this hole ive been able to decrease my temp about 5-8c so repasted with arctic.silver 5 and the other.mods i should be fine for a more agressive oc in the 2.8-3.0Ghz while gaming.. i hope!

 

So, I bought and installed a Kingston HyperX 120GB SSD into my optical bay. I bought this caddy off of eBay after doing a lot of research so I was certain I could install the optical drive bezel onto it:

NEW SATA 2nd HDD Hard Disk Drive Caddy Box Adapter 12.7mm Universal DV25A | eBay

However, I haven't had much luck with it yet. I confirmed firmware of SSD is up to date and was able to clone my boot partition to it using Acronis (actually did a back of the partition first then restored it to the SSD because you cant clone from partition to volume, only volume to volume). This seemed to go fine and the BIOS of the laptop sees the SSD but when I tell it to boot to it...no go.

I haven't tried a clean install yet, which I'm guessing would work fine...i just would rather not miss a beat.

 

Put the SSD in the main bay and the HDD into the optical.

 

I'm not sure why that would make a difference. The BIOS sees both drives fine and allows me to assign boot priority properly. When the SSD is set as the only boot device it gives typical 'no boot device' error.

 

You probably imaged it improperly

 

Thanks for the reply. Both you and HTWingnut have helped me find the correct caddy for the K53 Without you guys' help, I would of most likely purchased a wrong one.

Now I have to learn how to clone the boot partition. Is it simple to explain or is there a guide you can link? I googled it and people seem to have various methods on how to clone.

@tijo
So I would have to place the 120GB SSD in the optical tray, clone the stock HD, remove the stock HD, move the SSD to primary and the 750GB 7200rpm drive to the optical tray? (I'm ditching the stock HD)

I'm so excited to own my first SSD. I've watched YT videos and read the SSD NBR forum section and I'm amazed by the difference in performance when compared to a mechanical drive. I can't stand the 5400rpm hard drive "snail" performance that the K53 came with lol.

 

I'm going from memory, but i seem to recall people who had issues with SSDs in their G73s if the drive wasn't in the main bay. It won't hurt to try it anyways unless there is some massive disassembly required.

A bad image is also possible, if you have an external drive, backup the image and try with a clean install if all else fails.

 

Good idea using an external, I'll try that once I learn how to clone.

So this would be the simplest method?
1. Plug in external HD and clone the stock drive
2. Remove stock drive
3. Place SSD in primary hub
4. Place mechanical HD in secondary hub (optical)
5. Clone image from external HD to SSD
6. Voila?

Any recommended cloning guides? I'd greatly appreciate it.

Edit: Found this : http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/disk-copy.htm seems simple enough. Should I go this route?

 

Now that you mention it... I keep thinking it IS a pain to swap the internal HD in this laptop, but it's not. ...just every other laptop I have

I might try that to start. I've heard of fairly low success rates with copying boot partitions cleaning to SSDs but I'm going to figure it out one way or the other. I'll report back soon.

 

I have used easeus successfully and easily to clone my N50 from the 320GB HDD to a 500GB, but i haven't used it for a SSD. Your main concern is whether the SSD will be aligned or not which is something i'm not certain easeus will do when you'll clone the OS.

Depending on the SSD you got, you might be able to get a cloning tool on their website or one might come with it. I know some versions of the M4 come with the cloning software, but others don't. Intel has a migration tool, i think kingston will allow you to get a copy of Acronis from their site to be used with their drives, but again, not certain.

 

Has anyone played Starcraft 2 on this rig? I thought I saw someone earlier in this thread say they can play Ultra with 55 fps? totally not achieving that right now.

 

Do you guys think this is a good buy ?

Cooler Master NotePal U3 Notebook Cooler Review | Futurelooks

I want to buy somekind of coolpad for my K53 machine. Please advise.


LE : My old coolpad is this one http://www.thewindowsclub.com/microsoft-notebook-cooling-base-review but it doesn't seem to make any difference.