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

heheh. that kmdag.sys seems to cause problems for random people with all kinds of laptops.

at least now you know which driver is screwing up.

good luck figuring it out.

I have my lcd plugged into hdmi all the time, and I've never had reboot problems like that with any driver from 12.1 thru 12.4.
my laptop is set as primary, lcd is secondary.

alan wake is opengl? when i played it, i'm pretty sure it was using dgpu in dynamic mode

 

you can still undervolt a bit more xD I am 2.0ghz @ 1.0V

 

My mistake. I don't think Alan Wake is openGL. just quoting beefslayer. Now I realize that this may be a good example where fixed mode was better than dynamic mode for a game. It would take a lot of testing to determine which games (openGl and nonOpenGL games) show improvements in fixed mode. Maybe someone can come up with a game/app list, so we will know when is the best time to switch to fixed mode.

 

Alan Wake isn't OpenGL? I thought it was cos when I first played it in Dynamic Mode my iGPU was maxing out and 0% activity on the dGPU and it was terribly laggy.. Hm, oh well.

 

Get used to "configure switchable graphics" on llano dual graphic laptops; it's normal for many games to initially run off the the integrated card. After you exit a newly installed game the first time, pull up the "configure switchable graphics" screen (by right clicking on desktop and choose that menu option) and set game to high performance. It may be set to power saving the first time, so make sure all your demanding PC games are set to high performance.

 

quoting myself if anyone needs background, geeksquad contacted me and said it would cost 650$ to repair my laptop (bottom case, motherboard,and optical drive). Considering that the laptop only cost 450$, paying that much for repairs is out of the question. any advice on what to do? I really just want my powerjack repaired (and I'm hesitant to pay even 150$ for that). I'm currently in nyc and asus origianlly told me to go to geeksquad.

 

Ya I did end up undervolting more. At 800mhz I started getting bsod at 0.8375v so left it at 0.8675v and stable.

I went back to stock clock at 1.5ghz 0.9675v. I am happy at this speed.

 

take it back and take it apart yourself. Just remember that everything comes out without force. So if something is stuck, you missed a screw. To pry stuff open, you just need a credit card.

optical drives are cheap, and pretty much any brand will fit the slot. you can get one for like $30 on ebay

the powerjack is separate from the motherboard.
maybe you can jerryrig something to prevent it from coming loose. you can probably stick a marble or a chunk of something behind the jack.
worst case, you might be able to order a new bottom case from asus and install it yourself.

you see in the corner it's just the fan and the ethernet port.
I doubt your power port is broken.



did you crack your case badly? maybe try superglue.

clearly it isn't worth spending $200 more than you paid for, considering you can get a new laptop with dedicated graphics for that price.
If I were you, I'd stick with superglue and duct tape, and make it ugly, and keep using it.

 

scotch tape work wonders on any laptop repair.

 

thanks for the advice.

In all honesty, the optical drive worked (was just a bit noisy) and I got a ethernet to usb converter for my internet so that's not a big deal either, its just the power jack I'm confused with. I guess I'll have to open it up and see.

 

if it works, you just saved $30. most drives are noisy, although there is software that can spin the drive slower.

did you have an ethernet cable plugged in and drop it on that corner?
if the motherboard isn't cracked, I'd take a $5 40w solder iron to the ethernet port pins and see if i could melt the solder back to establish a connection. Just don't hold it in one place too long.
it's broken anyway, so doesn't hurt to try.

 

Can anybody help me with gaming on this notebook? All the games that people say they run very well on this laptop run like crap on mine. With battlefield 3, I'm running the game at mixed low-medium settings at 1366x768 and I get constant lag spikes with an already low 30ish FPS, the framerate would drop into the single digits sometimes.

I overclocked my processor in K10STAT to 2.3Ghz and HWinfoX64 tells me that when I play BF3 or any other game. In CCC, I have BF3 set to high performance. I do not have the modded BIOS installed because I did a fresh install of W7 and it gives me an error message saying that i do not have an ASUS notebook. Does anybody know how i can bypass this?

In MSI afterburner I overclocked the GPU to 650/1000.

Specs/other info:
Processor: P0=2.3Ghz via K10STAT
4Gb RAM
no Modded 212 bios
12.1 AMD Mobility drivers
BF3 set to high performance in switchable graphics settings


I read about people having the game run at low settings at 1920x1080 with fps in the 30s-40s while at low settings the highest FPS I get is in the 30s with constant framedrops that you would experience with something like an explosion except withing buildings where almost nothing is happening.

EDIT: CPU never throttles because it never surpassed 75*C, usually under 70* most of the time when gaming

Also, BF3 started going crazy when i launched a multiplayer game. The menu as well as the GUI started artifacting and the game was simply unplayable. On top of that the in-game view would always be blinking a black screen and I'd be able to see the game ever 3 seconds or so for half a second. Audio was also screwed up.

 

Power jack is an easy fix. Most likely the plastic chassis holding it has snapped. I fixed that on my last laptop with a dab of superglue. Even if the entire power jack needed replacing, it just pops off and you can buy a replacement off ebay for like 5 bucks. They're probably charging you 150 because they want to relpace the entire bottom case, when you could easily just fix it yourself in 30 minutes.

 

Your graphics card has an unstable OC. The artifacts are from the OC of the graphics card. I have my graphics card at 660/960 and it works wonders. I can increase a bit more but I like that stability and it gives me an extra 4 fps but like I said that's 100% the graphics card being unstable for you.

BF3 runs almost EXACTLY the same from low to High settings.. I mean there is no difference in performance except for when you are near smoke/damaged stuff or if you are sniping you will get lag and of course shadows will murder your fps. Different resolutions haven't done much for me as I get basically the same performance from lowest res vs the 1366x768. I run BF3 on low since I snipe and need the smooth fps but I have textures on ultra. The game feels as though high works better than medium and going from high to ultra will kill your fps easily. I liked playing with high settings but it's just not worth the few dips or the draw back in sniping.

I'm also skeptical about the 75C for BF3 as it is demanding and I'm sure you're higher than that at 2.3.

also 8gb ram is recommended

 

My experience with my dv6 (I hand my k53 to my bro asap so I don't fry anything ne more) is that

The APU will throttle even not hot if it is running heavy on dGPU. Sometimes I have to keep hwinfo up and see the thing throttle back to p2 or p3 .

Maybe you can try set all pstate the same and see if the problem exist. I am not sure how mem clock factor in fps for GDDR3, but I typically find mem clock doesnt help fps that much on my dv6.

 

yep. you need to clock down a little until the cpu clocks stop bouncing around in Hwinfo.

in cpu AND dgpu intensive games, cpu clock will bounce all over the place.
in cpu only intensive apps, cpu manages to stay stable pegged at p0.

 

not necessary have to lower the clock, you can have a profile with high clock across profile(p0-p6), but need to watch the temp.

 

Well I did do the Configure Switchable Graphics thing, setting the .exe to High Performance but it wouldn't save. It would just go back to Not Assigned (or the battery saver mode, can't rmb) after I launch the program again. This would also apply for games other than Alan Wake like Minecraft and Cry of Fear (HL1 mod).

 

Just want to update you guys and say that disabling dual graphics mode to make BF3 only use the 6650m seems to work wonders and now I'm getting results somewhat similar to you guys. The funny thing is when I set everything to ultra except for shadows which is low, my FPS is even higher than on high, lolwut?
Anyways, I average around 22 fps with sometimes getting as high as in the mid 30's but at the same time getting the occasional frame dip from explosions and other things.

Thanks guys!

 

For everyone here who owns the k53ta or A53TA, high performance saves fine..it usually remembers on the second time game is played. Keep trying it a few times after more reboots. not sure otherwise...maybe it's a compatibility of AMD drivers with your k43ta, since AMD drivers have been having all kinds of issues with different AMD PCs.

 

look at task manager and find which username is running ccc.exe.
go to C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE\APL and delete user.blb

then try to save settings again.

i set all p states to 1500mhz, and it still bounces after a while when playing games. Seems a little better than at 2000mhz though.
oh well, i guess it's by design.

 

I've just tried the 12.04 live cd. No need of external screen to get proprietary drivers installed.

 

So apparently 12.4 fixes the Downclock issue with Overclocked 6650M when idle in dynamic mode.

Also so far the performance seems about the same as 12.3 but I haven't done much testing.

 

12.4 fixed most things & almost looks like a perfect driver if it would just work well with our fixed dgpu mode when using bios 212 mod. If all you need is dynamic mode, then get 12.4! The above problem was discussed here and here .

Maybe in 12.5 everything having to do with the bios 212 mod fixed mode will be right again ..or maybe not

 

don't know how i missed that but good thing I haven't tried fixed mode with the driver yet. Would have been bummed out

 

Hmm ok, will do that when I decide to use Dynamic Mode. Thanks!

 

my mousepad area gets heated up really fast. is there a way to keep it down?

 

New PC that is $550 after rebate and looks like another good deal (Till 5/31):

GPU: Radeon HD 7670M
CPU: i5 2450M
17.3" --> 1600 x 900

Acer Aspire AS7750G-6645 NX.RVHAA.002 Notebook PC - Intel Core i5-2450M 2.5GHz, 4GB DDR3, 500GB HDD, DVDRW, AMD Radeon HD 7670M, 17.3 Display, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit at TigerDirect.com

Cons: Acer

Every mousepad on a laptop generally gets heated up a little.. If it burns a little then that ain't good. The last PC I had that did that was a sign of future death.

 

The Acer was $500 for a week a few weeks ago, which made it as sweet a deal as ours. Not bad for i5 & heard the keyboard was a little flimsy, but it's probably ok...also a little large at 17".

My mousepad also gets warm after a while. Maybe a little underclocking will help. Just use an external mouse whenever you can to avoid feeling the warmth.

 

12.4 on dv6z sometimes make the clock struck at 150/100 aswell, but priming it with gpu-z "seem" to solve the issue.

nvm: it just seem to struck randomly when it wishes to

just gonna switch back to 12.1

link you tried with ULPS disabled?

 

You're saying you get idle sticky clock when you're in dynamic mode too ?

if so, that's kinda good to hear, since you can report it to amd below


in fixed mode for me, even gpuz won't bump the clock. Only flash video in web browser does.

 

i mean struck clock in fixed.

dynamic seem fine.

and it was a fresh install. wrong jump AGAIN !

 

Intel's Ivy Bridge Hotter Than Sandy Bridge When Overclocked

Intel's Ivy Bridge Hotter Than Sandy Bridge When Overclocked

 

Hi again, I decided to have another go at getting the right usb port to work.
This is my device manager:


Notice I have "generic Multi-card USB device" that I don't have, I don't know if this is normal.
I tried uninstalling all the usb serial bus controllers and rebooting, but it just auto-installs the same devices that you see in that picture at startup.

When I plugged my android phone into the right usb port then uninstalled all the controllers and rebooted then at startup my phone recognized that it was connected to a computer and gave me the chance to "connect usb storage" but when I selected it nothing happened.

I think windows automatically installs something to that port that makes it unusable for my devices. Does anyone know what that could be or what might be the problem?

Thanks in advance

 

you do its the multi card reader

 

You are right, I just noticed it (strange location). Any idea as to what the problem could be then?

 

When I had issues with the rt USB it was because of the asus power driver. I didn't mess with it for quite some time and the other day, it seems to have corrected its self.

 

Do you mean Power4Gear? Because I had the problem even before installing that utility. Very frustrating
EDIT.
Also some of you have had problems with the switchable graphics settings not saving. I have such problem with the new Resident Evil game. Every time I close the game it asks me to select a profile for the .exe. If I manually browse and add the exe as high performance it still won't stick. I even tried re-installing the amd drivers 12.4, still nothing.
EDIT2.
Okay, to anyone else who happens to have the same problem. Go to catalyst control center preferences and select "reset to factory settings". This fixed the problem for me. Getting great performance now.

 

Hello everyone! I've been having real irritating problems with the touchpad on my K53TA. The touchpad just stops responding out of the blue, sometimes I can go for hours without problems and sometimes in a few minutes it just quits on me and it doesn't sense my finger or the buttons(right & left). I can still use a mouse, but I don't carry it everywhere.

I've tried:
-Updating drivers
-Disabling/Enabling the touchpad
-And I recently restored my whole system

Has anyone had this problem?


Thanks!

 

My left physical button doing same just erratic
the whole touchpad and right button works ok but left click button is faulty
some times it works and sometimes not but i can use the left click by
simple tap so its not big deal for me

I don't even use those crapy touchpad drivers just windows vanila ps2 driver

 

I'm going to try it just with the windows ps/2 driver. But I think its some BIOS glitch because once I restart my computer everything is o.k.

 

I had a similar problem a time ago, it was the ETDCtrl.exe process using a whole cpu core (25%), I just killed it and started it again.

 

Make sure you installed that atk package thing from the asus website.

I don't know about etdctrl using a whole core / crashing, but recently it just doesn't load on startup (disabling me from disabling the touchpad), so I used task scheduler to load it on login.

 

Hmm just bought a 60gb ssd from tigerdirect.. cant wait to see the difference on this beast! Bought a 2nd drive caddy too!

 

I have the Sentelic driver, the etdctrl.exe is from the Elan driver? Is the Elan driver better than Sentelic??

 

I dont know it they're better but personally i have the elan driver since i bought it and it works great

 

I made the switch about a month ago to a Samsung 830 128GB, and once you go SSD, you don't go back. Everything is practically in real time, things load before I even think of opening programs. It boots before I have time to make a damn sammich

 

AMD said there was an update driver available and I updated. Now I am having issues trying to get the GFX card to stay on. Sometimes it fires up with a game... sometimes it doesn't. Ideas?

 

What type of driver caused this to happen (eg. graphic drivers or something else)? Are you running the latest 12.4 drivers in fixed mode by any chance? (That was known for causing the dgpu to be stuck at low clock speeds but in dynamic mode everything would be fine.) Try reverting back to 12.1 drivers if you have something newer and see if things get better... But not sure if it's completely unrelated to that....

 

use windows system store if you have.