My review: Asus U46SV

Anyone know where to find a SSD tray for the optical drive?

 

The only one I found is here...
If anyone has a cheaper solution, I'd be happy to hear...

 

I thought I'd add a few things to this, as I just bought one.

There appears to be no throttling. I have an external monitor hooked up, with the Intel Throttle widget showing, and even when playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution (and that gets this thing hot with the fan at full-speed), it was providing boost and running at 2.7/2.8GHz, rather than the 2.4 standard. There could be GPU throttling, so I can do a more thorough check and update. Seems likely if it's willing to boost the CPU, though.

I noticed mentions of EMI bleeding in to the audio channel, and about awful speaker quality. The speakers are awful, it's true, but I always use external speakers so that's not a problem. I can't notice the EMI bleed in the internal speakers or with external speakers. However, I do notice a slight background bleed noise with headphones plugged in. It's quite quiet, and I don't hear anything when I have noise coming through the headphones - only when the computer isn't playing any sound, do I hear the bleed.

Lastly: I had some horrible static crackling/popping with audio when playing Deus Ex: HR. It only appeared to happen when I had a sudden frame rate drop. Installing SonicFocus and disabling it seems to have completely fixed all of it, though.

I'm going to subscribe to this thread, so if anyone has any questions or tests they wish me to do (within reason), regardless of when in time, I'll do my best to answer.

 

Did you manage to unthrottle it?

I just decided to sell my desktop and then hook both monitors to the laptop. It works. I can run 2 1080p monitors via hdmi and vga. It works well. The colour calibration is slightly off though.Text appear not that well. Also, on the monitor with the HDMI, the view is slightly larger than the vga (meaning if I open a window maximized, I can't see the folder window edges at the edge of the screen. BTW, the HDMI slot can carry audio to monitors that support audio. Since I have a LG M227WD so everything seems well.


Found the problem. HDMI>Monitor makes the graphic less nice.
Solution:
HDMI-HDMI-DVI adaptor>monitor. It cures the display and the font situation. But, when you do that, the HDMI now no longer carries audio and need to rely on the laptop. Solution is to pull the audio using the earphone jack.

On another note, does anyone know if it is possible to replace the dvd drive with a 2nd hd slot? I want to put a OCZ synapse there to make this a lot faster.

Thanks.

 

Thanks. The dvd drive is bolted to the laptop which makes removing it slightly annoying. Other than that it should be fine. The BIOS does show that it supports AHCI and the DVD is on the second port.

 

Oi... hold on. 8-cell battery? Anyone know where can I buy one for the nx6 series? *want*
edit: nvm, u-series.. >_<

 

I didn't actually have any throttling problems - unlike every other small laptop at the time with a 540M. When running on one core that single core is faster, but that's how it's supposed to work.

Going to Windows 8 and staying the hell away from Asus's drivers and software has fixed my audio problems in every single game I have except Dishonored - and even in that, it's only when it's really lagging, otherwise it's perfect.

Honestly, the only problem I have with it is that it regularly skips keys when I type too fast. It's incredibly frustrating with coding, and I've had to learn to slow myself down on it.

 

Thanks for sharing the experience. Has anyone tried making a windows USB bootable device and tried installing from USB? Making the USB bootable was easy, though I can't find any options in the BIOS that enables me to install it via USB

 

my laptop hinge has already broke. Or more specifically, the hinge is fine, the screen bezel is breaking loose starting from the right side end since about a year or so. Using duck tape to secure it, but even that, it seems like it is getting worse with constant open and closing the lid.

Looks like I will need to find a new laptop soon. Overall, this must be the shortest laptop I have used ever, like only just over 2 years. Will continue to use it, though I think I will not survive the end of the 3rd year.