New ASUS N550 Multimedia series, IPS panel ?

I noticed that my DB71 screen bezel is smaller than the DB72 touch model I have but only by 1/8" or so. Must be why they don't fit anymore. Good info. Thanks for sharing.

 

Were the specs properly listed on the actual packaging, or did you have to open it up to find out? (I ordered the DB71 from Amazon linked a couple pages back, and will be quietly freaking out over the possibility of actually receiving a 1366x768 version until it arrives.)

 

It does have the full HD IPS panel as was specified on the box label but it does not have the 4702MQ or the 24GB SSD cache drive. It came with the 4700MQ and a regular 1TB drive both listed correctly on the side of the box but were wrong on B&H site.

 

Quick question: all these people reporting their battery life of about 4-5 hours, is that on the non-touchscreen or touchscreen version? Does anyone know how the battery life is on the touchscreen version?

To those of you who may own the touchscreen model, is there a way to disable the touchscreen for better battery life?

 

Here are the box labels for both the DB72T touch screen and DB71 Matte screen. Both units feature the full HD screen and a GT 750M despite what all the websites say. The model number is listed at the bottom of the label. Sorry about the label orientation, they should be upright but when I posted them here they turned sidways.

 

Thank you, this is very helpful. Funny how all these sites ended up with such uniformly bad spec lists.

 

With regard to your question about getting a 1366x768 screen, you'll know right away by reading the box label without having to cut the seal. I was originally told that there were a few N550JV models that did ship with the lower res screens but I am not sure now because Asus says the "N" series features IPS panels. Anyway glad it helps.

 

Guys, I really wanted to get this laptop in the Uk, but the non touch screen version. I kept stumbling upon the touch version, any advice would be appreciated.

 

I'm so ready to buy this computer but really wanted to test it out in person before I picked one up. Since there are no microcenters near me and frys doesn't seem to be getting them in stock (have been calling all frys within a 100 miles of my area daily for the past week) I think I'm going to just pick it up online. Everything is looking good about the unit except for two things. For all current owners, it would be awesome if you could give me some input.

1.) Keyboard: Very important to have a sturdy keyboard with relatively deep keyboard travel. I type a huge amount for work and really want a portable laptop with an awesome keyboard. Was so close to pulling the trigger on the Samsung Ativ book 8, but the really short travel on the keyboard ruined it for m.

2.) Cooling: It seems like Asus made a vent right beneath the screen so that the hot air blows directly on you and the screen. Should I be worried that I'll have some longevity problems on this model in the future because there is constant hot air blowing on the screen?

Thanks for any input :thumbsup:

 

1. The keyboard travel is ok for me. They don't travel as far in my opinion as the keys on my X230T but that probably doesn't help much. They keys are plenty large though and have a nice spring to them even though they don't travel real deep. I'm afraid it's going to be tough to help you on this.

2. Cooling I can help you with. Indeed the heat goes out the back only via a dual fan setup. During light load such as internet and web surfing the case stays nice and almost cold to the touch being that it is metal. During heavy load the heat is pretty strong and the bottom left side of the screen does get quite warm along with the area above the top row of the keyboard letters. I have never felt any heat on my hands from this while typing. Almost all of the heat is contained to the rear left side but because the case is metal it will spread toward the center also. The fans are surprisingly quite tame as far as noise is concerned even under load.

 

I made a video to compare the X230T with the Asus. Hope that helps.

Asus N550JV Keyboard Travel - YouTube

 

You are amazing!

Never expected such a quick and thorough response. It's difficult to judge without seeing the actual laptop, but the video coupled with the fact that I have tried out the Asus N76VJ in person and have not found it's keyboard to be too bad will help me buy this thing online by Friday if it is not in Fry's by then.

Also, thank you very much for the input on the cooling. You've made my decision much easier

 

Hello!

I've been looking for a laptop to buy for months now and Im quite confident with this one. Since I live in Canada though, it is a bit overbudget but I think I can look past that.

Im not sure if this has been answered but does the laptop have Optimus technology? I'm not a huge gamer so it would help if I can improve battery life when not gaming.

Also, what is the intel graphics card in this laptop?

 

Yes it has Optimus. AFAIK, all Nvidia mobile chips have Optimus now.

Intel is HD 4600.

Unfortunately my Nvidia card has had some issues in my N550JV since I received it on Friday, so I'll be getting a replacement.

 

Intel HD Graphics 4600 and Optimus works.

 

Actually asus disable optimus in their higher end machines at least, they are the only high end machines to have it always off.

 

Which is a lot better vs these optimus haswell gaming machines since they can barely give better battery life anyway. I had the new AW14 and the Clevo W230ST and now currently with Asus N550JV and it's a struggle to get close to 4 hours and on all those 3 laptops with just web browsing using balanced mode and 40% brightness from 100% to critical warning hibernate, I get around 3h-3.5hr at best.

I had the G55 non optimus and G74 non optimus and those can get close to 3 hours so these optimus gaming machines in the haswell era really sucks on battery (probably the IPS Panel and full mobile quad drains it faster). Now the ULV Haswell is a different story because it is really a big improvement on efficiency and battery like the 2013 MacBook air 11/13, the sony Vaio pro etc...

 

Actually all the IPS screens are much thinner than regular panels and the lid are also made thinner. so regular screens just won't fit.

 

True. G750 has no Optimus.

You compare a 8 cell battery in G55 with a 4 cell in N550. And you get almost same level of performance. Not so sure if things are worse right now.

I had the G55. You could get at best close to 4h. Normal more close to 3.

The N550 gets close to 5 and normal close to 4h. Might not look like much, but in percentage with the battery in mind, it's very good.

Rated idle time for G55 is around those 4h in fact (but I could still do some light stuff on it). Rated idle time for N550 is +7h (could be since someone said that WIFI card takes a lot of power in N550).

 

AOU high gamut panels used to fit Asus N550-DB71, but in the latest shipped laptops ASUS switched to using different screens with different display connectors. That's what I was told.

 

Did you really time your N550JV from 100% battery until 5% critical hibernate using the task manager uptime? Reason i'm asking is that it is impossible to get 5h on this machine so I don't know if you are telling the truth or not. I'm not calling you a liar or anything but I tested this machine again and this time with only at 10% brightness and only wifi on and all cpu cores at 800mhz and didn't do anything with it and let it sit idle with backlit kb off and the laptop hibernated at 5% from 100% in 4hours and 27 minutes. My battery wear level is 0% using hwinfo so we can rule that one out.

I posted my battery result on the n550jv owner's thread for testing battery life and mentioned that when I was at balanced mode at 40% brightness and just wifi web browsing with 2 tabs in message boards/forums, no videos, no music playing, no backlit keyboard, I was only able to get 3h 20 minutes. So I dunno about the 4h or 5h battery you are claiming that you have gotten, maybe your talking about hovering your mouse cursor to the battery icon on the lower left task manager to get the estimate and maybe that's what you are talking about??? If it is then yeah when I hovered my mouse when my battery is at 98% like right now, it is giving me an estimated of 5h and 47 minutes but we all know that is not true unless you actually test it from 100% to 5% battery with actual usage and checking uptime with task manager or a third party software to get guaranteed accurate battery results.

Let me know

 

I use BatteryBar.

But even before this was out, I had my numbers posted.

So I got pretty much the same as those guys. More or less. They did a Surfing with WLAN automatic test with brigthness at 150 (that is in fact rather +50%). I had around 4h with screen about half and I guess kinda the same load.

Now the thing is that some pages might put a bigger load on the system. The browser itself maybe (I don't know, I use a modified FF, I can't tell all the things I've done, there is Noscript and ABP that cuts traffic quite a lot and so on). The OS itself might do stuff, my HDD might use more or less power, I have a self-installed Windows 7 65bit (Windows 8 should use less power or not, I have no idea how it's configured). Both were done on non-touch versions of the laptop, that might matter. The WiFi might use more to get a steady signal on your end. There are a bunch of things that are not exactly the same so different results happen. But I've compared my own G55 (don't have it anymore), used in exactly the same config (OS, browser, room and stuff).

I never did a DVD trial (I don't use them anymore), but they say they got close to 3h. That should use some juice, full brightness, the ODD itself, deconding stuff.

Why the heck would I lie about something like this? It's what happend when I've tested it. After that (my test was on July 14th and the notebook's posted on October the 3rd) I saw the numbers from the test and they looked fine to me.

 

I too would point out that I've been running on battery for the past 2 days and from what I noticed is that more webpages loaded per minute = lot more battery drained. Around 10 minutes in of surfing at brightness level 3, I drained about 5% power from 99% to 94%. That would equate to 200 minutes, about 3 hours. However, once the cores are idled out (and I do believe Haswell has actually changed the parked idle usage of cores), the CPU will use less power (like 1.1 - 1.3W according to throttlestop). I don't think I remember ever seeing lower than 3.5W usage on my Sandy Bridge i7, so definitely when idle, Haswell seemingly uses less power. So, typical web browsing usage will range in 3.5-5 hours of battery life. It's all about what you do with the laptop.

That's how I managed and recorded a full 6 hours at min brightness (mostly idle, little tinkering here and there with wifi enabled). If it was completely idle (and wifi/bluetooth turned off), I think it would have lasted as long as the review stated - 7 hours.

 

Just got my hands on this baby and am loving it. I have some questions for you owners and more tech savvy people than me. Luckily, being a little sister, my older brother is usually good at these things, but, unfortunately, my useless brother is unable to help me out this time.

So, I have a few questions.

Has anyone swapped out their slow 1tb drive for a ssd? I've never done it before and would love to get some input or tutorial, especially for this specific device.

Also, I want to apply thermal paste to the cpu and gpu since I will be doing some gaming (mostly skyrim) and I don't want the laptop overheating.

Would be really grateful for any help!

 

Good news and bad news. It's not designed to be user accessible as such, but with the right sized phillips screwdriver if you take the bottom 10 screws you do get access to everything and could replace the HDD/do a repaste.

 

Don't use a phillips screwdriver. The screws are Torx #5, and strip very very easily if you don't use the correct screwdriver for them. Hell, they strip easily even with the correct screwdriver. Use a Torx screwdriver if you can.

As for the paste, someone from the Owners Lounge thread tried repasting with MX2 and didn't see any impact. Experiences may vary of course.

 

Awesome! Thanks for the heads up. I was pretty apprehensive about repasting so seeing how it doesn't really give a boost, I think I'll skip it. Would love to try putting in that SSD on my own. I'll be buying the torx #5 screwdriver soon and will keep you all updated on how it goes!!

 

Actually Torx screws are designed not to strip. I dismounted the back plate like 5-6 times already and didn't strip once. Of course, you need the exact sized screwdriver.

As for battery life, the Atheros wifi module was a power hog, huge cr*p, at least for me. I went from 18W to 13W at idle by swapping it for an intel 2230N. That's with full brightness and wifi on, wifi off was pretty much the same for both. Never seen that before, 5W gap between two wifi modules lol. Of course, battery life will be far improved.

 

How much did your battery improve from switching out the wifi module?

 

Don't know exactly but i'm set like that now to surf the web :

-Wifi intel 2230N
-Just one stick of 8GB 1600mhz 1,35V ddr3
-80% screen brightness (i have the 768p screen but the full HD doesn't suck more according to notebookcheck review)
-cpu turbo off (99% max cpu usage in power settings)
-Multi Ad blockers plugins on firefox to prevent friggin' animated ads to drain your battery.

I'm idling at 11W, and browsing the web sucks very moderate power, so i'd say the battery should last 4-5 hours easily with medium browsing.

 

Review Asus N550JV-CN201H Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

See the idle power consumption with full hd on board and wifi off is 12W max, same as 768p.

With wifi on now that's another story, i guess we all had this Atheros module on board, and it's clearly not the best. My wattmeter never lie.

 

What's a good wifi card to replace the Atheros one? I need dual band and was considering the new Intel AC 7260, but I've heard people have been having trouble with the drivers on that. Anyone know a dual band card that gets the lowest power consumption?

 

I got the AC 7260, the driver problems are probably because the card is so new. At first, people got the card somehow before drivers were even released. I was able to get the drivers installed in W8. The intel website's device detector still doesn't recognize it but it's probably because the detector is outdated. So far so good though I don't have an AC router.

 

How is the power consumption on this wifi card? Any significant improvements of battery life for the laptop?

EDIT: I don't have an AC router either, but I figured if it's better than the stock card, I might as well make my laptop futureproof for when AC routers are cheaper.

 

I have the same question really. I've never really looked into replacing wifi modules, so I'm new to this part. I'm assuming from what Kallogan said, it would make a beneficial change in battery life, correct?

Would any other hardware changes possibly make a difference as well, besides the wifi module, RAM, and possibly an SSD?

 

well i know that using one stick of ram instead of two will shave only 1W or so, as for ssd, you will barely gain 0,5W at idling but as soon as your tasking, the ssd will do any operations very quickly and will spend most of its time idling, so it should make a decent difference on a full battery charge compared to a laborious hdd always scratching for nothing, 30 minutes or so. Don't expect more than that though. And that would be with a very efficient ssd like samsung 840 pro or evo.

I will try a ssd in a few weeks

 

How is the keyboard on this laptop? Reviews have mentioned it to be underwhelming and cheap feeling. I haven't been able to test this laptop in person. My local best buy has this model in stock

Asus - 15.6" Touch-Screen Laptop - 8GB Memory - 1TB Hard Drive - Black - Q550LF-BBI7T07 - Best Buy

Which is supposed to be very similar to the n550 and the keyboard on it is absolutely horrible. I will be doing very heavy typing on the laptop and am interested in seeing what people think of it.

 

Finally one retailer has the specs correct on their site. And they also removed the 24GB SSD specification that I have not seen any of the N550JV models include. Wonder if Asus finally released a proper spec sheet?

ASUS N550JV-DB71 15.6" Notebook Computer (Gray)N550JV-DB71

 

Except some noise, it's one of the best I've used. Cheap?!?!?

 

I didn't have any issues transitioning to this keyboard from a Lenovo x230t. The key travel isn't quite as long but I like the keyboard quite well.

 

The keyboard is better than on my all previous laptops, so it can't be that bad.

 

Hi guys. I recently got the matte non touch screen model. I just noticed than whenever I put pressure on the edge of the screen, it seems that the screen depresses and slightly separates from the bezel. This is particularly noticeable on the right, left and top sides of the screen. I tried putting some pressure on the corners but it seems solid and it sits flush on the bezel. Is this normal? This is my first non mac laptop. So I'm not very much familiar on the build quality of other brands particularly Asus. So I just want to know if this is normal in all n550jv-db71 models.

 

Do you see any problems on or with the screen itself? If not, you're fine.

How did you end up pressing there?

 

Hi everybody,

for some reason, in Germany there are many more versions available than in the US.
I contacted ASUS to find out the differences between the different versions (that all looked exactly the same to me) and got the following reply:

The models N550JV-CN051H and N550JV-CN201H both come with a 2GB GT750M, 8GB RAM and 1TB of storage.
They have the same optical drive, screen and processor.
Apparently, the only difference is dual-band wifi-support (CN051H ist dual-band, CN201H is single-band).

Same with the models CN199H, CN088H and CN052H. They all come with a 4GB GT750M, everything else is the same as above.

• CN199H => single-band + optical mouse (?)
• CN088H => dual-band
• CN052H => dual-band

I was planning on putting an Intel AC7260 in the laptop because I read about the single-band only Atheros card.
Can anyone tell me the model number of their wifi card? Does it support dual-band mode? Is it a US model (DB71 or DB72, I think) or a European one?
I'm not sure if it is worth going for a model with dual-band support if I can just switch the wifi card myself.

Thanks a lot in advance!

 

Im looking to buy this model from pc world

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/laptops-netbooks/laptops/laptops/asus-n550jv-cm067h-15-6-touchscreen-laptop-21490052-pdt.html?gclid=CKCJm5_eibkCFWOWtAody2gAFw&srcid=198&cmpid=ppc~gg~~~Exact&mctag=gg_goog_7904&s_kwcid=AL!3391!3!{creative}!{matchtype}!{placement}!{network}!{adwords_producttargetid}!{keyword}&ef_id=UhIrYwAABf0JTTmK:20130819143814:s#longDesc

Does anyone know whether this particular model has an IPS screen as that is one of the main reasons i'm wanting to buy it? It only says it is a Full hd LED backlit screen?

 

From previous comments I believe it does.

 

Hi guys! Could you please check what max resolution the display port in this laptop can carry? I need at least 2560x1600, but 4k would be definitely future-proof.

 

This is what 750M can do:

This is HD4600 performance on paper:

Now the problem is, what can the drivers do???

 

Thanks a lot. I would be grateful if someone could confirm this in practice. I am planning to change my Lenovo Y580 because of lack of DP. Unfortunately now I can only display FHD through HDMI port and nothing more.

 

There's back light bleeding and then I tried putting some pressure in the side. I tried looking at other laptop models and it seems that screen is tightly seated in the bezel. Even if I pushed the screen, it did not seem to depressed from the bezel. May be it's normal with this model?