To Buy ASUS C90S or not to Buy ASUS C90S?

To Buy ASUS C90S or not to Buy ASUS C90S?



Hello everyone,

I am new to the community and have enjoyed reading many of the posts here.

The question that I have is the following:

I am extremely busy with my a full time day job, night time home business, and volunteer job, plus a family of four with one addition on the way.. ; )

I need a laptop which is a powerful, reliable desktop replacement, that when I do not have the time to tinker with it, will work powerfully and efficiently all of the time, yet, I can upgrade and mod as time provides (which I have little of these days, but enjoy doing these things).

So, as of this year and day, would you purchase the ASUS C90S (I think that I had heard that there is a P on the horizon soon?)?

I need to get the very best bang for my buck, so if there is something different which you would recommend, I would appreciate hearing about it.

I guess the next question is, if you would still recommend the C90S, what options would you opt for?

I am thinking

E6700 Proc
3 GB High Quality, fastest supported speed, Mushkin or Equivelant RAM
The latest offered 512MB Video card offered
TV Tuner, do they make an HD Tuner for this?
Need Wireless N
Large 7200 RPM HD
Combo BLue Ray - DCD Multi Burner
High resolution Monitor (What is the current resolution supported on the C90S?)
Gigabit NIC
etc....

Any recommendations that you have would be appreciated.

I need a laptop which will take a little bit of a beating, and keep on ticking, and will not die from its own heat...

How bad is the fan noise on this thing? I currently have an ECS Green Systems 732 laptop which seems to have a System board problem as I have tried everything including booting from VISTA CD and it will not get past the CRCDisk.sys driver regardless of what I boot from, Hard DRIVE or DVD. Also, the fan noise on this thing is loud, and it would be nice not to have one that loud.

Also, from the sounds of things, GENTECH is the best purchase option? They seem to be out of some of the features that I wanted if I move forward for this laptop. Any other suggestions?

Any assistance/guidance would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance,

Dave

 

I have heard a lot of heating issue with desktop processor.I dnt knowhow much is costs,get a 9262.

 

there's pretty much NO issues with heating issues with the desktop processor. The heating issues mainly arise from the graphics card. there's been noted problems with the N card in the c90s though, and the c90s is picky about ram. Also, the c90P should have most all the kinks worked out with a better graphic card and processor support line as it will have the P35 chipset. It's supposedly supposed to come out this month or next however.if you opt for the c90s, gentech would be great as they make sure you get the right RAM for your c90s and the wireless card works properly.

 

How loud are the fans in the C90S?

 

Oh wow I typed up an entire article to answer each and every little question you had just now to check back on your response and see it never posted! GRRR

I will get back with you and retype what I can from memory later but I am short on time right now.

 

The fans get loud if you're overclocking your system, otherwise, they stay quite low. They're, imo, not loud at all unless they get to full speed at which it sounds like an aircraft take off .

 

Wait for the c90 coming out in july. If you can't wait I recommend a sager.

 

Yeah wait for the C90P. The fans aren't loud, except that sometimes they start running for no apparent reason (switch to OC/gaming mode for 30 sec then go back to power saver). The C90P will support the new CPUs, better, cooler and way cheaper

 

Ok the shorter version of what I said before..

DTR thats powerful and reliable. The C90S has you covered in the first part its powerful but reliability can be argued amung us. I think all of us have working units but some of us have a few quirks that we have never got quite fixed. Me personally I have a perfect machine except I have ram issues, I cant boot on 3gb+ of ram from battery mode I have to use 2gb of ram or boot from AC power. Strange eh?

Anyways onto your configuration and what you want.

E6700 is a No, the C90S has a max of 2.93ghz and 2 different overclocking modes. The e6600 will go to like 2.87ghz with overclock mode so its less than 200mhz away from the e6700 speed for a fraction of the cost and it will run cooler wich is important.

3gb ram is a good spot to go, the chipset for the c90s supports max of 3gb, 4gb of ram simply wont work (it will post and run but never use all 4gb) this is one of the few things that we know for sure the C90P can fix is allowing use of 4gb of ram due to a newer chipset. Dont worry about speed just get the regular 667 stuff because the speed is going to be based on your FSB and thats based on the cpu you use and your overclock mode. Actually another reason I prefer the e6600 because when you overclock the e6600 you run the ram at a faster speed, while the e6700 will be stuck at a lower FSB and thus slower ram.

512mb Video Card, sounds like you think more memory is better. This is not the case with laptops and gpu memory. The trend is that the larger memory cards use slower memory (DDR2 in this case) and do not preform as well as the lesser but faster memory cards (256mb GDDR3 in this case) the 8600gt with GDDR3 was discontinued for some reason but you can probably still find it somewhere. I had both cards in mine at some point and prefered the 512mb card in the end due to some driver issues, but I also didnt game alot. As a gamer the performance boost of the GDDR3 version may be better.

Also to elaborate on the ram size, a laptop is never going to be playing a game at a high enough setting to be needing 512mb of video card ram, its a gimmick more than anything, A high end desktop is a different story as it uses higher settings and resolutions that can actually take advantage of the extra ram.

TV Tuner, I think there is a TV tuner part for the C90S because it was supposed to come with one overseas I think, however I am not sure on this 100%, you can always get a usb tv tuner if you have too and then be able to move that to a future laptop or computer as a bonus to your investment.

Wireless N, the C90S comes with the newest wifi cards that have the full Draft N support. N is still in Draft stage you know so I cant really recommend it for any reason, and if you do manage to get a fully working N network there is probably nothing you can do with it to take advantage of the faster network speed because your internet or your hard drive is still going to be the bottleneck in speeds, not the network. Investing in a good G network is a better idea IMO.

HDD Large & 7200rpm do not go together in the same sentence, you can get much larger drives much cheaper with 5400rpm. I have a 250gb 5400rpm drive and it preforms more or less as fast as a 160gb 7200 and now there are 300gb 5400rs out there on par with 200gb 7200rpm drives. In addition to alot of extra space and a much cheaper price you use less power and produce less heat, and every bit of heat you can save is a good thing especially in a C90. Still tho if you insist in a 7200rpm drive it does have some merits with a faster random access and seek time.

Blueray drive, they do have one for the C90S! But its expensive and probably not worth it for any logical reason I can conceive, half the price of the laptop so you can play movies? If its for data backup you can get a more secure external hard drive for a fraction of the cost or even build a file server.

1680x1050 res, is a very great screen. Nothing is higher but some very rare and expensive models like Alienware has a 1920x1200 15" screen but thats insane and makes reading text and stuff really hard to do.

Gigabit NIC is standard.

So where to buy? Yes Gentech is where I got mine and I highly recomend them. Ken here on the forums works for them and he has gone so far out of his way so many times to help us the customer. No hassles returns if there are problems, cheap and fair prices, and he does cool extra stuff for us like release new bios. Getting a laptop like this from a etailor like newegg would be a big mistake because any problem becomes your problem rather than having somebody to help you with it.

So yes the C90P is supposed to be on the way, however I cant recommend it to you or say you should wait for it. We all thought the C90S was going to be great and it had many let downs, you would hope that they fixed any and all problems for the new model but we cant say for sure. So if you need a laptop now a C90S is there for you, if you wait for the C90P it may be better but no guarantee since you get to be one of the first buyers and pioneer onto the new platform. If you want to take no risks you have to wait for quite a while until other people have bought one and been hands on long enough to find any problems.

 

are you sure that's the shorter version vicious . there are, however, upto 320 gig 7200 drives out there from WD that are pretty good here
and they're also already on sale.

 

Yeah it is the shorter version lol. I had more detail in the original post that somehow never posted.

 

People, is there any chance to replace E6600 from my C90S with E7200? According to the benchmarks, E7200 is the way better, both, on speed and energy consuption.

 

Hmm I think it could work, its pretty much just a die shrink to 45nm vs the older 65nm so uses less power and produces less heat. Same FSB.

But there is the problem tho, lower power use, so since the chipset is so old on the c90s unless they make a new bios that can detect the new cpu and the chipset/mobo can give the right amount of power, it may not supply the right amount of power to the cpu.

The voltage spec is almost the same tho so it shouldnt hurt it, you just might not end up with a much cooler running cpu or save as much power.

The only way to know is to try

I personally still want to test the q6600 so I am waiting for somebody to let me barrow one or to sell one dirt cheap.

 

Yeah it doesn't change my comparison tho becasue there are 500gb 5400rpm drives out there for nearly the same price thus keeping true the fact you get lots more space for less money and only abit less performance.

 

My E4500 is not supported but still works, and is detected correctly. The only way to know is to try. Google Chipset 945 + E7200