Zenbook U500 Announced: 15.6" HD IPS, GT650M, Quad-Core i7...

Because you get worse Trackpad's drivers, no Optimus = no graphic card switch = more power use and worse energy management = less battery life

 

I have to add that when you are using Windows the rMBP power supply is insufficient to handle full power of the laptop and apple keyboard is not optimized for windows user.

 

And CPU throttling to 1.2 GHz and near 100° C temperature

 

As I said earlier, battery runtime is also a big differentiation. 3 and half hours of battery runtime will not fly for UX51. I hope the production model has much better battery life.

 

Based on the specs it should last 5-6 hours with light use

Sent from HTC HD2 with Tapatalk

 

specs mean nothing if the BIOS/firmware has the fans on all the time for example.

 

indeed, you take a p150em it packs a 77wh battery, however it has a mediocre 3.5h battery life, given the switchable tech in there ts should have much more.

 

I would be more satisfied if at least the UX51 would claim a battery life of 9 hours like the rMBP.

 

I prefer have REAL 5-6 hours of light use than claimed 9 hours

 

So does everyone.

That's why I hope that the claimed time is 9 hours, so that in actual life it would be at least 5-6 hours. If the claim itself starts with 5-6 hours, then I am not hopeful of the actual battery runtime in real life.

 

There are so many Asus fanboys in here...the higher resolution on the rMBP means that things will look sharper and clearer, which means that it's a better screen.
Also, the issues that people are referring to - the image retention is only on certain LG screen models, and Apple replaces it without a charge if you have the issue. The lag because of the resolution is fixed with the Mountain Lion update.
I haven't heard any complaints about Apple's build quality; on the contrary, I've heard only raving reviews about the thinner rMBP.
Not to mention, apple laptops keep their resale value better than Windows laptops ever will...a rMBP bought now can be sold for around $1200 two years later. The U500 will be sold at around 600 if you're lucky.
Battery life on the rMBP is better, thinner, lighter, and for some the 16:10 aspect ratio of the screen is an advantage.
Also Apple has superior customer service (Asus customer service being horrible is a well known fact)

 

As I understand it, the problem is Windows. Even the MacBooks only offer great battery life when running MacOS. As soon as you run Windows on them you lose a good portion of the battery life. MacOS must just be written for more efficient power usage than Windows. So it would be difficult for any manufacturer to achieve similar battery life in Windows while using the same CPU. The response of the Windows world to this problem has been Ultrabooks with special CPUs that consume less power, but of course those are also less capable CPUs.

I suspect it is not possible to produce a Windows computer with hardware equivalent to the MacBook Pro that achieves the same battery life, because the OS is just less efficient.

 

It's enough sure that UX51 will not have a battery life like rMBP, because rMBP has a 95Wh battery while UX51 has a 70Wh battery.

rMBP Battery life isn't 9 hours: (by notebookcheck review)
Idle (without WLAN, min brightness)-----17h 50min
Surfing with WLAN-------------------------6h 04min
Load (maximum brightness)-----------------1h 28min

Review Apple MacBook Pro 15 Retina 2.3 GHz Mid 2012 - Notebookcheck.net Reviews

 

The Retina MacBook Pro starts at $2199 in the US and $2229 in Canada for the lowest-spec model. The UX51 starts at $1999. Not the same price.

 

That would have made all kinds of sense. Or it sounds like it makes sense.

But the Macbook isn't actually that efficient. Lots and lots of services in OSX that aren't necessary, that still are pulled in - and you can't disable them. Activation of hardware happens automagically in a way that makes sense for a "common user", but it's not "efficient".

And while Windows is extremely difficult to get to run properly, it's easy to make any random windows-computer draw less power on average than a macbook..

If you measure it, the Macbook - as long as anything happens on it, and the monitor isn't practically turned off - will idle down to 40-50w. It's easy to make a computer with the same intel hardware idle on lower frequencies and less than half that effect-draw - in linux or windows. I know that from experience.

Instead, it's the large battery and efficient use of the graphics libraries for various tasks that makes the difference. This means that for common tasks, you don't suddenly run everything on pure software (which you often do with windows), which saves you from running to max processor states (and avoids the peak draws getting very high). Also, you don't have the opportunity to install masses of spyware that keeps the processor running.

So.. the entire Mac is efficient thing is a myth. It has been that ever since Apple dropped PowerPC. The PowerPC Macs were awesome, though... Expensive as hell, but very good. So obviously they don't make them any more.

Anyway. Point is that if you had a similarly rated battery on your random China-built laptop, you could easily get more battery out of it than a Macbook. That is, if you dropped fifty-three automatically installing adware collections, thirteen Asus apps that call monitor calls constantly to check if the computer is still on earth, on power, and whether hardware has been disconnected -- or if you have made a backup of all your files in the last three seconds.

If you avoid that, you can get a pretty efficient - relatively speaking - windows computer. With longer battery-life than a Mac.

Just take an example. Imagine that Asus wised up and added a 70wh lithium polymer battery as an extra option for the nx5 and nx6 series. Instantly, they would have computers with 6h effective battery life, rivaling the Macbooks on /existing hardware/. They wouldn't even need to do anything else, and they would be on "Apple level" when it comes to battery life.

On top of that, the battery would also not be glued to the chassis on the inside - with actual glue, and stabilized by something resembling packing foam.

But since Asus aren't really interested in selling their laptops on functionality, flexibility and convenience - even when they could do so with minimal effort:
1. Bios tweaks on ram/sata detection, open up boot settings to a degree.
2. Add extended lithium polymer packs to the battery lineup - at this point, this might even cost less than producing a new lithium-ion variant, as lithium ion batteries are on their way out in favour of other organic types of power-packs. Meaning that manufacturing large quantities of new batteries isn't that type of premium any more, even in the short term.
3. Remove bloatware.
4. Create/collect power-profiling software and hotkey overlays in a uniform and small package that can easily be installed. And documented so it can easily be ported to other OSes.

But since they aren't able to really grasp that it takes very little effort to get things up to speed, and instead spend resources on creating overlay programs that hang and lock away settings. In order to create something that /looks/ as streamlined as a Mac. They are just falling short.

And you can see that thinking when it comes to battery life as well. They know exactly what they have to do. But since they make some decision on top about how "most people seem to think this is acceptable", they are happily saving pennies in the short term on sub-par battery packs.

Same thing when it comes to software: Create a fractured package of multiple programs, and then add a new service or five for each extra software part that a new external developer makes. And then add an overlay that /looks/ efficient.

Same thing with their aftermarket support. Spend money on rescuing RMAs and supplying windows-users with endless amounts of support when it comes to re-installing the OS when something simple breaks - obviously. Spend two minutes on a bios-tweak that would reduce support requests in the long run by numbers measured with at least 5 zeros at the end every year? Hell, no.

And that's that. Focus on creating an overlay that looks great. Instead of developing something that actually is uniform and efficient. Asus could upstage Apple right now. But corporate stupidity is probably the most powerful force in the world, so that's just not happening.

Because of idiotic details that any nerd would have been able to point out after two minutes with any of their computers.

 

A lot of things happen on hardware level, the firmware is the via crucis that most windows notebook fail for battery life. Basically this means that even if I remove the bloatware with a clean install leave things clean as possible they can be (i.e. shut off several drivers/bloatware), sometimes the power draw is still going to be significant.

Enterprise class notebooks like the x230 sip power, on idle and light tasks they sip 4-5w, this is a rare thing, being the usual around 6-12w. Another thing that people actually have forgotten here is the display, a 15'' display is going to consume a lot more than a 12.5'' one, and the same is valid for a 2880*1800 vs 1920*1080, the former is going to consume a lot more power, and now you know why apple changed the 77wh battery to a 95wh in the rmbp and claimed (realistically) that it has the same battery life of the cmbp, 7h.

btw that figure on the x230 power consumption is using the lenovo install, not a clean install. So yes I dont want them to be on ''apple level'' of battery life, I want them to be on enterprise class battery life, not to mention support, once you go NBD you never go back (or so I thought)

nipsen I think you have made a math mistake, no notebook idles at 40-50w, otherwise the battery life on idle would be usually 1 hour.

 

Yes, but with the student discounts it's $1999

 

Apple benefits from co-designed hardware and software, they know the hardware it will run on and can micro-optimize for lower power. Microsoft on the other hand have to design against standard interfaces where it is more difficult to get close to optimum power consumption. Microsoft have had some things not being power optimal before Windows 8.

On the other hand Apple often "cheats" in that they haven't delivered the same performance as Windows machines due to being power optimized. They have also cheated by simply not using the standard interfaces mentioned above when running Windows; guess what: Windows can't use power optimizations Apple deliberately hides from it. Apple also have done sub-optimal (aka. crappy) drivers for Windows use.

There's a reason they do that: they want Macbook users to use MacOS, consume all media and use all applications where Apple get a cut of the cost. Not only does one have to pay through the nose for Apple hardware but one have to accept to become merchandize.
Not that MS is any better with Windows 8...

 

In my country rMBP starts from 2300€ so no way to compare its price with UX51 that instead starts form 1800€.

 

.. that sounded completely braindead, didn't it.. What I did was I took a slice of the power-draw when the screen was lit and the programs were running (but not doing anything specific). Turned out that before the computer drops out of a program context, an average Mac a year ago actually had a very high power-draw.

(I guess it could be less now. I know my n56 won't go lower than 17w with the usual things disabled. It will creep towards 25w on idle when the processor frequency is low, but everything else is enabled. If things start to happen, with an hdd, that sort of thing, the draw goes up again.)

So that made me wonder a little bit about the intel Mac Project, since what I expected was that as long as I was just typing in a document, etc., then the battery life would be awesome. Like on the PPC macs. Turns out it wasn't. And that this kind of thing happened on a lot of programs if you had any input alive and some active object or other.

A bit in the same way as Microsoft Office works, since it keeps your system "alive" with a million small things running in the background. And it probably wasn't optimized well for that kind of thing on the firmware level, like you say, but not really on the software level either. Not consistently, anyway.. From what I hear it still isn't.

So if your quad-core Mac goes to idle with all cores at max speed, and all devices enabled, and with some traffic, then - like any intel setup - then you suddenly have high draw when just typing in a document. Add a music player, or any sort of background task, and you're dropping fast.. "Actual battery life may vary with use", as they say.

Just saying it's not about magic. It's the same hardware here, right? And it's not necessarily about programming this into firmware, but just being slightly aware of what sort of resources you pull in in different software. Some of that can't be programmed into firmware either - how you update the screen, how you redraw the screen, update and check for consistency, when you read, etc.. Even if what modules can be deactivated and activated on the fly again, that might be done easiest in firmware to a certain extent... Some of it has to do with architecture - ability to run low-level processes at all without doing expensive bus-traffic, etc. OS-level - avoiding to double everything to disk on every memory operation, etc, etc..

That kind of thing doesn't seem to be a huge priority, though. Which is weird, since we're talking laptops... Since it doesn't help much if the pc idles at 9-12w, like an EeePC, etc.

 

Hilarious and informative. Well done Sir!

 

that only means that you got when it fluctuated in the processing power, its a math thing, it impossible to have the battery life of 10h that I have with a power consumption of 40-50w, it has to be a lot lower, I have a mbp 13 2011, it packs a 63wh battery, it means that I use 6.3w per hour. which although close to what the x230 uses, that little beast can do 24h+ battery life with the 9 cell and the slice.

No, its not the same hardware. Yes its the same processor, it may use the same ram, it may use similar SSDs, but nothing aside the cpu is a given. Here is why:

lets get a desktop mobo, while for a lot of people it only serves as something that connects everything that matter, cpu, gpu, ram, HDD, its one thing that make or break in terms of power consumption, there is a variance of 20w in the same chipset, with usual the usual things in there. That is a lot. Aside that there are some minor things that make a difference for notebooks, like how many connectors, the layout of the board, the firmware, components used... Each and everyone of those have a different characteristic, in the end everything that give you a marginal boost counts.

Off course the software counts, but I dont want to enter in the stupid contest of OSX is better than windows or vice versa, its futile. I do prefer Unix though, so you know what OS I tend to prefer.

 

That too kind of would make sense.

But when you start to look at it, there are a couple of things you end up with. The motherboard has a memory controller, a disk-controller, southbridge, etc. And these together, with dimms, idling hdds, etc., draw some... I don't know.. 2-3w? It's not very significant. 15' screen might be down towards 4w, before it fades away?

Outside that.. an i7 can - in any OS - run down to as little as 8-12w or so, I think. And then you have a normally idling i7 intel system at 16-17 or so watt. Smaller cores should go down further. Maybe lose another watt without a dedicated card and lower volt ram?

If Asus had any bios-tweakers so we could run variable bus-speeds, it might go down a bit from that as well.

Might even be lucky enough to get down to AMD Llano levels

And you're absolutely right that that can be reduced with firmware tweaks and so on. And that the layout for addon-cards can be significant.. But, what happens under load? Or if you have an nvidia/cuda application running (even if it's not active)? What happens to a program context where the word-processor is actually redrawing the entire document area every time you hit a key? It's things like that that lands you way too quickly at "2h battery left". And that happens on your smaller laptops as well.

Which imo is a problem that neither Apple or Microsoft is very interested in solving. See way too much of the "concepts" now having practical usage measured with, you know, a cached web-page and a pre-loaded plugin config opening over and over again. Doesn't give you the results you are really looking for, imo.

I know I'm way too argumentative, but I'm not.. you know.. pushing something particular, or want to bash a particular OS or company and so on. I'm just explaining why I doubt hardware tweaks and hardware controls in the OS is significant - over effective hardware decode for the graphics library (and effective use of it), and a bigger battery.

 

Anandtech has fully reviewed the Razor Blade, very interesting machine, unfortunately price is too high, the new cooling system seems perfect

AnandTech - The New Razer Blade: Thoroughly Reviewed

 

i would've pulled the trigger if it had a standard mouse pad.

I am happy with my XPS 15 but i have laptop acquisition disorder lol

 

^"ooh, gpu only maxes out at 90 degrees" lol

And not a word on the surface temps. (edit: other than that it's "better", or not as terrifying as the previous version of Razr's laptop..)

Great pics from the Razr media&"you owe me" kit, though. A marvel, when the fans make the warm air flow /out/ of the chassis, instead of /in/, clearly.

Who knows, maybe Asus will have a similarly awesome launch with the U500 if they make good enough press-shots, and write draft reviews for the tech-sites on beforehand?

 

he also notes that the original razor had one of the fastest boot time he ever measured at 15 seconds.... shouldn't this Asus beat that with Windows 8?


heck i get 8 seconds boot using UEFI, SSD and a fresh Win 8 install

 

let look at 2 models from the thinkpad line up.

Light load - wi-fi on, surfing the web and writing/read docs, no flash videos or flash content, not that I use any of that as well, well except videos which I do prefer to use html5

x230 - 12.5, i5 and 9 cell battery (94wh) - light load it will give you around 12-14h
t530 - 15, i7 qm and 9 cell battery (94wh) - light load it will give you around 10-12h

as you can see both sip power. Problem is your model doesnt do that. It consumes the same thing as a samsung series 7 gamer on light load using a SB cpu and a 6970m, yep thats a 17'' model.

even a few milliwatt are worth to save, but asus aint in that game mostly, only their U series appear to have a good battery life.

Regarding constant access from software, that happens on most pro software as well as consumer, its needed, thus a good ramp up in speed a few microseconds are done with that tasks.

 

We only know that prices for the SSD only systems..... We still don't have one for the 500 GB HDD and 128GB SSD combo Asus said there is going to be. At this point it will probably be around $1500, but that would be awesome if it came under that.

(To those who think it won't be close to that.... what other Asus laptops come even close to that price?) EDIT: Highest priced one I found is the G75 @ $1 999 ----- with a 17" screen, i7-3610QM, 750GB + 256GB, Blu-ray writer, 3GB GTX 670M and 16GB of RAM!!!

The U500/UX51 is a U series..... Hence the U in the name.

 

Still.. both of those are dual-core setups, no external card, lower resolution screen, etc.

And if you actually just put this right next to the n56 (with Asus' braindead memory timing, idiotically overvolted ram, idling dedicated card, i7s without dynamic bus-scaling, etc.) under the same conditions - and it actually will survive 4 hours. Half and hour or two more if turn the brightness all the way down and cull the extra processes running, shut the optical drive down. Can worm a bit more out of it as well if you boot on a user-account (to prevent the many admin background processes in windows, and switch off the virtual memory/pagefile (but some older/badly programmed programs stop working then..).

So it's suddenly 5 hours, on a much hungrier system, on a battery rated for 56Wh. ..closer to half of the Lenovo battery.

(Note: with braindead timing and 1.5v overclocked and stressed ram, never mind the dedicated card and the four cores.)

So I don't know. I'd be willing to bet good money that the differences on the inside here - with motherboard setup and layout so on - are pretty much non-existent. And that the only differences we are really going to find is a different setup on the bios, locked sata 2 settings maybe, and lower clocked ram, or a different bus:dram timing setup. ..and that that's really the only difference between a "china build" and a Macbook, or a premium business-top.

 

actually the t530 can be configured with a quad, it uses a much higher quality tn panel than the n56 at 1080p, yes its the famous 95% aRGB gamut panel, the matte version off course, it also packs a more thirsty fermi gpu in there (actually if I remember correctly if you chose a quad you cant chose a mobo without the nvidia gpu), and that particular model was the one that I confronted you with

the hardware and the engineering differences are there, as I said its pretty much the same thing for desktop mobos as well

 

High quality components on the mob really do matter, its just like a high quality psu, a gold quality one consumes much less at idle then a bronze one.
there is also the power thing, a mob ready to support a quad core and a high performance graphics need to have stronger components to canalize the energy to the system, and these components have a big influence on idle batery life, its like having a 600W psu to idle the computer at 20W, its just not efficient. and hereby one of the reason clevo battery life sucks

 

Is this laptop user-upgradeable in terms of hard drive and ram? The pictures do not look very promising on the bottom

 

currently from the specs on the sites available we know that there is one ram slot, regarding the HDD we have to wait and see

 

Do we know whether it can be upgraded beyond 8GB?

Edit: just noticed that some stores are advertising a 12GB version, but I take it that'd be the max if there's just one slot free and 4GB soldered to the motherboard. Also, I guess there might be a performance hit going to 12GB, with dual channel no longer being used - like on the UX32VD?

 

According to this site: MacMall | ASUS UX51VZ DH71 - 15.6" - Core i7 3612QM - Windows 8 64-bit - 8 GB RAM - 128 GB SSD + 128 GB SSD UX51VZ-DH71 there is a soldered ram slot of 4gb and then another slot with another 4gb stick that can be removed.

 

actually there would be no performance hit, since there is something called asynchronous dual channel, and the performance hit of not running ram in dual/triple/quad channel is negligible at best right now, for it to be meaningful, this would need a workload that would depend on ram access in extreme fashion, there is a reason that only the lga 2011 have the quad channel ram, its for servers and workhorses, not consumer notebooks

 

i just hope those two slots for SSDs are of the 2.5 variety.

 

Do you have a link where I can read more about this please? I'm very interested

 

you can read how ram works, wiki is a good start, you can also go for more tech articles on what speeds are given out by what components and how windows manage memory, there is a very different way on how win 8 manages things, here are some links

Solid-state revolution: in-depth on how SSDs really work | Ars Technica
Understanding CPU caching and performance | Ars Technica
Ars Technica: RAM Guide: Part I; DRAM and SRAM Basics - Page 1 - (7/2000)
Ask Ars: what’s the relationship between CPU clockspeed and performance? | Ars Technica

those may seem out of place, but the idea here is that the bottleneck that was before the ram, is now the HDD.

Multi-channel memory architecture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DDR3 SDRAM - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Thank you very much. If having ram of different size really doesn't make performances worse I may go for the 12GB

 

just do it.

and here is a quote from the haswell article from anandtech

AnandTech - Intel's Haswell Architecture Analyzed: Building a New PC and a New Intel

ignore the mention to apple, since when you mention apple anywhere all hell breaks lose and change that thinkpads, latitudes, elitebooks

 

..I suppose what you could have mentioned was that the article talks about idle power states, and not active states during operation.

 

actually if you read the article that I linked you could see that there is a new line of thinking in town, spurs of active power all combined, not the usual of what we have now, everything giving outputs anytime they want.

Also you should be aware that there are 5 power states for cpus, all are considered idle minus s0, which means that your cpu spends most of its time on the variations of the idle states not the active states, this is a given due to the maximum of get it done, go to sleep. And now that we have the 6th power state we can be more in that state than on s0, and there is also the thing about powergating and all that jazz. Some of those things are not even new, they are around since the first core duo.

 

Yes.. being able to turn modules off and on when you use them (without needing a reboot). Anandtech discovers the gunpowder next week, I guess.

Look. The example in the article was a component they were able to make use significantly less power from - during the sleep states.

Anandtech, or whatever writer they have here, then takes the opportunity to insist that that is where the explanation is for how Apple computers "generally" have better battery life than everything else. Along with intel's recommendations and Apple's ingenuity and magic. This is bull****, and you know that as well as I do.

Meanwhile, do you know what intel's recommendations look like? Open up Asus' bios, and then look at the memory timing settings and weep. Take a look at any other random locked HP bios, and see the same horror. This is Intel's "recommended" settings. And them being so, is the reason why Asus' support guys flatly refuse to change them when I ask.

They don't want to deviate from them, because otherwise the computer can be "overclocked". That's how much Intel's bulldropping "recommendations" are worth in real life. Because these guys don't know how the systems work. And they're not invested in actually being tech-savvy in that area.

On the board-meetings and when talking to the PR (<- really funny autocorrect... :/) managers, though -- oh, hell, now these recommendations are going to usher in an era of amazing technological advancement. And the "concepts" here are going to have all kinds of amazing magical properties.

But in practice - it's ******.

 

it was written by anand.

Here is the deal, there are several things in the mobo, each of those give a different output at a different time, there is a tendency of concentration of the controllers in the cpu right now, most things like one of the bridges have been integrated either some years back or will next year disappear in one chipset from intel.

You know that one thing that got me worried here is that given that there is a tendency to dish out everything at approximately the same time, there will be a chance of lag in that platform, this can be circumvented by the si0x state, we have to wait and see.

Intel doesnt make or break your ram timings, your mobo and bios does it. The supported speed is 1600mhz for all the ivb cpus, if you want to put a higher timming in there you incur the risk of the ram having some problems and downclocking itself. Again this doesnt have anything to do with intel, it happens to every notebook that doesnt support xmp or jedec ram, and yes the problem is with the ram.

If that was even remotely true, the mbp 13 from 2010 couldnt run 1333mhz ram, or even faster one. They can. Thats just a example. And that is a locked EFI as humanly possible. You dont even have access to it.

So its asus screwing with you.

also given the success of ultrabooks, and the models that are coming out, with higher than average consumer quality, I think they are doing a good job when it comes to recommendations. Even acer is making something that looks interesting.

btw that article made me think of going for broadwell instead of haswell.

 

Asus is giving us all a big fat middle finger with this starting price point!

 

There have been no official announcements on price.

The "leaks" have been SSD only configs.... Not the 500GB HDD/128GB SSD combo (which is the starting config).

 

Your point being..? See, you said what they wrote meant something it clearly didn't. That was the problem. That Anandtech wants to marry Apple isn't news.

... :/

No. The ram doesn't "downclock itself". Just... If you don't know how a bios works, then you really don't need to be so categorical, you know.

What Intel has is a bunch of settings that are supposed to go with /everything/. And this means that what we have as standard isn't optimized for anything. It works - possibly - without major issues. But there are examples where the margins are not going to go your way. This is true with for example the higher frequencies for ram the motherboards have started to support lately - since it requires you to increase the latency timings to get to the vendor specific settings they've made their ram-chips for.

But earlier, it was possible to cut the latency settings usually in half over the oem recommendations - and that held true for a very long time.

So for example if we are talking Apple, and you actually have one single configuration - then you can set settings here that are optimized for that one single configuration. This is, like I said, something that for example I could do in 20 minutes. It's simple, it's easy. I'm sure they did that with the 1333Mhz ram.

Meanwhile, out in the real world, we have been buying our own ram for a very long time. And some manufacturers tend to want to add settings that automatically detect this new hardware. So that's something we've had on desktop motherboards for /years/. With spd-timings - and a bios that sets the timing based on the ram manufacturer's specification. And lately also dynamic bus-frequencies. These functions are incredibly useful when you want to change your ram and still have a working computer.

And it should be something laptop manufacturers should go for, since they would help very easily to extend battery life.

But they don't. And this also goes for Apple and their Intel Macs. They don't do frequency modulation either. (Even if I'd bet good money that their smaller laptops are set up with lower bclk and higher difference between ram and bus-clocks. Makes sense if you're not gaming on it.)

Basically we have this weird practice where laptops are stuck in 2001 or something, when the motherboards are made ten years into the future. Because they want to - and I'm quoting Asus here - "prevent overclocking".

But I guess we will just have to wait until Anandtech discovers the gunpowder again, I guess.

Because otherwise, none of these things exist, clearly. 16Gb ram at 1.3v requires a motherboard upgrade. And Ram "underclocks itself" automatically based on magic. While Apple motherboards made with the identical parts as everything else, on the same factory, by the same people - and put in a box with the same contacts using the same internal connectors - are actually /completely different/. Because of magic.

 

Given that you can program a BIOS, why continue to use your n56 as an excuse and just do the damn hack? Actually asus bios are one of the easiest ones out there to do those kind of things. We have been doing this for several years.

What you dont seen to understand is that I dont idolize anything, and I really despise your comments regarding anand. The guy is extremely helpful, not to mention very knowledgeable.

So since that is out of this way lets go to your ram problem:

First thing, search what JEDEC and XMP are. I was baffled why/how you wrote that.

Second thing, the 2010 mbp 13 used a nvidia chipset (the last one they made for intel, so it was a core 2 duo), and the chipset supported only 1066mhz DDR3, which was at the time the only thing that they had in terms of ram, near the end of the year 1333mhz modules started to appear. And please dont come with desktop had 1333mhz ram, this is so dimm we are talking about.

Also you seem to be unaware that you can run perfectly fine 1866mhz ram in notebooks, the mobo doesnt support that, the ram controller (which is in the cpu btw, and thats why the old way of overclocking is dead), its just yours that doesnt, and you fell for that crap that asus told you.

For example you can run perfectly fine 1866mhz ram in a x230, and thinkpads are notorious for their whitelisting and tight control of what component goes where. I can also do this is this SB mbp 13 that I have. And the SB dual cores were limited by their controllers to only accept 1333mhz, but hey I can. And yes it runs at specified speeds.

seriously your posts about linux and gpus never made much sense, but this now is becoming extremely OT, and annoying.

Just deal with the thing, people can make better hardware, they get the low cost approach, people can do better firmware, they go for low cost approach, people can do better software they go for the low cost approach.