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

I got a support reply today from the German support:

Sehr geehrter Herr xxxx,

in kürze wird für das Gerät ein Bios Update erscheinen.
Dieses behebt das von Ihnen beschriebene Verhalten der Lüfter.


Bitte fügen Sie einer Antwort immer den gesamten Schriftverkehr bei!

Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Best regards

Pierre Sacher

Technical Support Division [P06S]

Customer Service Center
ASUS Computer Germany

L2 Support Notebook / PDA
ASUS Notebook Support Division

They say that a BIOS update is released in the near future which fixes the fan issue.

 

Sorry if I repost this, but it was overwhelmed by the news about a possible updated BIOS, and I think it can be useful for all of us not yet 100% sure about buying this laptop.

 

I can't really say anything about the power of the GT645 but about VRAM since I recently had to deal with it because with my Desktop PC I'm using 2 30inch monitors (2560x1600 res). Since I want to play some games in rare cases I looked into VRAM. You basically only need a lot of VRAM if you play in high resolutions and this is not even true for EVERY game. 1GB of VRAM should be enough for most of the current games (most recent ego shooters might be tricky) in Full HD.
'

 

Available for preorder Touch version on Redcoon:
Asus UX51VZ-CM061P Touch Win 8 (Ultrabook 15.6'' i7-3612M 2x 128GB 8GB) -- 1779€
Asus UX51VZ-CM062P Touch Win 8 (Notebook 15.6'' i7-3612M 2x 256GB 8GB) -- 1999€

 

If the UX52 really have GDDR5 VRAM like the UX51 the performance difference should be very small in most cases. How much VRAM size affect performance depends strongly on the game and also on the quality settings - higher quality in most cases require a lot of VRAM for a small visible change IMHO.
GT 645M uses the same silicon as the GT 650M so the difference should just be binning.

 

I hope that. It should be a little less expensive than UX51, and performances should be slightly inferior only to N56VZ and UX51VZ. Has it been released in some country?

 

Those pictures here were taken in a store by my nokia n9:

My eyes tell me that the 'retina' shows the color red better than Asus, what do you say about that?
Asus has one advantage, it blocks out all reflections very good.
Next time there I will try to take one single shot with those machines placed next to each other.

 

Retina's colours look more vivid, probably because of the much higher contrast. BUT they look very good to me anyway :thumbsup:

 

Yes, to us mortal being , there is really no wrong with Asus. Except the fan noise of course, and the screen should be a little brighter too.

 

Here is yet another review. This time by Digital Trends:

ASUS Zenbook UX51Vz Review

A rating of 9.5/10!
Biggest gripe: The fan noise

BTW, any news on the new BIOS firmware 204?

 

Haven't received the appropriate 204 "A" version yet... soon now, hopefully.

 

Same here, waiting on taiwan office.

 

Could someone upload the bios file please?

 

Dude.... did you even read the two posts above your own? :S Or the 30 posts before that when we talked about it? Come on....

 

Dude... I did read the posts. What are you talking about? Some got a bios that they cant flash and I asked for it?

Are you drunk? Come on...

 

Do you an UX51VZ without the A? If so, contact me directly at quindor . quindorian . org and we'll arrange it. But a word of warning, I take no responsibility whatsoever for what happens with your laptop.

 

Anybody know if the U500VZ or the UX51/2 will arrive in Canada??? I'm hoping it will arrive at least in the first quarter of 2013.

Any ideas anyone?

 

Yesterday I got my UX51VZA with the sh*tty 203-Bios. I hate the fans!

If the new Bios comes out in due time and will fix the issue, I keep the Notebook, otherwise I send it back (12 days left).

There are two things I want to mention:
1) Due to the fact that the hot air is blown out in the midlle and in front of the display, the user will hear any noise even louder compared to other notebooks where it is blown out on the side.

2) The UX51 has quite some nice and powerful hardware built in - so maybe ASUS wants to make shure it will stay cool enough, accepting the endlessly rotating fans. However, they should be clever enough to keep it cool in idle situations!

 

Why is it nobody can edit the bios? There are some people doing it in the dell forum.

 

I believe it's not so easy to do, and nobody wants to brick their 2000$ new toy...

 

Very interested in what they come up with, hopefully a solution That would clear the way for a positive purchase decision on my end...

Having read the entire thread (yeah, it's saturday and I'm really interrested in this machine) I am convinced that the hardware isn't the problem, as some people fear. The fans that are used (Delta Electronics KDB0705HB) are high quality variable speed fans which are used in many Asus machines.
It's all a matter of software (read BIOS) control.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

Grtz,

Xcel

 

Unfortunately the UX51 is not available in Hong Kong what so ever, I've try SSP, Wan Chai and Mong Kok... it's not in HK yet, they only have the UX31, UX32 and UX42... They don't know when they may have it...

 

This is very good news

 

Yeah, good news in the sense that Delta is indeed a reputable company.

However, I can't help but think back to the days when Delta fans were the weapon of choice for CPU overclockers... synonymous with high airflow & high noise. Somehow consistent that even in their current tiny laptop iteration that has not changed.

 

Terpen Tijn, I understand your apprehension....The fans in the UX51/U500 were used in many other Asus laptops but I can't testify to the fact how silent/noisy these machines were compared to the competition. Fact is that these fans are mounted and that the software engineers at Asus have to do their best given the used hardware. All there is left for us is hoping that they succeed.....

So fingers crossed for version 204 A !

Grtz,

Xcel

 

I still have my 60mm Delta black label (it _was_ black and had no specifications for some reason) and it's still extreme both in airflow and sound. Sadly my Alpha heatsinks are gone...
With that said I've also had Delta fans that are very silent just like any other fan manufacturer so thinking Delta = noise is wrong. Different fans designs have different goals and IIRC the black label was used for cooling extreme servers and even military equipment where sound levels aren't relevant but proper cooling is.

 

Hehe, the good old days. I still have an Alpha cooler somewhere... another legendary brand.

 

FWIW, I received my UX51-vz on 29 November here in Arizona, USA. It's used as my primary work system so I rushed to break the really stupid RAID0, install Windoze 8 Pro and Mint 14, then get back to work. Today I checked out proprietary Nvidia drivers for Linux and discovered that I'll have to work with the Bumblebee program as the graphics are the new hybrid that switches between the Nvidia card an an internal Intel graphics module to save battery and reduce heat.

It occured to me that I should return here to let everyone know that my specific system is the most quiet mobile system that I've ever used. Only for 2 minutes at 01:00am while I was doing something with the new installation of Windoze did any fan noise occur and yes, it was freaking loud and high pitched. Can't remember now what I was doing, as I was tired and it went away when I rebooted. But other than that one brief time, there's no way that any human can hear the fans in this machine.

Here's the BIOS info:
id: firmware
description: BIOS
vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
physical id: 0
version: UX51VZA.203
date: 09/13/2012
size: 64KiB

 

Sorry, I didn't read all the 250 pages, only the 10-20 lasts, but what's wrong with the RAID0 ?

 

RAID0 provides no backup capability and was used many years ago to speed up application servers when drives were the data throughput chokepoint. These days, especially with SSDs on a frigging laptop.... it is a waste of resources since there is no increase in disk throughput.

I won't go on further, because I'll sound religious. But my opinion as a recently retired Chief Enterprise Architect for a global IT firm, this was a brain dead idea on Asus' part. I couldn't help but mutter out loud when I posted.

Yeah, this is Wikipedia but it's one of the better written tech pieces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

 

How did you break the RAID0 mode? Could you access the RAID Controller BIOS? Everyone else here reports that ASUS somehow blocked the access.

Thanks.

 

I totally agree, Raid 0 with SSD's in a Notebook is a stupid brain fart and marketing joke. The throughput in the benchmarks was just 40MB per second higher than with just one fast SSD. This Raid 0 SSD thing in the Asus notebook is a reason for me to pay less and not more, like Asus want us to pay.

 

I don't know where you read that the RAID-0 was only 40MB/sec faster. It's actually 2x as fast (For sequential transfers) as without RAID-0. With random read/write it's not so much 2x but it still helps. The Sandisk SSD's aren't the greatest in the world. But two combined in RAID-0 actually post some decent performance figures. So that's why they did that.

Here is an ATTO of the Internal SSD. It's impossible to achieve these kind of speeds with only 1 SSD, since you would be limited to around 500MB/sec - 550MB/sec. The maximum one SATA600 port can transfer.


The discussion if RAID-0 is a good idea is a different one in my opinion. I use crashplan myself so my data is always safe and automatically backed up. If the RAID-0 would fail, no big problem. Also, the failure rate of a good SSD is a lot lower then a mechanical harddrive. So the chance that it happens should be a lot lower too.

Also, SSD's often fail in different ways then a harddrive. If for instance you keep some extra spare space on the disk, this will prevent some common problems and also give you a bit of extra performance and longevity for the drive. If it doesn't fail mechanically (PCB, etc.) in the first week or so, it'll probably last you a few years. Also because of using RAID-0 each drive only receives half of the writes per drive, thus giving you a longer lifespan. That is actually a good reason to chose 2x128GB vs 1x256GB sometimes.

 

There is an option in BIOS to enable or disable raid0. It is not blocked, at least on the UK sold machines.

Read speed from the first disk is 310 Mb/s

root@dynomob:~# dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 3.46407 s, 310 MB/s

 

Just tried to install the "Intel Thermal Management Tool"

http://nbtsd.asustreiber.de/Tools/DPTF_V6.0.6.1082.zip.

Can you install it? On my system it says "this system does not meet the Basic requirements for the installation of this software". NET 4.5 comes with Windows 8, so maybe there's something else I have to install?

German Asus support tells me for the time being there is no BIOS update available. I shoul use the software above.

 

But the reality is, exactly how will even a heavy duty user detect this? I should have clarified my remark as "no detectable increase in performance." Using RAID for redundancy made much better sense, or leave it as two separate disks as I created. We're not talking about an application or database server here. I increased the RAM memory which has a much larger laptop performance effect than the RAID0.

I too use CrashPlan but Google their recent failures, there is some risk there too, hence why I also back up to my NAS each night.

 

Doesn't anybody have a UX51VZ without the A? What is it anyway and what's the difference? I want to know if the new BIOS fixes the fan :O.

 

You'll know soon. Even german support now responded telling me that the bios update is in preparation and should be released soon.

 

Have you found any store in the world that actually has the 128 GB SSD + 500 GB HDD configuration? Because it's included in the official U500VZ page, but I can't find any evidence of its existence

 

kinda crazy reading people have already their 4th u500, because of bsod/graphics card problem, then not working touchpad, after that distorted sound on the right speaker, is going on with the quality control at Asus, are there monkeys working instead of real people??????

 

Actually my current model is the third. My Friend received his second, last week. This seems to be normal for asus customers...

 

Where'd you buy it and what was the turnover time to get a new one?

 

I have an eight year old ASUS notebook here (bought it in December 2004) that worked right out of the box and still does it on daily use. Only recently it suffered a broken hinge on the left-hand side of the screen so I need a replacement for my trusty machine. This A3878GLP was kinda the great grandfather of the UX51VZ. For its time pretty fast (Pentium M 2 GHz) with dedicated graphics (ATI Mobility 9700), 2 GB RAM, DVD burner, SD Card reader, webcam and a great1400x1050 screen. Also only under full load the noise of the fan is audible. At that time the notebook of my dreams for comparably reasonable 1750 Euro.

Looks like the UX51VZ would be the perfect replacement for a similar long time if only the quality was comparable. But I will wait some more time until Asus has sorted out their quality problems. A broken hinge does not hinder the overall performance of my A3878GLP.

 

I'm on my first and have no problems. One have to remember the reporting bias from those that get bad hardware v.s. those that get good. However I've missed someone that have gotten 3 replacements, can you provide a link?

 

The Notebook was bought on Amazon.de. Amazon is very quick! They sent me the new one immediately and gave me 30 days to send the broken one back. So the replacement for 1 notbook took me about 3 days.

 

I'm on my 3rd UX51.

First one had graphics card issues with BSOD, cost me $50 out of pocket because of XoticPC's return policy.
Second was had a faulty right speaker. Another person also has this issue as well. No out of pocket cost but the local store I bought it from didn't seem to like the exchange.
Third one had a bent chassis near the USB port. I can deal with that. But the webcam is now not working properly.

If the webcam issue keeps up to the point where I can prove it, this one will be going back as well.

 

And are you losing any money (e.g. return shipping costs or such) on each one?

 

That's clearly unacceptable for a computer in this price class! Hearing things like this makes me wonder if I am exceptionally lucky having a machine without any problems (as far as I know, touch wood)...

 

Still no word on the new bios?

 

Nope, I checked in with them today, but they are still waiting on Taiwan office.