Asus G73JH and FSX question

Hi

My first post so sorry if I have posted in the wrong section.

I am still trying to find a laptop that will run FSX at high frame rates and good detail. The new Asus G73JH seems promising as it has an ATI 1GB 5870 graphics card, 8GB DDR3 RAM and a core i7 720QM processor.

Has anyone any experience with this computer and FSX? The processor seems to be the weakest link but I've been told I can't upgrade it here by the distributor.

Many thanks

Gerry

 

That prosessor is not the weakest link, as it can disable unused cores (Will show up as 8 cores in Windows) and automaticaly overclock the remaining ones.
Should run FSX with SP2 flawlessly.

Discussion about quad cores and Flight Sim X:
http://forums.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?t=161337

 

You can definitely put the 920 i7 in there, several have already done so. He told you no because if you do it the warranty will be voided. There are several authorized resellers of Asus that can do that upgrade for you and you retain the warranty. Also, getting to the processor on this laptop is very tedious!

 

Thank you for this information. I think I will go for the laptop as it is configured and consider the processor upgrade at a later date. I was looking at Alienware but much more expensive for more or less the same rig.

 

If you the 720QM isn't enough, then FSX is a horribly programmed game.

A DX9 game requiring a 1ghz processor? Am I reading this right?

http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimulatorX/product_info.html

 

Asus G73 will be more than enough...

 

Dont think the Intel Core i7 920XM is worth the price premium, so if you absolutely want to swap cpu, just take the Core i7 820QM instead.
(Dont really think its needed as 720QM is a beast. )

 

i7 mobile is the best mobile CPU on the market.
Trust me...The G73 will have no problem,weather you are on approach in a archer II or flying an downloaded u2 at 80 thousand.
BTW..the only alienware capable of matching the G73 is an M17x-R2 with twin GTX280's..at which you might as well throw the battery away,along with $3000 of your money.

 

Gerry, I'm really considering loading up my FSX and REX on my G73 just to see how it will run. If you're still interested in this, let me know and it could be the push I need. nVidia is still the better GPU for FSX though.

Q

 

FSX is a very CPU heavy game, it uses all cores, so you will be very glad to have a quad core cpu.

The i7 720QM should be enough to max it out pretty easy, it should split the game into 8 threads and use all 4 cores to there fullest.

 

Please let me share my FSX experience with you all. It's not so much about core or thread counts as clock speed. ziddy touched on it (trust me ziddy, those minimum requirements will run it very poorly), it is a horribly coded program and MS disbanded the team a while back so it's all up to the mod community and 3rd party addons. Fortunately the community is huge.

The only multicore support FSX has is an addition to the config file called "Affinity Mask" and you can set this for 1-8 cores/threads, however FSX thrives on high clock speeds more than multicores. When I use it on my i7 desktop, I run it at 4GHz and 4 cores. The first core usually pegs 100%, but the other 3 only around 50% (this is better than 1 core 100% though), so even with the affinity mask, multicore support is limited. It is also well opinionated in the community that the HT of the i7s don't help, and even hurt the performance over just using straight cores (my opinion included and that's why my affinity mask is only set for the cores while HT is disabled).

Unfortunately, I know of no way to disable HT in the i7 mobiles, so the HT could actually hurt. What the real question is is, do we set an affinity mask for the G73/mobile i7, if so, what core combo will be best or do we leave the affinity mask out and see how the i7 mobile determines the load since the turbo operation of a mobile i7 is much different than the turbo of a desktop ** i7? I know, has to be a record length question It is a curiosity of mine to see what the i7 mobile determines the load is (i.e. running 1 core 2.8GHz or the 2 core load or full 4 core load of 1.73GHz or is it just going to keep changing throughout a flight). If the load is determined to be full and runs 1.73GHz, FSX won't like this one bit because it wants clock speed and we would be counting on a wing and a prayer (pun intended ) to have the 4 cores/8 threads working awful efficient to overcome its lack of clock speed (I hold no hopes because it just isn't a multicore sim). One thing is for sure, the higher clocks of the mobile 920 will be much better than the 720.

Also, keep in mind, this isn't a game in the normal sense, it is a sim and FPS are not as important in this regard. You can fly very smooth around 15-20FPS and anyone in the FSX world will tell you to put down the FRAPS and adjust your settings based on how smooth the flight is. Granted flying 700knots 100' of the ground will be a lot different than 3 miles up when it comes to texture loading and that is really what the cpu does, load textures (you read that right, the cpu, not gpu is responsible for textures and that's why clock speed is important and an SSDs access time is also huge). This is not a GPU game/sim, but nVidia cards are still better for it than ATI. In fact, my 4GHz i7 desktop would be much better off with an 8800GTX than the 4870x2 I have in it to run FSX.

Whether Gerry is interested or not, my curiosity has now been pushed and I am going to load up FSX, REX, UTX & GEX and see what the G73 coughs up. I'll make videos and run tests with just FSX in case people only use that and not the other enhancements.

Q

** I know it's desktop talk, but it seems I've been out of the loop a little too long. I am reading about the i7-980X and they speak of TurboBoost running similar to the way mobile i7s do. This is not the way Turbo works on my initial release C0 step i7 920. All you can do on that is enable turbo in the BIOS and it will bump the your core only by your set BCLK and nothing cuts other cores off to do it like our mobile units. It appears to be time for me to get reinvolved into my desktop.

 

Hi Q
I am still very interested and would love to know how you get on with FSX on the G73.
Thanks
Gerry

 

You can use Bill2's Process Manager to disable hyper threading and / or Cores.

To compare performance on different systems, you can use the method of benchmarking Fsx in the 2nd link in my sig. That is more of a worst case scenario in my opinion, and you usually get much higher fps in game than you would do in that benchmark.

 

I developed a problem with my G73, so the FSX thing won't happen for some time, if at all.

Q

 

Sorry to hear about the fault in your system, what happened?

 

Screen went half rainbow and half odd hues, but external display works fine. My thought would be a malfunction between the connections of the GPU to screen or the screen itself.

Thanks Gerry, I imagine Asus will take care of me and I'll let you know when I get back on track.

 

Fsx prefers, and was primarily designed for 2 Cores at a higher clock rate. Even on my mobile i7, if I disable the affinity of 2 Cores, I get better results. The Turbo Boost of the mobile i7 isn't always good for games such as these either.

A higher clocked Core2Duo will also beat a lower Clocked Core2Quad in this game. They added multicore support in SP2 but it only uses an extra Core for a minor task so not much difference is made by the patch if you have a Quad.

 

Hi Guys
I really appreciate all of your input and glad I signed up to this forum. It's a bit of a learning curve for me. My current system is a five year old XPS Gen 2 with a Pentium 2.13ghz processor and a GeForce Go Ultra 6800 and 2GB Ram on Windows XP Professional. It runs FSX on DirectX 9 with pretty good frame rates and good detail but it won't run scenery add-ons very well or heavy weather.

I contacted the importer again today and we will only have the core i7 720 here with no possibility of anything higher as an option. It will also be early April before I can expect delivery. You guys don't know how lucky you are on price, it will cost me €2.500 or about 3,500USD!! So I can't afford for it not to run well!!

If anyone comes across a video or test of the G73JH and core i7 720 system with FSX running please let me know.

Thanks

Gerry

 

well u can get it for about 2500USD on ebay... from this retailer.. ships in UK in 1 day and worldwide should be in a few days...

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ASUS-G73JH-La...tZUK_Computing_Laptops_EH?hash=item4cee25fda4

about 1750 pounds + shipping... should be cheaper for u and u can get it ASAP... its the X1 version so its not as good as the A1... which should be comming next week if u can wait...

 

Thanks for that and I think I will wait for the A1, what's another week!

 

Good luck then! I have 158 days left to wait...