G74Sx General Questions

[KylePmore]

Hi, I have owned my G74Sx for about a year now. I have loved every bit of it except when I tried Windows 8 in January, never again. I have upgraded it to 12gb of RAM and my primary hard drive is a 120gb HDD While having my original main in the 2nd slot. So I have some general questions.

1. What is the best way to dust my fans?
I have pondered this one for a while. It seems I can not get to the fans just by removing a few screws. Am I stuck to using a can of duster? I mean it has been a year and there has to be massive amounts of dust slowing the fans down.

2. What are some easy ways to boost performance?
I know this thing isn't going to last forever. But when that time comes for the processor and GPU become out of date, I would like to know how to boost the performance of both without overheating.

3. Has anyone ever used xsplit broadcaster to stream to sites like Twitch.tv for their gaming?
I am thinking about coming a daily streamer. I have streamed before but I would like to ramp up the time of my streaming. For example, I normally stream at a 1600x900 resolution at 900kb/s Give or take another 100 for audio at a 30fps rate. If I stream for oh say, 6 hours a day will I see my CPU and GPU begin to fail sooner?

Thank you guys so much for reading! I wish you all well and I certainly wish Asus and RoG well! I will continue to by RoG products for a long, long time. ❤️

[ScottinSoCal]

1. There's a sticky at the top for how to dismantle the G74SX, that's the only way to get to the heat sinks for the computer. It isn't a small thing, and you shouldn't attempt it unless you're confident.

2. Increasing your RAM and going to an SSD is the easiest way to increase performance.

3. On/off cycles (and the associated thermal cycle stress) are the primary cause of failure in electronics assemblies. I worked in IT for nearly 20 years, and I've seen servers that ran continuously for years without a problem. They were never turned off, and they ran on a large UPS so they weren't affected by power outages, spikes or brownouts. As long as you're not overheating your system, running it longer won't cause failure any faster. Just keep an eye on your temps.

[G74sxpoo]

I have 16Gb and the increase was not very noticeable over 8Gb.

Get an 250Gb SSD for the C:\ drive and run the OS and your main apps off that, use D:\ for data lesser used apps.