Well it turns out that the "top of the line gaming laptop" cannot play Starcraft 2 properly.
If you use anything but the lowest settings the game will randomly lag & often kill all video going to a completely black screen. Twice now the game has hung in a video loop.
I started with the built-in Radeon Catalyst drivers. Windows 7 reported a Windows Experience Index of 2.0. Yeah TWO. As in complete junk. Why? Video rating for 3D and games was a 2.0. When running Starcraft 2 it simply stated "card not supported" and defaults to 1024x768 resolution and lowest video settings. If you set it to 1920x1080 and cranked up to even medium settings the video lagged horribly.
I upgraded to the latest ATI Radeon driver from the ATI website, version 10.07. Starcraft 2 stopped lagging and became ALMOST usable. However, after a few minutes of play the audio started looping and I got a black screen. NOTHING worked. No keyboard input, mouse input, power input, LCD keys, NOTHING. I had to do a hard power off after 20 minutes of listening to a horrible audio loop.
Second attempt at medium video settings and the system started lagging a little, but still got into this audio loop problem.
This is *NOT* a Starcraft 2 problem. I've been playing it fine on my Sony Vaio VGN-AR890U for a month now. It runs no lag on a NVidia mobile card with only 512MB of video RAM.
This is horrible for a laptop advertised as a "top notch gaming laptop". In fact this statement can't be further from the truth:
"Visuals look awesome on the 17.3” full HD screen, and made even better by the ATI Mobility™ Radeon® HD5870 with 1GB GDDR5 – an overkill GPU taking notebook gaming beyond the edge so you no longer have to switch graphic details off in options menus." (
http://rog.asus.com/Product.aspx?PId=32)
