Starcraft 2 on G73JH

[Retired]

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)

[Retired]

I would make sure everything is up to date. I am running a G73HJ, and run all most every game on high. I bought this laptop for two main reasons. Number one if for school, because I know it has the horse power to do everything I need to do in Photoshop and programs of the same nature. Number two is to play games while I'm on vacation.

I don't know about you but about day five or six I get that itch to start getting my frag on.

[Retired]

I have the 211 bios... still having the same problems. 😕

I buy a gaming system (Asus G73JH). It comes with a Radeon card. The card does not work with the one of the BIGGEST releases of the summer... StarCraft II.

The cursor gets corrupted on a regular basis and the system lags horribly under any type of load unless you set all of the graphics settings to the LOWEST setting. Very sad for a $1500 laptop with a 1GB Radeon 5X series dedicated video card.

I am told to upgrade the driver and the BIOS. 10.07 will fix all of my problems. It makes them WORSE. The system shuts down the 2nd monitor when exiting the game and often locks up windows. The cursor corruption is stil there.

I am told to upgrade to 10.08 it fixes all of my problems. Immediately on reboot I notice the scaling on my 2nd monitor (HDMI) is screwed up. It is set to overscan. My settings are 0% for over/underscan. Every time I enter Catlyst and hit OK it goes back to normally. Reboot the system and it is screwed up again. What a joke.

I am told to upgrade. The 10.09 hot fix will fix this. It does not. Also now sometimes when I reboot the WINDOWS CURSOR is corrupted. It shows double cursors or a pixelated mess for a cursor. Sometimes the entire screen is in "double vision" with 2 screens on top of each other offset by 10 pixels in horizontally and vertically.


In 15 years of working exclusively with NVidia on all of the computers I've spec'ed out I have NEVER had this many problems or this many failed releases in a row. This is a joke. I have literally wasted hours uninstalling poorly written drivers that Radeon spits out like vomit from a newborn with a bad case of the flu.

If I could return this laptop and get something with a real video card I would. It is very sad to see that nearly a decade after my last failed Radeon experiment that the lack of quality is still there. The control panel is very amature in design. The software doesn't work. The video performance is horrible.

AMD should be embarrased to put their name on a product of this quality. I guess my only choice is to go back to the vendor-approved 10.06 release after a lengthy edit-the-registry uninstall/re-install process and put up with corrupt cursors and crappy video performance in SC II.

At least I can say with a bit of confidence "don't EVER buy Radeon products" any time I spec out a system for my business or for the hundreds of systems I spec out for my clients. I can cite specific examples of complete and utter failure and not just as an isolated incident should anyone ask. In fact I'm capturing this forum post to my PDF writer the next time a business owner asks why I recommend staying away from Radeon like the plague.

Now what to do with my crippled-but-brand-new G73JH. Guess on of my new hires will enjoy it... as long as they don't want to do any gaming. Maybe the accountant will make better use of it. 😕

The really sad part is the rest of this system seems to be well made. Why in the heck Asus would place their bets on Radeon for a top-of-the-line gaming system is beyond me. The product manager should be fired IMO. One too many corners were cut in a place that is CRITICAL to gaming performance. I have yet to meet a gamer that PREFERS Radeon over NVidia. They might put up with it but they NEVER prefer Radeon. Every single one will say "if I had the money I'd go with NVidia"... and most will save their pennies a few extra days just to make it happen.

Asus... PLEASE give us an NVidia based gaming laptop. Radeon is for my grandmother who prefers to play scrabble at Yahoo! Hey... maybe THAT is who I should send this to. Then again she might just get aggravated at the low frame rate when the other player lays down their triple-word score.

[Retired]

I have the 211 bios... still having the same problems. 😕

I buy a gaming system (Asus G73JH). It comes with a Radeon card. The card does not work with the one of the BIGGEST releases of the summer... StarCraft II.

The cursor gets corrupted on a regular basis and the system lags horribly under any type of load unless you set all of the graphics settings to the LOWEST setting. Very sad for a $1500 laptop with a 1GB Radeon 5X series dedicated video card.

I am told to upgrade the driver and the BIOS. 10.07 will fix all of my problems. It makes them WORSE. The system shuts down the 2nd monitor when exiting the game and often locks up windows. The cursor corruption is stil there.

I am told to upgrade to 10.08 it fixes all of my problems. Immediately on reboot I notice the scaling on my 2nd monitor (HDMI) is screwed up. It is set to overscan. My settings are 0% for over/underscan. Every time I enter Catlyst and hit OK it goes back to normally. Reboot the system and it is screwed up again. What a joke.

I am told to upgrade. The 10.09 hot fix will fix this. It does not. Also now sometimes when I reboot the WINDOWS CURSOR is corrupted. It shows double cursors or a pixelated mess for a cursor. Sometimes the entire screen is in "double vision" with 2 screens on top of each other offset by 10 pixels in horizontally and vertically.


In 15 years of working exclusively with NVidia on all of the computers I've spec'ed out I have NEVER had this many problems or this many failed releases in a row. This is a joke. I have literally wasted hours uninstalling poorly written drivers that Radeon spits out like vomit from a newborn with a bad case of the flu.

If I could return this laptop and get something with a real video card I would. It is very sad to see that nearly a decade after my last failed Radeon experiment that the lack of quality is still there. The control panel is very amature in design. The software doesn't work. The video performance is horrible.

AMD should be embarrased to put their name on a product of this quality. I guess my only choice is to go back to the vendor-approved 10.06 release after a lengthy edit-the-registry uninstall/re-install process and put up with corrupt cursors and crappy video performance in SC II.

At least I can say with a bit of confidence "don't EVER buy Radeon products" any time I spec out a system for my business or for the hundreds of systems I spec out for my clients. I can cite specific examples of complete and utter failure and not just as an isolated incident should anyone ask. In fact I'm capturing this forum post to my PDF writer the next time a business owner asks why I recommend staying away from Radeon like the plague.

Now what to do with my crippled-but-brand-new G73JH. Guess on of my new hires will enjoy it... as long as they don't want to do any gaming. Maybe the accountant will make better use of it. 😕

The really sad part is the rest of this system seems to be well made. Why in the heck Asus would place their bets on Radeon for a top-of-the-line gaming system is beyond me. The product manager should be fired IMO. One too many corners were cut in a place that is CRITICAL to gaming performance. I have yet to meet a gamer that PREFERS Radeon over NVidia. They might put up with it but they NEVER prefer Radeon. Every single one will say "if I had the money I'd go with NVidia"... and most will save their pennies a few extra days just to make it happen.

Asus... PLEASE give us an NVidia based gaming laptop. Radeon is for my grandmother who prefers to play scrabble at Yahoo! Hey... maybe THAT is who I should send this to. Then again she might just get aggravated at the low frame rate when the other player lays down their triple-word score.

[Roland3]

My mouse cursor also get corrupted while playing Starcraft on my Asus G73J with ATI Mobility Raedon 5870. I've tried using default pre-installed ATI Driver and swapped to 10.8 ATI Mobility Raedon Driver. Both of them didn't solve this mouse cursor corruption problem. Very frustrated. Also, it lagged for 1 sec during the game. I have no idea to fix it. Please help me. 🙂

(Plus, I am 100% sure my BIOS is updated.)

Brian@Asus, can you give us a hand?

[Chastity]

That's odd... I know several people playing that game without issue...

1) Did you ever update your DirectX?

2) If that update doesn't help, then I would suggest uninstalling 10.8, and drop back to 10.7a Hotfix.

3) You can wait for the upcoming 10.10 Mobility Release. If you want to try it now, here is a link for a beta leak.

[Roland3]

Thank you for helping me out.

I've updated my DirectX as soon as I saw your reply. Played for an hour, looked fine to me, and I told myself, finally the mouse cursor corruption problem is fixed. However, I kept playing for another hour, the mouse cursor got corrupted again. I've tried everything, uninstalled SC2, format G73JH, and reinstall Windows 7, and tried it again, the mouse cursor corruption curse still there.

[Chastity]

Only suggestion I have left is grab the latest Intel Chipset INF and run the installer with : "setup.exe -overall" commandline option.

[Retired]

Mine used to get the Mouse Cursor corruption, turns out it was caused by a Windows glitch with the Mouse Shadow setting, just disable mouse shadow. Problem solved.

[Retired]

Hey chastity, long time no talk 🙂 so we are going to see a 10.10 soon? I haven't checked notebookreview forum in some time, been super busy lately.

[Pyro411]

Honestly i can say I haven't tried SC:II yet but have seen oddities on Mass Effect 2 such as FPS dips. If I knew Asus was going to come out with the G73JW I would have waited to get that, who knows maybe there'll be a free/cheap trade in initiative started for us to trade the G73Jh for the G73Jw to see if that takes care of the issues of us here on these boards.

Not sure if it matters or is similar but there are from time to time major video lag in the latest patch of WoW and the betas of WoW Cataclysm, I'd guess the graphic engine got upgraded to that used in Starcraft II which is throwing fits with the ATI mobile cards but that's just speculation.