Asus ROG Strix GL503GE SCAR - wrong ram slot, coil whine, fans a bit loud

[vacs]

Hi,

I want to share my experience with this notebook to see if others have the same issues and maybe Asus would address the CPU issue with a bios update. I already filed a RMA to my seller and now waiting for them to aprove it, but I still want to share this.

I bought the notebook yesterday, installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 Pro 1803, downloaded and installed all drivers from the official website and then updated Windows until no updates were avaible. Also I installed Chrome, Aida64 and nothing else and these are my problem:.

1. The notebook comes with a single 8GB ram stick which should be somewhere on the motherboard and not accessible through the ram and ssd expansion bay so that the other ram slot in the extention bay would be empty and when you decide to upgrade the ram you won't have to dissasembly the whole notebook and lose warranty (image attached). BTW on all youtube videos their slot was empty.

2. The notebook makes a scratchy noise almost the whole time while connected to the charger. The only time it doesn't is when you're in the bios, or not doing anyting (not even moving the mouse). I attached a video to see that I opened just chrome and that the noise appears as soon as I move the mouse. The system load varies from 4 do 13% so that's means no background proccesses are causing additional load, and even if they where a notebook this price range ($1350) should not make this noise as I had ROG notebooks before and none of them made any other noise than the normal ones produced by fans and hdd's.

3. When I run Aida64 I see that my CPU clock is always between 3.8 and 4.1GHz, when I start the stress test the clock goes down to the base 2.2GHz clock which is not normal, it should be the other way around.

4. After installing all the drivers from the link below one device remains „unknown“ so when I run windows update it downloads something called „asus – firmware...“ (I don't remember the whole name). After rebooting it updates my bios to v306 even if the last version on asus official website is v303. I thought that this bios caused the cpu clock issue as there must be a reason asus pulled back the v306 so I performed a downgrade to v303 but the issue remained. It's weird that windows would do a bios update as I never seen this before.

https://www.asus.com/us/Laptops/ROG-Strix-GL503/HelpDesk_Download/

[vacs]

meddylad wrote:
I found the constant fan on my GL703GM was caused by the Asus Lighting Service (what makes the colours on the keyboard). Disable this service and see if it makes a difference as my fans are often off until needed

This worked whilst using throttlestop and having the Speed Shift setting at 128 with undervolt of -0.125v (no other settings touched). YMMV

tnx for the advice, unfortunately I don't have the Asus Lighting Service installed, just the Asus Aura Core Service. I'll try removing it later today.

edit: tried and it didn't help

[ahrnes]

So did anyone find final solution to this issue?

[helix400]

Which issue? This one has covered many of them?

[ahrnes]

the max clock issue ,
My CPU is always STATIC on MAX , before disabling "Processor Performance Boost Mode" it was 3600s STATIC , after disabling it is 2186 MHz STATIC

RAM is also static at 2654 MHz

[vacs]

ahrnes wrote:
the max clock issue ,
My CPU is always STATIC on MAX , before disabling "Processor Performance Boost Mode" it was 3600s STATIC , after disabling it is 2186 MHz STATIC

RAM is also static at 2654 MHz

I just changed windows power mode from high performance to balanced

[FarleyCZ]

Brand new GL503GE here, same problem with coil whine. C1E hacks helps, but it essentialy kills idle powersaving on the laptop. I don't like that. Coffee Lake was supposed to be good at powersaving.

Also I have a new bit of information: My colleague bought GL503VD (Kaby Lake i7, gtx1050) few months back and he's not reporting any sounds at all. So there is either something wrong with Coffee Lake (and/or gtx1050ti) implementation on this motherboard, or it's a random issue. That gives me some hope.

I'm also bummed the same way Vacs was about the extention RAM slot. The extension deck was the single thing that got me to buy this laptop instead of similarly priced MSI laptop with a slightly better specs. I also bought some upgrades right away to take advantage of it.

Aaanyway. It's going for it's first RMA tomorrow here in Czech Republic. Guy on the hotline was super cool, Asus has pickup service here, so fingers crossed.

[FULLMETALJACKET]

FarleyCZ wrote:
Brand new GL503GE here, same problem with coil whine. C1E hacks helps, but it essentialy kills idle powersaving on the laptop. I don't like that. Coffee Lake was supposed to be good at powersaving.

Also I have a new bit of information: My colleague bought GL503VD (Kaby Lake i7, gtx1050) few months back and he's not reporting any sounds at all. So there is either something wrong with Coffee Lake (and/or gtx1050ti) implementation on this motherboard, or it's a random issue. That gives me some hope.

I'm also bummed the same way Vacs was about the extention RAM slot. The extension deck was the single thing that got me to buy this laptop instead of similarly priced MSI laptop with a slightly better specs. I also bought some upgrades right away to take advantage of it.

Aaanyway. It's going for it's first RMA tomorrow here in Czech Republic. Guy on the hotline was super cool, Asus has pickup service here, so fingers crossed.

Some people can't hear coil whine because of "bad" hearing. It's a very high pitched noise and most people don't even notice it. Same goes for the high pitched noise CRT tv's used to produce.
My wife can't hear the coil whine on my GL502VSK, and it's kind of loud, while I can clearly hear it. *Your friend's laptop probably also have the same coil whine issue but he can't hear it. Good for him I guess lol

[FarleyCZ]

FULLMETALJACKET7 wrote:
Some people can't hear coil whine because of "bad" hearing. It's a very high pitched noise and most people don't even notice it. Same goes for the high pitched noise CRT tv's used to produce.
My wife can't hear the coil whine on my GL502VSK, and it's kind of loud, while I can clearly hear it. *Your friend's laptop probably also have the same coil whine issue but he can't hear it. Good for him I guess lol

I don't think that's the case to be honest. Hearing loss means you can't hear very high pitched frequencies. Like above 16kHz. Or 12kHz if it's really bad. Either his coil whine is on different frequency, or it's not there at all. My coil whine (and coil whine from other gl503ge's in YT videos) is not even 8kHz. It's high pitched, yes, but not that high pitched. 2 - 5kHz region I'd say. Hearing loss usually doesn't go that "low".

Your coil whine is probably much higher than the one on my laptop. (Sorry to hear that, very high frequencies are painful.)

(I'm TV broadcast sound engineer, I dare to say I know a thing or two about frequenies.)

[vacs]

bump

[r-rig]

I have the same problem with GL503GE, a problem that I recently knew was named "coil whine".