- last edited on by
ROGBot
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/
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/
Sorry for spamming so much, but somewhere in the middle of this might be a way for y'all to fire a real RMA with a chance for success.
So, my first RMA got back with an explanation of that 10dB manufacture tolerancy for coil-whine. Ok, then, let's try to measure it. I closed my windows, waited for quiet night moment and tried to measure the noise by a phone app. It's not precise, I know, but at least we have something orientational. Unfortunatelly this is what I've got:
Problem with this is that this number is not caused by the laptop whine, but by low-frequency ambient crap of the city I live in, which is very well present even when I close my windows.
So, I recorded the coil whine again. Here:
...took the sound of it and run it through a frequency analyser. Just to see exactly what's going on. (freq. tilt set on 0db/oct)
Now, peaks I've hilighted by blue are the low-frequency city noise that causes that 30dB reading. Frequences highlited by red are the coil whine. The difference of amplitude between those two is not even a 5db. So, if the app measurement at least resembles the truth and my room actually is dipped in 30dB of ambience crap, then this coil-whine has a potential to go upto 25dB. That's defintely not a 10dB.
Also, 4kHz is reeeeallyyyy high. Look at this. That graph shows you how much of actual loudness your ear needs throughout the spectrum to achieve preception of all of the frequencies being equally loud. (Hence the name equal-loudness curves.) See how little you need of that 4kHz region to appear as loud as the bass region? Ear is simply much more sensitive to frequencies between 2 and 5kHz. I'm not making this up. This is actual psycho-acoustic thing. That is the reason, why that coil-whine is so annoying even when it's relatively quiet.
I've summed this whole thing into a nice little document that goes out in next few days with my second RMA. I'll let you know what will be their reaction. But if they agree it's a reason for money-back, I think few of you might use similar reasoning to get something better after CES.
...and if they try to argue by decibells again, I'll be more than happy to borrow a calibrated noise meter and a flat measuring mic to get the exact numbers. They promised that money-back has a high chance of success in my case, but still. They simply bumped into a wrong guy with this coil-whine issue. Period. Hope it helps a bit in your cases too, guys.
Best of luck to 2019! 🙂
So, my first RMA got back with an explanation of that 10dB manufacture tolerancy for coil-whine. Ok, then, let's try to measure it. I closed my windows, waited for quiet night moment and tried to measure the noise by a phone app. It's not precise, I know, but at least we have something orientational. Unfortunatelly this is what I've got:
Problem with this is that this number is not caused by the laptop whine, but by low-frequency ambient crap of the city I live in, which is very well present even when I close my windows.
So, I recorded the coil whine again. Here:
...took the sound of it and run it through a frequency analyser. Just to see exactly what's going on. (freq. tilt set on 0db/oct)
Now, peaks I've hilighted by blue are the low-frequency city noise that causes that 30dB reading. Frequences highlited by red are the coil whine. The difference of amplitude between those two is not even a 5db. So, if the app measurement at least resembles the truth and my room actually is dipped in 30dB of ambience crap, then this coil-whine has a potential to go upto 25dB. That's defintely not a 10dB.
Also, 4kHz is reeeeallyyyy high. Look at this. That graph shows you how much of actual loudness your ear needs throughout the spectrum to achieve preception of all of the frequencies being equally loud. (Hence the name equal-loudness curves.) See how little you need of that 4kHz region to appear as loud as the bass region? Ear is simply much more sensitive to frequencies between 2 and 5kHz. I'm not making this up. This is actual psycho-acoustic thing. That is the reason, why that coil-whine is so annoying even when it's relatively quiet.
I've summed this whole thing into a nice little document that goes out in next few days with my second RMA. I'll let you know what will be their reaction. But if they agree it's a reason for money-back, I think few of you might use similar reasoning to get something better after CES.
...and if they try to argue by decibells again, I'll be more than happy to borrow a calibrated noise meter and a flat measuring mic to get the exact numbers. They promised that money-back has a high chance of success in my case, but still. They simply bumped into a wrong guy with this coil-whine issue. Period. Hope it helps a bit in your cases too, guys.
Best of luck to 2019! 🙂
FarleyCZ wrote:
Sorry for spamming so much, but somewhere in the middle of this might be a way for y'all to fire a real RMA with a chance for success.
So, my first RMA got back with an explanation of that 10dB manufacture tolerancy for coil-whine. Ok, then, let's try to measure it. I closed my windows, waited for quiet night moment and tried to measure the noise by a phone app. It's not precise, I know, but at least we have something orientational. Unfortunatelly this is what I've got:
Problem with this is that this number is not caused by the laptop whine, but by low-frequency ambient crap of the city I live in, which is very well present even when I close my windows.
So, I recorded the coil whine again. Here:
...took the sound of it and run it through a frequency analyser. Just to see exactly what's going on. (freq. tilt set on 0db/oct)
Now, peaks I've hilighted by blue are the low-frequency city noise that causes that 30dB reading. Frequences highlited by red are the coil whine. The difference of amplitude between those two is not even a 5db. So, if the app measurement at least resembles the truth and my room actually is dipped in 30dB of ambience crap, then this coil-whine has a potential to go upto 25dB. That's defintely not a 10dB.
Also, 4kHz is reeeeallyyyy high. Look at this. That graph shows you how much of actual loudness your ear needs throughout the spectrum to achieve preception of all of the frequencies being equally loud. (Hence the name equal-loudness curves.) See how little you need of that 4kHz region to appear as loud as the bass region? Ear is simply much more sensitive to frequencies between 2 and 5kHz. I'm not making this up. This is actual psycho-acoustic thing. That is the reason, why that coil-whine is so annoying even when it's relatively quiet.
I've summed this whole thing into a nice little document that goes out in next few days with my second RMA. I'll let you know what will be their reaction. But if they agree it's a reason for money-back, I think few of you might use similar reasoning to get something better after CES.
...and if they try to argue by decibells again, I'll be more than happy to borrow a calibrated noise meter and a flat measuring mic to get the exact numbers. They promised that money-back has a high chance of success in my case, but still. They simply bumped into a wrong guy with this coil-whine issue. Period. Hope it helps a bit in your cases too, guys.
Best of luck to 2019! 🙂
Thank you very much for posting your research!
