How's ASUS Z70va Doing For All of Ya'll?!?!?

Yeah, I too am thinking of getting the Z70VA. My specs are going to be:

P-M (750) 1.86Ghz
1Gb DDR2 (1x1Gb)
40Gb 7200 RPM
YES bluetooth
X700 128mb

I'm still deciding on the 750 vs 760. Hard to decide if I should splurge and get the extra processing speed.

Hey.. thanks to this forum, I also made the switch and ordered myself the Z70va last night from ISTNC. Expecting to receive it next week hopefully. I can't wait.

Here are the specs:
Intel P-M 760 2.0GHz
1GB DDR2 4200 RAM
100GB Seagate 5400RPM HD
Internal Bluetooth
ATi x700 128MB
Intel 2915 wireless 802.11 a/b/g card
DVD-RW

Got mine Sept 8th and have a few minor complaints about mine.

First, Fan noise was an issue without tweaking. The CPU fan is fine, when idle and doing light tasks, that fan will rarely ramp up loud enough to be heard. However, on default Powerplay settings the video card is set on Max Performance on AC which causes the video card fan to ramp up shortly after boot to exhaust the heat even when the laptop has been idle doing nothing. Users who don't fiddle around with ATI's Control Panel or Catalyst Control Centre to adjust Powerplay may find this unacceptable.

Even with Powerplay set on Optimal Battery to underclock the video card, when the laptop is idle on a desk or flat surface, occassionally the fan will ramp up for nearly a minute to cool the card.

I monitored the temperatures using the Everest and Speedfan and found the video card fan is off till the GPU reaches ~58-59 C where the fan comes on and spins at ~2400rpm until the temp falls back down to ~51 C. While not too loud, it just seems out of place when the laptop isn't doing anything graphically intensive and the fan comes on.

With speedfan, I tested what would happen if I forced the fan not to come on. The GPU temp stabilized at 70 C, which ain't overly high, but then Asus probably had a good reason to want to keep the temp below 60 C.

Currently, what I'm doing is manually setting the fan to 35% through Speedfan. At this setting, the video card fan is very quiet, basically inaudible in most daytime environments. This also keeps the GPU temp in the mid 50's when not doing anything graphically intensive.

Second, when using the laptop on my lap/legs while wearing shorts, there's a small hard plastic foot on the bottom far right (near my right knee) that digs into the skin. This was on the second or third day of class with my laptop and I found myself shifting my leg so the plastic would dig into different areas. This however isn't a problem when I'm wearing jeans.

Third, the keyboard for the most part is good (no flexing) but there are a few things with it. Several times I've had my fingertips snag on the bottom of keys while typing. It doesn't happen much, but often enough that I can't dismiss it. Also, the larger the key is the louder they are when pressed. The letters are very quiet but the space bar isn't. When typing quickly during class, the space bar almost sounds like i'm using it to tap the beat of a song fast paced song.

hmmm... so far mostly "what are they thinking?"... interesting.

Hi
So you found that the 1.5mm platic foot does not agree with your leg. Hmm. Interesting. Have not heard that one mentioned yet but it is there.

I like it. No complaints. Exactly how I expected it. When you expect the fan to be on it is and when you don't its not. So far I couldn't be happier with it.

It rocks

I had low expectations(I did come from a ThinkPad t21 and a Latitude ls400) so it went great.

Basically, my z70va tripled in spec's from m previous computers lol

First computer with a dedicated GPU mind you

What type of peripherals are available for use with the integrated bluetooth?? Is it useful and forth spending the extra money on??

EDIT: When you include Artic Silver 5 on the online order do they apply it for you?

Welcome to the light my friend.

I love mine too so far. No problems with it at all yet. It's everything I expected it to be. CS:S runs beautifully at 1680x1050, no dead pixels, everything works that I plug into it, and battery lasts over 3 hours with undervolting. It's quiet, sexy, powerful, thin, light, and built solidly.

Doesn't get much better than that.

watching things on this thing is really fun. it works great and I haven't had any problems with it (except that I loaded the wrong video drivers and fudged it up). Well, only good news. Good luck on the mofo shiz.

For those who voted and stated complete satisfaction....gratulations to you all.

As for me, my fate was not to be a long time owner of the z70va.

I love it. It's replaced my desktop, and is also great for school. A great balance between gaming DTR and portability. The fan noise doesn't bug me at all. As someone said earlier, it's only on when you would expect it to be. The pin mod worked great, so I'm getting 2.13GHz out of a 1.6GHz processor Battery life is great too.

Z70Va is the 4th generation of Asus M6 model, M6Ne-R9600, M6Ne-R9700, and Z70V-X600, Z70Va-X700.
I did hear a little bit more complaint about Z70Va than his 3 older brothers.

These are from our customers:
1. optical drive complaint;
2. heard 2 complaints about LCD;
3. 2 customers mentioned network cable jammed;
4. some noisy fan complaint;
5. some heat complaint.

Because most of these customers just grabbed the laptop and headed to schools, not yet back. I think in couple of weeks, when they have a chance to come back, we will know these problem better.

The enlarged Z70Va--Z83V will be available next week, let's wait and see this brand new model.

So far i am happy with my new z70va. After undervolting, heat doesnt seems to be a problem (61c max temp at full load using cpu burn).
About the fan noise, you can hear the fan in a quiet room but realy its not that bad (imho) i am going to use this laptop for taking notes in class and im not worried at all about the noise.
Ive discovered that the everest monitoring program and ati control panel are imcompatible (on my system)several crash becose of this but right now everything seems to be perfect (after desinstalling the culprit).

Jean

BTW i ordered my lappy from Canadasys and i must say i am impress .
I can only recommand this store from Canada.

The network cable jammed problem has nothing to do with the laptop, just a poorly made cable, problem already solved.

Interesting.....

I love mine. It was absolutely worth the wait. I accidently blemished the palm-rest with my wrist-watch and I nearly cried.

The fan doesn't bother me at all, even though it does climb up there. I have yet to tweak ANYTHING, however, so things should get much better. The heat is nice up here in the mountains. I've used much hotter laptops before, and I have cold hands (and knees) as it is... so the warm palm-rest and keys are great for me.

I noticed that the fan problem was completely gone without vid drivers installed. This makes me believe that if I needed absolute quiet, I could always turn off hardware accel. and be done with it.

Playing Half-Life 2 at the native res is nice, so far. I can't hit 2xAA with good frames yet, but after my tweak job I'm sure I'll figure something out.

The screen isn't as nice as the Z63a, but it's great for a matte. I have no complaints on that front.

Hmm I am interested to hear from those who voted the Z70va as a piece of junk, their opinion heheh