How's Asus Z71V Doing For You?!!! - Page 4

At the moment, 65.00% of 60 users are very satisfied (no instability) with the Acer 8100 series, 85.55% of 90 users are very satisfied with the Dell 9300 or XPS2, and 74.42% of 86 users are very satisfied (no complaints) with the Asus Z71v. (but then again, the owners of the other systems are probably not hyping their satisfaction polls or putting liks to it in their signatures either)

I just got my Z71V on thursday. This thing is awesome. I honestly don't mind the "sparkle" with the screen. The 6600 packs quite the punch, as I am able to play GTA San Andreas at 1680x1050 with no problems. Same deal with Guild Wars, smooth at 1680x1050. The only thing that really bugs me is the over-sensitivity of the touchpad. The screen is very nice outside of the sparkle, but you people must be really nitpicky if it bothers you. The build quality is outstanding too. No flex whatsoever, which is nice.

Hmm, perhaps I should draft up my own review.

Only one more vote until 100!

I love my Z71V, but I'm getting really fed up by the GPU mine has. It appears that I didn't exactly get the best engineering sample in the world, but I was okay with running it with underclocked memory.

...It just about crashed in CS:S with clocks at 250/399 earlier tonight. It's been stable at that up to this point, so I'm going to check to see if there's copious amounts of hair tomorrow (I have animals.) If removing the hair doesn't make it stable, I'm going to be seeing what there is I can do to get a replacement for my GPU.

I just don't want to do that because I'd have to give it up for a while, and I'm not far enough out of the hole that I want to risk jumping towards it.

Crashes occur with all driver versions. It's obviously a heat issue. Every clock speed above 250/399 caused crashes (within ten minutes) when I tested last week. The system arrived with a 250/500 clock. It was INITIALLY semi-stable, but it steadily lost stability. First night, I played UT2004 for quite a while with no crash. Next day, crash after ~20 minutes. Reproducable. Half-Life 2's demo crashed it after ten minutes, so I underclocked it after hearing someone say that their stock clock was 250/400.

Judging by this, though, it was STILL getting worse over that time, so it's almost certainly a bad card OR hair accumulation (I have four animals) is that severe. I'm popping the keyboard, well, as soon as I get the screwdriver for the two screws on the back and the tweezer for the keyboard latches (question: Can you take the keyboard off without removing those two screws. The two screws are, I know, supposed to be removed for memory upgrades, but are they otherwise necessary?) If I don't find a ton of hair or if the problem persists after a good ol' compressed air cleaning, I'm going to BCom and seeing what I can do.

And although I could see a driver version causing crashes or lockups, I can't see a twenty second crash followed by huge amounts of artifacting being caused by that.

Another question: Does the space below your LCD panel get extremely hot? I've noticed that mine does, even without the GPU running at full power.

A few interesting notes about the crash, though. One is that Half-Life 2 crashed it faster than any application at the original clocks, with some sessions lasting for less than three minutes before the crash (from a cold boot.) Another is that 3dmark03 NEVER crashed at 250/500 or lower. Another is that NVidia's autodetect is god awful and told me that I could hit 340/638 or something obscene like that (I wasn't stupid enough to try it.)

Practically the first thing I did was reformat. I then tried a number of things, one of which was a very minor overclock (that actually worked quite well for a while, oddly enough.)

To the best of my knowledge, they're all going strong (well, when they're not all off because the idle temps are that low.) As I said,the biggest problem I could conceive of outside of the GPU itself is hair in the intakes (spring+animals=very bad for delicate thermal balances.)

That's what I figured, but it's good to hear it again.

hmmm... since you're consistently having troubles with your GPU at stock (or below) settings, maybe you should have your reseller replace the GPU. It sounds to me like your card is at fault.

Finally ordered my Z71V late wednesday night, so hopefully i'll have that baby in hand within a few days so I can vote for the "rock solid" option.

Pretty nice, but I'm disappointed in the battery life.
I'm not a big fan of widescreen laptops. It won't fit in my favorite laptop bag, and I lose 3/4" of vertical screen size over a straight 15" display, which is almost painful at that resolution. The choices were close, but the deciding factor was the advertised 4-6 hr battery life.
I did a test, with the unit in Battery Saving mode and the wireless card disabled, doing nothing but web surfing (no DVD/CD activity) with a hard-wired ethernet connection, and it lasted almost exactly 3 hrs.
I didn't expect to get the advertised time, but I was hoping to at least approach the low end.
Asuz Z71V
1.86 Ghz
512M RAM
60G 7200RPM HD

So far so good for my Z71V.

The battery life is just fine for my uses. I'm rarely more than an hour or two away from AC power. The performance is excellent. Doom3 on high quality and very fast. This is my first laptop and I'm still adjusting to the keyboard and touch pad. The wireless is a nice feature and allows me to move from room to room in the house, something I've wanted to be able to do for a long time.

The display is quite nice, although I'd probably prefer one of the glossy higher glare screens. My wife says the Z71V screen is excellent. Overall I'm pretty happy. Some issues in game play so far with wierd keyboard/touch pad behaviour, but perhaps I need to tweak some settings somewhere.

just wanted to say.. after researching.. www.mwave.com is alot cheaper than istnc, geared2play, proportable, and discountlaptops / chembook 2371. when I mean alot.. i mean at least $100.. even to those in california who have to pay sales tax.. it still ends up being cheaper. the only down side is that the options aren't as much as say geared2play.. however the price advantage weighs heavily in their favor.. i hope they release a Z70V too!!