This is an amazing discovery, article, and fix proposal. Fantastic work, very impressive and also very instructive on how things work on modern PCs and how far you can actually dig to get at stuff that is "supposed" to be hidden.
As someone who has written embedded firmware for many years (not for PCs), I can only dream of an end user being this capable to discover a bug. I want to live in the world where Asus immediately send an e-mail offering some kind of short-term contracting work to fly in and talk to their firmware people for a few days and get $FIVE_FIGURES or something, and leave with an updated laptop running their new production BIOS.
Obviously this bug has gone un-fixed for four years so that is not the world we're in. That makes me sad. :|
The technical RCA is fascinating, but im also interested in the business processes RCA.
- this sounds ubiquitous and reproducible. How did this not get fed back through tech support/RMA channels? Was there so little evidence that it wasn't correlateable, or did ASUS look and arrive at an incorrect conclusion, eg batch of bad silicon? Could it be that they had plentiful evidence and were negligent or incompetent?
- it sounds like this is plainly evident when using the machine. What is the QA process? This should not have been possible to miss?
- now that they know, what will they do?
Imo, the ceo calculus here is clear. If you're a luxury good with elastic demand, you fix the issue and fix the perception (two separate things). Multi-year, multifaceted issues like this have the potential to ruin a brand. I've bought ROG in the past, and I'm inclined to never do so again.
EDIT: on further reflection, the firmware bug itself is pretty troubling. the other bugs i get - hardware assumptions were changed, or good code was reused that didnt know or support the gpu mux, i see how those errors comes about. the method sleeping an interrupt... is awful? how did that get reviewed? what is that firmware test suite?
It doesn’t matter that the consumer/gamer laptop is a piece of shit, because all of the competitors are too. Consumer hardware is a volume business, and the actual end-user experience matters very little compared to endorsement deals and marketing strategies.
Every one of the affected ASUS laptops probably got a glowing 5/5 review from the usual suspects, and consumers have little hope of getting a fair deal
> What is the QA process? This should not have been possible to miss?
Have you used consumer goods [or virtually anything] from the last couple decades? By and large, nobody cares. Look at the timeline here; clearly nobody cares.
I imagine the signal to noise ratio of "my laptop is slow" is pretty bad, knowing how many non-techies I've helped with their computer to see some variation of malware, incredible amount of installed and running programs, disks sitting at 99% capcity etc....
Yeah. ACPI's AML bytecode is sort of a mixed blessing. It allows for reverse engineering and end user analasys/fixing of bugs like this.
It's also just a terrible disaster of a programming environment, with a very large (terrifyingly so, given the limited capability) interpreter that needs to live at the highest privilege level of the kernel.
And it's generally used like a hatchet by system integrators for tricks like this, with pretty much exactly the code quality you'd expect. Almost always the path to writing a Linux driver for some oddball laptop subsystem starts with "throw away the ACPI stuff".
As far as I know there are three ACPI AML stacks, the reference intel one, linux uses this, miscrosoft has one, and those crazy hackers over at the openbsd project decided to make their own.
As a user and programmer, I can only dream of being this knowledgeable about things. There's a ton of domain knowledge embedded in the article, it's pretty amazing.
I managed to reverse engineer a lot of my laptop's features but hit a wall when it came to this ACPI stuff. I dumped the tables and decompiled the code but all I got was stub code. I wanted to be the guy who wrote the Linux drivers for his own laptop but I just didn't manage it. Massive respect for anyone who can do this.
Yeah the best way to go is to buy Linux preinstalled and supported. Though, as with Windows in this case, that still won't save you if the system integration and firmware teams don't do their job.
Yeah, sorry, that was a bit unclear. I just meant that the article went as far as propose rather clearly what is needed to fix the issue ("don't sleep() in an interrupt service routine").
Impressive that they managed to ship crippling stuttering for 4 years in gaming laptops specifically. Makes you wonder about the end user psychology, evidently they didn't get a show stopping rate of product returns.
A quote from one of the linked reddit threads. I wonder if the warranty trip is part of their scheme.
"I did everything you suggested , but nothing changed. I send it back via garante. I am curious what they do whit it."
"what was it at the end? did they respond?"
"They have claimed that the plato works perfectly. So basically i just got use to it. I am using bluetooth earbuds all the time so i cant notice the problems."
I've owned 2 gaming laptops in my lifetime and both had similar issues that were never fixed.
One was the first gen Alienware M17 with two GTX 270M GPUs (yes two) and an onboard nvidia GPU whose specific model I can't remember. That one suffered from stutters and audio crackling, etc. It was sort of fixed by disabling SLI and the onboard GPU and sticking to a specific driver that was modded, the driver was by someone on the notebookcheck forums IIRC. Later on I think it got somewhat patched with a bios update that let you use SLI without the stutters, but I think the laptop reached EOL without it being fully fixed.
The second was an ROG ASUS laptop with a GTX 460m (I can't recall the laptop model). Pretty much the same story as the OP but I didn't have the knowhow to go deep into the ACPI code. The only change from the story is that latencymon kept attributing the latency spikes to multiple dlls, sometimes it was some wifi driver, other times it was an nvidia one. I don't remember the full fix for that one, but it involved me changing the wifi card and disabling the dGPU (not the onboard one) when I was not gaming so I could watch videos and such without it crackling. Funnily enough it didn't crackle much when actually playing games (it still happened, just very rarely).
I stopped buying gaming laptops after that. Seeing this story makes me think things haven't changed one bit.
I am frequently asked for hardware purchasing advice by family and friends. Starting around 2017 or 2018, if asked to recommend a "gaming" laptop, I have refused. I never had a good experience myself, and more often than not, what I had recommended over the previous years ended up flawed or outright broken. Across every OEM and brand. I tell them to settle for a professional/business SKU with a low-tier dedicated GPU, or give up on laptop gaming entirely. Is it worth the money to pay a "business" premium for a weaker system? No, and I'll tell them that. It's not a good deal in on-paper-dollar-for-performance terms. But at least there's a chance that all of the components function and are supported!
What use is a "good price", when what you get is a quality and support minefield?
I've owned two gaming laptops and never had issues like this.
First one was a Clevo (rebranded as Medion) with a GTX 970m that I bought in 2017. An absolute beast, I lugged it in a backpack around the world for 4 years, including to places you really shouldn't bring a laptop like beaches and rainforests. I passed it my girlfriend's nephew and it is still going strong and being used every day. I repasted once in that time.
My current laptop is an MSI GE66 with an RTX 3070m bought in 2022. It's loud, I've repasted recently because it started overheating. It had some problems with the screen connector which they fixed under warranty fairly quickly. But aside from that it's solid.
One thing about both of these laptops - they are very easy to open and it looks like I could repair/replace pretty much every removable component easily. No glue.
The only thing I consider a real problem is the MSI fan noise. Well, that and the power brick which is the size of a literal brick.
I can tell you how I got duped into buying their product - a Zephyrus G14:
ASUS at the time had an exclusive deal with AMD to ship their Ryzen 4xxxHS line.
Initially it worked fine, but two years later performance was already much worse and dominated by thermal throttling. Repasting, though necessary due to the state of the paste, only helped partially.
I still don't know the root cause of the issue, but I investigated declining battery performance and it turned out that the iGPU was going full throttle at all times. Setting the dGPU as the preferred device actually improved battery life somewhat.
When mechanical failures started accumulating I switched to a FW16 and never looked back. I don't care what gaming laptop manufacturers have on offer and for how little if I can't buy having them give a shit about their products and customers.
I bought a Clevo-based gaming laptop for programming because it had a good CPU. It was a really bad decision.
It will thermal throttle itself to uselessness within seconds of a load being placed on it. The dGPU idles at about 15 W, the entire power budget of a single board computer, and it's one of those problematic nvidia GPUs that will never be properly supported on Linux. The Windows app that controlled things like fans and keyboard LEDs was so obnoxiously bad they required over one minute to show a window on the screen, reverse engineering that thing was one of the best things I've ever done. Mercifully the firmware wasn't broken by default but I still didn't manage to reverse engineer the ACPI nonsense, I dumped the tables and decompiled the code but there was nothing useful.
Looks like Apple has a monopoly on good taste and giving half a shit about the quality of the products they sell. I wish the Apple silicon macbooks existed at the time.
This flaw only happens in Ultimate mode, when the user explicitly tells the mux to switch to the discrete GPU. This is an extra feature only users who primarily use the laptop for gaming with an external display care about.
The laptop works fine in Optimus mode even with external displays, you just lost a bit of performance and you're missing out on some display features like G-Sync. So it is highly likely that most users always use the laptop in Optimus mode. If you primarily use the laptop as a laptop you probably wouldn't even know the mux feature existed.
The problem is Asus shipping extra features in their hardware that are not properly QA tested. It looks like they only thoroughly tested the golden path.
Asus doesn't even test basic features, nevermind the extra ones. I have the 2017 Zephyrus GX501, which came with a Nvidia GTX 1080 which introduced HDMI 2.0 support. The Asus Zephyrus marketing material is boasting about HDMI 2.0 capability, the manual talks about HDMI 2.0 etc. However, in reality the device is limited to HDMI 1.4 bandwidth.
The problem isn't limited to some units, there was plenty of discussion online of this issue at the time of release. [1]
Asus never recalled, fixed, or even responded to the issue. Indeed, even the marketing page [2] still talks about how you can use HDMI 2.0 to connect 4K TVs at 60Hz.
It was also an interesting showcase of laptop reviewer incompetence. All the reviews just regurgitated Asus marketing material on how it has HDMI 2.0, but apparently nobody actually tested it.
Seems to me this can't be concluded from the information at hand. This investigation used the mode, but the linked reddit posts I read complaining about ACPI latencies reportedby latencymon don't mention it.
I don't know if anyone cares, is the problem. I used to have a £7000 Dell workstation laptop, specced to the moon - i9, 3080Ti, 128GB of ram.....that kind of thing.
The laptop was absolutely useless at playing games, because it would throttle itself thermally after about 30 seconds. Which was ironic given that I used to work at a games development company and the ability to play games was actually a core feature of the product. I then used to have a Razer Blade 15 which wasn't as bad but would also eventually start throttling hard - just inadequate cooling imho.
Funnily enough I have a much cheaper MSI gaming laptop now with an i7 and a 3070Ti and that never throttles, I can run games without it slowing down. But clearly the cooling system in it is massively overbuilt, which is great.
> I have a much cheaper MSI gaming laptop ... that never throttles, I can run games without it slowing down. But clearly the cooling system in it is massively overbuilt
Maybe they learned their lesson. I had an MSI gaming laptop a while back, and it ran horribly, I never realised until long after it was possible for me to return it, that it was just poorly designed, and could never run beyond ~50% of its gaming performance. Within minutes of starting a game it would be thermally throttled and that was that; it also sounded like it was about to take off, to the point you could barely drown it out with headphones.
My 2013 Macbook also had a display mux that switched the laptop display itself between the integrated and discrete GPU. In some cases it would fail to properly switch the display over causing it to remain permanently off until the next reboot. I was not the only Macbook user with the problem.
Apple is just as guilty for shipping laptops with hardware issues that you just have to work around. And unlike this Asus issue the Macbook mux was on by default. You had to turn it off in the settings if you wanted to entirely avoid the issue and then you would have no way of using the discrete GPU.
As if Apple land was free of issues, remember those wonderful keyboards, Snow Leopard, Tahoe among many other examples, or any Linux laptop for that matter.
Gaming laptop market feels like the most exploitative segment of entire laptop market to me.
They're like four-seater off-road motorcycles. You have to NOT understand how sketchy that concept is to consider one. The engineers has to know that they're guilty to be involved in it.
What's sad is that a lot of buyers are falling for it from the presumption that laptops are the most standard and regular type of computers. But I guess there's little we could do about it.
Apparently this happens only if you set the laptop to discrete GPU only mode, which most people won't do.
However, this is not the only problem with Asus bioses. My daughter has one and it randomly locks up if you add an extra SSD, sooner or later depending on the SSD. You'll blame the SSD's firmware, but the most locking one was one that I have in two desktops with no problems...
This makes sense, but what does not make sense is who tested this 'ultimate mode', I mean they went to the trouble of adding a physical hardware switch on the motherboard for this, surely when testing there was some kind of benchmark or comparison to show this feature was an advantage. Maybe they don't test, or they have 'internal firmware' that is not what the user gets, but it's a serious fail either way.
> Impressive that they managed to ship crippling stuttering for 4 years in gaming laptops specifically. Makes you wonder about the end user psychology, evidently they didn't get a show stopping rate of product returns
It's a gaming laptop. If you're playing any game released in the past 5 years, odds are you're getting constant stutters anyway due to Unreal Engine 5. And Windows 11 is a slow, bloated mess, too, so that covers stutters outside of games.
For most end users, and especially gamers, stuttering and overall bad performance is just the new normal that they've come to accept and even embrace. The recent success of Borderlands 4, a game that struggles to run smoothly on the best and most expensive hardware available today, is just the latest and best proof of this. If you complain about it, you'll be called poor for not owning a $3000 GPU and/or a luddite for not wanting to play at 720p 30fps AI-upscaled to 4K 300fps.
So what should user do before byuing? Reasonably it might search for "<modelname> reviews". Such reviews include a number of throughput tests but they never test for latency.
This might be a culture issue. At least we should push for popular benchmark solutions to include latency tests. In ideal world laptop reviewers should also test keyboard latency but I do not see how it might be automated.
It always puzzles me how apparently well known flaws never mentioned by product reviewers, even genuinely pro-consumer and generally well respected, like rtings or notebookchecks.
You buy product after stellar review, encounter problem, search for solution, find reddit thread where everyone is "yeah, it is always like that, why do you act surprised?"
Usually their revenue is from affiliate links. YouTube channels have ad spots, merch sales etc. There are many shills of course, but some are doing their best to give accurate reviews and don't shy away from bashing manufacturers for their missteps.
Yet widely known (to enthusiasts) problems, like stutters from the OP, are often not mentioned at all.
LinusTechTips doesn't depend on ASUS money in any meaningful way, but still failed to mention stutters in their Zephyrus G16 review. Some might say LTT is not a reviewer, he is an entertainer, but he undeniably thrives to be accurate while doing so.
I wonder if the "programmer" (and I use this term very loosely) who wrote that sleep-in-an-interrupt code ever tested the code personally, or if it was some other distant responsibility-diluted department of a hundred other lamers who didn't care "because the automated tests all pass". This is a situation where dogfooding, in the original Microsoft sense, would definitely be beneficial as among the developers experiencing this on their own machines, surely one would be tempted to fix it.
A long time ago I did some contract work writing firmware for a major hardware manufacturer in Taipei. I quickly learned to ignore bugs, because reporting them would get me reprimanded for doing things other than the task I was assigned. Even worse, the hardware team saw the firmware/driver/software devs as lowly servants and dismissed any feedback outright.
It's crazy how the hardware sector just can't grasp that software is actually important too. Everywhere I've worked at we were just second class citizens, last to get a new hire or any budget, and then it was our fault when the software was subpar. It seems like they think going down to our level will actually sully them.
I have a 2024 Zephyrus G14 and it has bursts of stuttering which seem to be directly linked to running off USB-C power. It doesn't do it on the original power brick, but on a 70W USB power brick, it slows down massively every now and then, to the point where the mouse cursor is only updating every few seconds and any playing audio starts underrunning buffers. Unplugging USB power immediately clears the issue up for a while. It's fine running off battery, and it's fine when I plug USB power back in, even straight away.
It does other stupid things with power management, too:
- There seems to be some "cooldown" logic that keeps it awake with the fan running for a while (sometimes minutes) after closing the lid. If I just unplug the laptop stick it straight in a backpack, it'll keep doing this (getting hotter and hotter, and burning half of the battery capacity) until it hits the critical high temp shutdown. It's great fun taking it out at the start of a plane flight and finding out it's on low battery and has bbq'd itself.
- Even if I do wait for the fan to turn off before stashing the laptop, when I open the lid and wake it up, it immediately goes into hibernate mode, and I have to wait for it to finish hibernating, turn it back on, and wait for it to boot up, which is really frustrating.
The solution to both of these (for me) is to reassign the power button to be 'hibernate' instead of 'sleep', and to explicitly hibernate it every time I'm packing it up. It's still stupid and annoying, and a damn shame because it's otherwise a really nice laptop. The OLED screen is beautiful and the build quality feels great. I just wish it wasn't crippled.
Your story reminds me a little bit of an issue with the late-Intel macbook pros. If your USB-C charger was plugged in on the left side, and you had an external display connected as well, you'd get crazy thermal throttling. I believe this was because the GPU was on the left side, and so the heat from the charging chip + the GPU resulted in the Macbook deciding to throttle the CPU and crank the fans to max. The solution was to charge on the right side.
There's a similar issue with the old ASUS ROG laptops, my old 17" 2017 one had a higher CPU throttling curve than the GPU, and they shared a heat pipe, so with the CPU at 100%, the GPU would throttle hard and slow games down. The solution was to drop the max CPU down to 90% or something, barely noticeable loss in CPU performance in exchange for a full speed GPU.
(Why did I get another ASUS? Well, after the throttling issue was fixed, the 17" was a beast, it survived dozens of mine site commissioning trips, tons of abrasive iron ore dust, and having a 2" ring spanner dropped on the keyboard (which left a nasty dent but the keyboard still works!). It's still going as my kid's gaming laptop, battery life is now only a few minutes but while plugged in it's fast enough for most modern games. And my partner had just bought a 13" Zephyrus and it was really nice and we hadn't noticed any issues with it.)
Dunno about 2024, but 2023 G14 explicitly documents it can't work at full power when powered by USB-C, because it's USB-C PD supports only 100W compared to the >200W draw of the system. So it throttles just like macbooks with i9 (but those throttled always because one of the problems was overheating VRMs)
I don't expect max performance gaming on USB-C, but it should at least run as fast as it does on battery alone. It should definitely be able to update a mouse cursor and play an MP3.
This isn't just throttling, it's unusable. And it instantly goes away for a while when you disconnect and reconnect the USB-C power supply, even when gaming etc.
Short version: don't buy ASUS gaming laptops until this is definiteively fixed, and if you one under warranty, file a warranty claim, being prepared to go to Small Claims Court.
Unless you specifically bought that model because you want low-latency output to an external display with G-SYNC.
I've used Asus motherboards in my gaming PCs for years, and their BIOS/UEFI firmwares there are equally awful, their Ryzen AGESA stuff has been a complete mess.
It sounded to me like they were multiple bugs. Some were specific the mux mode, but sleeping in an interrupt, and artificially re-arming it is problematic either way.
Sometime around 2015 I promised myself to never buy a laptop with switchable graphics again. This has worked well so far.
But it never ceases to amuse me watching brands that position themselves as 'premium' spending pennies on firmware development team somewhere down in a basement compared to millions they spend on shiny marketing.
Likewise - I bought one laptop with "Optimus" in 2013 and swore to never do so again. I sometimes have to break out the desktop or rent a server but I have never regretted going iGPU only.
wow lots of us burned by the same thing apparently!
clever hardware suffers the burden of having lots of edge cases spread across a small customer base. going for dumb hardware that has lots of buyers is less exciting but statistically more likely to "just work".
for me: from now on, its either lenovo business laptops (which sell probably 10s of millions of enterprise users), or macs (which sell the same.)
volume > being clever
p.s. infact, even the lenovo TB docks are a bit shaky. ugh, more cleverness! i think sticking to their proprietary docks would have been the better play. with their volume, it would have made a better product.
The big difference is Apple can't hold other companies accountable since they delivered the software, the hardware and the integration and they have an incentive to fix their stuff.
The few issues I've had with Macs the last decade did get fixed within a reasonable amount of time. Lots of PC hardware bugs simply don't get fixed at all since there is no party that really cares about them. The author of the linked write-up should have been an Asus employee instead of a disgruntled user...
I had a mac at work for 8 years. Overall things mostly worked ok, but I had two big issues.
a) one time charging stopped working... thankfully I had a pretty full charge when I noticed and was able to migrate my data to a spare machine and not have to deal with it... removable storage would have been super handy.
b) for a whole year, there was about a 25% chance of loud static instead of music when I started playing a stream in iTunes; pause and play again would fix it most of the time. It started when I installed a named OS revision, and it stopped when I installed the next version. Did not have issues with sounds from other apps. Of course, there was no information to be found anywhere about this, because 'macs just work'
Less big, but if Outlook was running when I put the laptop to sleep, there was a good chance it would continue to eat battery and generate heat in my bag. Outlook is a travesty, but when the corp runs Exchange, Outlook is less effort to make work compared to fighting to make auth work with anything else and then still having to use Outlook from time to time.
Reminds me of when MSI laptops were getting properly bricked after users ran `rm -rf /` because of a UEFI bug where the board could not boot after some variables got deleted https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402
Readit News
As someone who has written embedded firmware for many years (not for PCs), I can only dream of an end user being this capable to discover a bug. I want to live in the world where Asus immediately send an e-mail offering some kind of short-term contracting work to fly in and talk to their firmware people for a few days and get $FIVE_FIGURES or something, and leave with an updated laptop running their new production BIOS.
Obviously this bug has gone un-fixed for four years so that is not the world we're in. That makes me sad. :|
Edit: s/fix/fix proposal/.
- this sounds ubiquitous and reproducible. How did this not get fed back through tech support/RMA channels? Was there so little evidence that it wasn't correlateable, or did ASUS look and arrive at an incorrect conclusion, eg batch of bad silicon? Could it be that they had plentiful evidence and were negligent or incompetent?
- it sounds like this is plainly evident when using the machine. What is the QA process? This should not have been possible to miss?
- now that they know, what will they do?
Imo, the ceo calculus here is clear. If you're a luxury good with elastic demand, you fix the issue and fix the perception (two separate things). Multi-year, multifaceted issues like this have the potential to ruin a brand. I've bought ROG in the past, and I'm inclined to never do so again.
EDIT: on further reflection, the firmware bug itself is pretty troubling. the other bugs i get - hardware assumptions were changed, or good code was reused that didnt know or support the gpu mux, i see how those errors comes about. the method sleeping an interrupt... is awful? how did that get reviewed? what is that firmware test suite?
Every one of the affected ASUS laptops probably got a glowing 5/5 review from the usual suspects, and consumers have little hope of getting a fair deal
Have you used consumer goods [or virtually anything] from the last couple decades? By and large, nobody cares. Look at the timeline here; clearly nobody cares.
It's also just a terrible disaster of a programming environment, with a very large (terrifyingly so, given the limited capability) interpreter that needs to live at the highest privilege level of the kernel.
And it's generally used like a hatchet by system integrators for tricks like this, with pretty much exactly the code quality you'd expect. Almost always the path to writing a Linux driver for some oddball laptop subsystem starts with "throw away the ACPI stuff".
Windows laptops are dead on arrival for me, all windows laptops are physical shovelware
I managed to reverse engineer a lot of my laptop's features but hit a wall when it came to this ACPI stuff. I dumped the tables and decompiled the code but all I got was stub code. I wanted to be the guy who wrote the Linux drivers for his own laptop but I just didn't manage it. Massive respect for anyone who can do this.
A quote from one of the linked reddit threads. I wonder if the warranty trip is part of their scheme.
"I did everything you suggested , but nothing changed. I send it back via garante. I am curious what they do whit it."
"what was it at the end? did they respond?"
"They have claimed that the plato works perfectly. So basically i just got use to it. I am using bluetooth earbuds all the time so i cant notice the problems."
One was the first gen Alienware M17 with two GTX 270M GPUs (yes two) and an onboard nvidia GPU whose specific model I can't remember. That one suffered from stutters and audio crackling, etc. It was sort of fixed by disabling SLI and the onboard GPU and sticking to a specific driver that was modded, the driver was by someone on the notebookcheck forums IIRC. Later on I think it got somewhat patched with a bios update that let you use SLI without the stutters, but I think the laptop reached EOL without it being fully fixed.
The second was an ROG ASUS laptop with a GTX 460m (I can't recall the laptop model). Pretty much the same story as the OP but I didn't have the knowhow to go deep into the ACPI code. The only change from the story is that latencymon kept attributing the latency spikes to multiple dlls, sometimes it was some wifi driver, other times it was an nvidia one. I don't remember the full fix for that one, but it involved me changing the wifi card and disabling the dGPU (not the onboard one) when I was not gaming so I could watch videos and such without it crackling. Funnily enough it didn't crackle much when actually playing games (it still happened, just very rarely).
I stopped buying gaming laptops after that. Seeing this story makes me think things haven't changed one bit.
What use is a "good price", when what you get is a quality and support minefield?
First one was a Clevo (rebranded as Medion) with a GTX 970m that I bought in 2017. An absolute beast, I lugged it in a backpack around the world for 4 years, including to places you really shouldn't bring a laptop like beaches and rainforests. I passed it my girlfriend's nephew and it is still going strong and being used every day. I repasted once in that time.
My current laptop is an MSI GE66 with an RTX 3070m bought in 2022. It's loud, I've repasted recently because it started overheating. It had some problems with the screen connector which they fixed under warranty fairly quickly. But aside from that it's solid.
One thing about both of these laptops - they are very easy to open and it looks like I could repair/replace pretty much every removable component easily. No glue.
The only thing I consider a real problem is the MSI fan noise. Well, that and the power brick which is the size of a literal brick.
All the complexity of a PC, in a package the size of a book, with the engineering quality of a Happy Meal toy.
In any other industry everyone would be returning their acquisitions day one.
About 35 years ago, I had a teacher asserting computers are like buying shoes that randomly explode when tying them.
Thankfully consumer laws are finally happening.
How come people have become so obedient ?! That's crazy.
ASUS at the time had an exclusive deal with AMD to ship their Ryzen 4xxxHS line.
Initially it worked fine, but two years later performance was already much worse and dominated by thermal throttling. Repasting, though necessary due to the state of the paste, only helped partially.
I still don't know the root cause of the issue, but I investigated declining battery performance and it turned out that the iGPU was going full throttle at all times. Setting the dGPU as the preferred device actually improved battery life somewhat.
When mechanical failures started accumulating I switched to a FW16 and never looked back. I don't care what gaming laptop manufacturers have on offer and for how little if I can't buy having them give a shit about their products and customers.
It will thermal throttle itself to uselessness within seconds of a load being placed on it. The dGPU idles at about 15 W, the entire power budget of a single board computer, and it's one of those problematic nvidia GPUs that will never be properly supported on Linux. The Windows app that controlled things like fans and keyboard LEDs was so obnoxiously bad they required over one minute to show a window on the screen, reverse engineering that thing was one of the best things I've ever done. Mercifully the firmware wasn't broken by default but I still didn't manage to reverse engineer the ACPI nonsense, I dumped the tables and decompiled the code but there was nothing useful.
Looks like Apple has a monopoly on good taste and giving half a shit about the quality of the products they sell. I wish the Apple silicon macbooks existed at the time.
The laptop works fine in Optimus mode even with external displays, you just lost a bit of performance and you're missing out on some display features like G-Sync. So it is highly likely that most users always use the laptop in Optimus mode. If you primarily use the laptop as a laptop you probably wouldn't even know the mux feature existed.
The problem is Asus shipping extra features in their hardware that are not properly QA tested. It looks like they only thoroughly tested the golden path.
The problem isn't limited to some units, there was plenty of discussion online of this issue at the time of release. [1]
Asus never recalled, fixed, or even responded to the issue. Indeed, even the marketing page [2] still talks about how you can use HDMI 2.0 to connect 4K TVs at 60Hz.
It was also an interesting showcase of laptop reviewer incompetence. All the reviews just regurgitated Asus marketing material on how it has HDMI 2.0, but apparently nobody actually tested it.
--
[1] https://rog-forum.asus.com/t5/rog-zephyrus-series/gx501-zeph...
[2] https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-zephyrus/rog-zephyrus-gx501...
For this specific case, getting no fix since the issues have been reported in 2021 is tough to brush over.
Asus already has a spotty reputation regarding to customer repairs and business practices, so this issue piling on top of that is unfortunate.
The laptop was absolutely useless at playing games, because it would throttle itself thermally after about 30 seconds. Which was ironic given that I used to work at a games development company and the ability to play games was actually a core feature of the product. I then used to have a Razer Blade 15 which wasn't as bad but would also eventually start throttling hard - just inadequate cooling imho.
Funnily enough I have a much cheaper MSI gaming laptop now with an i7 and a 3070Ti and that never throttles, I can run games without it slowing down. But clearly the cooling system in it is massively overbuilt, which is great.
Maybe they learned their lesson. I had an MSI gaming laptop a while back, and it ran horribly, I never realised until long after it was possible for me to return it, that it was just poorly designed, and could never run beyond ~50% of its gaming performance. Within minutes of starting a game it would be thermally throttled and that was that; it also sounded like it was about to take off, to the point you could barely drown it out with headphones.
Apple is just as guilty for shipping laptops with hardware issues that you just have to work around. And unlike this Asus issue the Macbook mux was on by default. You had to turn it off in the settings if you wanted to entirely avoid the issue and then you would have no way of using the discrete GPU.
>Even installing Linux, only to find the problem persists. [...] >The problem is far deeper, embedded in the machine's firmware, the BIOS.
Anyway it's not as if the Linux laptop user experience in general were much better.
Dead Comment
They're like four-seater off-road motorcycles. You have to NOT understand how sketchy that concept is to consider one. The engineers has to know that they're guilty to be involved in it.
What's sad is that a lot of buyers are falling for it from the presumption that laptops are the most standard and regular type of computers. But I guess there's little we could do about it.
However, this is not the only problem with Asus bioses. My daughter has one and it randomly locks up if you add an extra SSD, sooner or later depending on the SSD. You'll blame the SSD's firmware, but the most locking one was one that I have in two desktops with no problems...
It's a gaming laptop. If you're playing any game released in the past 5 years, odds are you're getting constant stutters anyway due to Unreal Engine 5. And Windows 11 is a slow, bloated mess, too, so that covers stutters outside of games.
For most end users, and especially gamers, stuttering and overall bad performance is just the new normal that they've come to accept and even embrace. The recent success of Borderlands 4, a game that struggles to run smoothly on the best and most expensive hardware available today, is just the latest and best proof of this. If you complain about it, you'll be called poor for not owning a $3000 GPU and/or a luddite for not wanting to play at 720p 30fps AI-upscaled to 4K 300fps.
This might be a culture issue. At least we should push for popular benchmark solutions to include latency tests. In ideal world laptop reviewers should also test keyboard latency but I do not see how it might be automated.
You buy product after stellar review, encounter problem, search for solution, find reddit thread where everyone is "yeah, it is always like that, why do you act surprised?"
Why indeed?
(I'm not sure if it lags in igpu pass-through mode)
notebookcheck does report latencymon numbers and even remarks when it says the laptop is not recommended for real time audio:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-RTX-5090-Laptop-and-mini-L...
They don't see these extreme values though.
Yet widely known (to enthusiasts) problems, like stutters from the OP, are often not mentioned at all.
LinusTechTips doesn't depend on ASUS money in any meaningful way, but still failed to mention stutters in their Zephyrus G16 review. Some might say LTT is not a reviewer, he is an entertainer, but he undeniably thrives to be accurate while doing so.
I am not surprised by this story.
It does other stupid things with power management, too:
- There seems to be some "cooldown" logic that keeps it awake with the fan running for a while (sometimes minutes) after closing the lid. If I just unplug the laptop stick it straight in a backpack, it'll keep doing this (getting hotter and hotter, and burning half of the battery capacity) until it hits the critical high temp shutdown. It's great fun taking it out at the start of a plane flight and finding out it's on low battery and has bbq'd itself.
- Even if I do wait for the fan to turn off before stashing the laptop, when I open the lid and wake it up, it immediately goes into hibernate mode, and I have to wait for it to finish hibernating, turn it back on, and wait for it to boot up, which is really frustrating.
The solution to both of these (for me) is to reassign the power button to be 'hibernate' instead of 'sleep', and to explicitly hibernate it every time I'm packing it up. It's still stupid and annoying, and a damn shame because it's otherwise a really nice laptop. The OLED screen is beautiful and the build quality feels great. I just wish it wasn't crippled.
https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/61253-power-your-macbook-pro...
(Why did I get another ASUS? Well, after the throttling issue was fixed, the 17" was a beast, it survived dozens of mine site commissioning trips, tons of abrasive iron ore dust, and having a 2" ring spanner dropped on the keyboard (which left a nasty dent but the keyboard still works!). It's still going as my kid's gaming laptop, battery life is now only a few minutes but while plugged in it's fast enough for most modern games. And my partner had just bought a 13" Zephyrus and it was really nice and we hadn't noticed any issues with it.)
This isn't just throttling, it's unusable. And it instantly goes away for a while when you disconnect and reconnect the USB-C power supply, even when gaming etc.
I don't think I ever put any of my laptops into dGPU-only mode via MUX, it's stupidly power hungry with little upside.
Unless you specifically bought that model because you want low-latency output to an external display with G-SYNC.
I've used Asus motherboards in my gaming PCs for years, and their BIOS/UEFI firmwares there are equally awful, their Ryzen AGESA stuff has been a complete mess.
But it never ceases to amuse me watching brands that position themselves as 'premium' spending pennies on firmware development team somewhere down in a basement compared to millions they spend on shiny marketing.
clever hardware suffers the burden of having lots of edge cases spread across a small customer base. going for dumb hardware that has lots of buyers is less exciting but statistically more likely to "just work".
for me: from now on, its either lenovo business laptops (which sell probably 10s of millions of enterprise users), or macs (which sell the same.)
volume > being clever
p.s. infact, even the lenovo TB docks are a bit shaky. ugh, more cleverness! i think sticking to their proprietary docks would have been the better play. with their volume, it would have made a better product.
It's unbelievable that something this bad has been shipping for four years. I guess I know what I'm not buying, at least...
The ASUS machine would be in the trash long before this Apple laptop.
a) one time charging stopped working... thankfully I had a pretty full charge when I noticed and was able to migrate my data to a spare machine and not have to deal with it... removable storage would have been super handy.
b) for a whole year, there was about a 25% chance of loud static instead of music when I started playing a stream in iTunes; pause and play again would fix it most of the time. It started when I installed a named OS revision, and it stopped when I installed the next version. Did not have issues with sounds from other apps. Of course, there was no information to be found anywhere about this, because 'macs just work'
Less big, but if Outlook was running when I put the laptop to sleep, there was a good chance it would continue to eat battery and generate heat in my bag. Outlook is a travesty, but when the corp runs Exchange, Outlook is less effort to make work compared to fighting to make auth work with anything else and then still having to use Outlook from time to time.
Would you push gamers/VR people to macs ??