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ASUS G60JX thoughts

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Kowalski3500

Member
Joined
Sep 9, 2005
Location
Bernalillo, NM
This is a post I wrote over on notebookreview.com forums on the subject of the gaming performance of the ASUS G60JX.

Product Link:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220796

Core i5 430M (2 physical 2HT) 2.26GHz +2.533 Turbo Boost
4GB DDR3
GTS 360M
1366x768 resolution

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220796

Something everyone has overlooked here that I experienced immediately upon heavy testing of the G60JX is that when you get a heavy load on the processor, any load on the gpu is going to skyrocket the temps. When you hit 91, it's going to start thermally throttling the gpu. This means it's going to turn your performance down to keep heat down. I didn't run into this while gaming unless I was also Folding SMP work units at the same time :p Furmark will also show this as you can watch the live FPS counter float in the 100s till your temp starts getting near 92 and then bam, thermal throttling kicks in.

Yes of course you can use aftermarket coolers to keep the heat down. Also some people get laptops which have a bad application of the Thermal Interface Material between the heatsink and the GPU/CPU. You can RMA or try to fix yourself in this case.

The G60JX gets around 10,000 points in 3dmark 06 with the default resolution of 1280x720 (NOT the default 3dmark resolution used normally, our laptop cannot display enough vertical lines without a secondary monitor). For comparison, an old socket 939 Opteron 165 at 2.3 GHz with 2gb of ddr1 with a GTS 250 gets 9334 (these are my scores). The G60 has a very new, very fast core i5 dual core with hyperthreading. The old Operton is just dual core. Video cards are the real factor here, and if fact the two cards (360m and GTS 250) are 9800GTX+ if I recall correctly.

The G60 can play games quite well, given that the default resolution is 1366x768, which is middle of the road as far as display resolutions go. If you crank that up to 1600 or 1920 with and external monitor, Frames/Second is going to suffer.

One more thought: Running on battery power, the GTS 360 never clocks fully loaded as it would on AC power. The core only hits 405 vs 550 and the shaders are in line with this. The memory especially doesn't clock high at all, being something like 300 vs. 1800 of AC full load.


Also, I've been Folding SMP units on the i5. Gets around 2,000 ppd. It'll fold on the GPU but it overheats a bit too much for my liking. The i5 will float around 69-71 folding.
 
If you open it up, I won't be surprised to see CPU and GPU being serviced by the same heatpipe cooling
system. It is likewise with my MSI GX640 based whitebook. Here is an excerpt from my upcoming review :

However, there is a glaring and in my view, severe design flaw in the cooling system. The GPU and CPU parts share the same cooling path and are connected to the same heatpipes. Ostensibly this is done to save costs, but the penalty incurred is a bit too severe in my view. We will visit this in detail in the data analysis section. In brief, increasing the GPU load drives the CPU temperatures up very quickly and vice- versa. Full load Furmark assisted GPU temperatures were about 94C.

The cooling system is just not good enough. Two measly heatpipes to cool a hot and powerful GPU? You must be joking! I am going to be a bit harsh and call it utterly worthless. The CPU and GPU are cooled by extremely thin copper sheets! Perhaps, a better cooling system may increase the mass of the laptop, but hey I can live with an extra 0.5 lbs.! I hope MSI will revisit the cooling design in their future models.

There is a way to fix this, so stay tuned. ;)
 
Nice Super Nade! I was getting quite tired writing that up, hence the grammatical and other errors :p Yeah I've seen pictures of the opened back and the single system of heatpipes (two or one with an indentation) and I agree. It's like putting everything on a weak watercooling loop :p I am aware that the GTX 9800 that the 360 is based off of is a quite warm card, comparitively (I cannot spell that word), a GTS 250 (galaxy, aluminum heatspreader, no pipes) gets up to 80 with folding, 95+ in furmark, I can only imagine if it had to share heatsink with a CPU, espeically an i5 (hot as pentiums) at that ;P
 
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