How to Fix Your GSOD Blues

[hax0rJimDuggan]

Just wanted to log my experience:

I received the laptop last week. I had read about all the GSOD issues so I decided to stay stock everything initially. I experienced no GSOD's, my idle temp was 64c and the highest in-game temp was 90c. I decided to try the ATI 10.8 drivers after several hours of normal gameplay on stock. Within one minute I got a GSOD. I tried a couple of more times after with the same results.

Yesterday I went through the upgrade process. First I flashed my bios from 209 to 211 followed by the vbios, using the instructions here. The only issue I ran into was that I never saw the flash drive show up in the list of devices to boot. I believe I navigated over to the advanced tab and that's when I saw the usb listed so I selected it, pressed enter and it automatically brought up a command prompt. I threw caution to the wind and proceeded with the VFlash command which worked perfectly fine. I eventually went on to update ATI drivers to 10.8 as well as Realtek 2.52.

My gpu idle temps are now 58c. After several rounds of Bad Company 2 last night, I hit a max of 86c. When I was on stock drivers I forced BC2 to use dx9 for added performance. After the upgrade to 10.8 I went back to dx10 and noticed that overall the game was much smoother. I'm not sure if the complaints about a decrease in fps are because people here were using newer drivers than stock? Maybe I'm seeing a difference because of the jump from 9.12 to 10.8 but it's most definitely there and improved for the better.

I did notice some stuttering early on but it was fairly minimal and went away. I will continue to keep an eye on that but I'm not sure it's an issue for me. I'm use to some stuttering/lag due to hardware/latency.

In conclusion - if you were like me and were all stock, I would definitely recommend updating everything so you can use the latest drivers.

Thanks to Gary and all of those who suffered a lot longer than I did to get this issue noticed and fixed!

[IM0001]

So wait, you don't expect a product, brand new, in this price range to actually work out of the box?

If so, I have quite a lot of vertical property and some bridges you might be interested in buying, seeing as a working product out of the box is not a requisite for you when you buy stuff.

Its techs like you, good sir, that allows companies to release horrible products in the first place.

That you actually have the nerve to reply to him as you do speaks in volumes of the sort of product quality people expect today.

It's frightening.

Show me 1 Top of the market bleeding edge product that actually works flawlessly out of the box for every single user who owns one.

Its not that I have low expectations. I expect the product to be damn close to perfection and have been let down many times. (There is a big difference between Working and Perfect out of the box. You can say any laptop that boots on the first try to be "Working" out of the box. ) The thing is Instead of just b**** and moan about how things don't work and threaten to go to X or Y Company, Brand, Etc, Just shut the heck up, look around for a fix, and get thing right while also giving helpful feedback request to the company to maybe help them get the product to work like it should.

Every computer I have built works 100%. Did they "Out of the box", Hell no. But after a bit of time, research, finesse, and some massaging, the true computer harmony does eventually break free.

[Nyegaard]

It did work out of the box. It was when everyone went updating to the newest ati drivers that everything went to ****. ASUS was just a *little* late on getting out a new Vbios like most other laptop companys did.

Try telling that to Maya (which I don't use myself but others in here have been trying to use) or SC2 which told me it wouldn't work with the old drivers and, thus, started my whole gsod nightmare.

The product was faulty, now it works as intended.

[aramis109]

Guys, can we stay focused on the topic? If there are still GSOD issues, then post here. Otherwise, pick a different thread to argue pointlessly in.

[HeavenCry]

Powerplay seems to be working for me just fine, with the little video glitch at first startup, but I haven't lost any noticeable speeds.

In regards to the MSI vBIOS, it could be that it's smoother switching modes since it doesn't support the 2 additional video outputs.

What video glitch at first startup do you mean?

My screen goes completely black for a second (turns off) at windows boot, just after the windows loading logo dissapears and before you see the blue welcome screen before the desktop appears. Does that happen to everyone? I cant remember if it did that all along or not, but it seams strange to me so im assuming it started doing this just now...

[hax0rJimDuggan]

What video glitch at first startup do you mean?

My screen goes completely black for a second (turns off) at windows boot, just after the windows loading logo dissapears and before you see the blue welcome screen before the desktop appears. Does that happen to everyone? I cant remember if it did that all along or not, but it seams strange to me so im assuming it started doing this just now...

Yeah I get that. If memory serves me correctly I would say it's always done that.

[HeavenCry]

Just felt like it didnt do that before, but i probably got aware of it becouse i rebooted around 30 times in a row trying different drivers just now and my memory is real bad so im really not sure ...

Can someone else also confirm theirs also does the same?

[CavemanK]

Yep, here too.

[IM0001]

My Desktop has done that forever. Think it is the res swap from the booting screen res to the desktop res.

[ampedconfusion]

It goes black for a second for me too.

On an unrelated note, seems I might have to wait for official Overdrive support to use that feature. I have bios 211 and Chastity's Overdrive unlocked version of Gary's vBios, and whenever I set Overdrive past 800/1100, I begin to get artifacts in SC2. If I set it at around 820 or 825/1100, I begin to get GSODs.

The problem completely goes away (no artifacts or anything) if I scale it back to 705/1100, so I guess it might be a matter of a vBios being made with Overdrive in mind.