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?
With the Steam Deck nowadays there is not much need for a gaming laptop unless you want to play the few games it can't run. Though even integrated GPU's in the more recent laptops nowadays are good enough for running games (usually at low/medium settings, 1080p)
Not a few. You are overestimating steam deck. I have one. It's for small games. And I'm not talking just about AAA or not. Steam deck is pretty weak.
Laptops with the newer nvidia generations that support framegen make this a harder argument. Yes, laptops are always severely power and thermal constrained, but you can run raytraced games at 1440p 240hz on them now. HL2 RTX at that fidelity is a trip. The concept of a high end gaming laptop is a pretty big market, but not when the mfgs and firmware devs can't manage to prevent stuttering that most of their target market would notice and find unacceptable.
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.
Glad to see that there are laptops that don't suffer like this. But I think the combo of having a steam deck + business laptop beats buying a gaming laptop. Assuming you already own a gaming rig at home.
20 years ago, I had a midrange laptop with a dGPU and while it played games with mediocre results, the laptop experience itself was also mediocre. Stupidly, 10 years ago, I bought a laptop with a dGPU again, but because NVidia didn't play nice with Linux back then, I don't think I've used that GPU for more than an hour or so.
Never again. A laptop with a dGPU runs counter to the things a laptop should be. Keeping gaming activities on a desktop is the best option in my experience.
A few months ago, I started working at an e-waste recycling company, and discovered that used Microsoft Surface tablets are what I've been looking for. My work "laptop" is a Surface Pro 5 with Debian (my work desktop is an Optiplex micro). I'm typing this on a Surface Go (with BlissOS) that I bought for myself. The cameras don't work on either and the work Surface never knows it's battery status, but I don't care (it lasts an entire afternoon with a barcode scanner, good enough for me).
I daily drive Ubuntu on this laptop. It has issues, but the Nvidia GPU is not one of them. Times have changed.
If you don't like a dGPU in a laptop, that's fine. But people have different needs. I travel a lot and do 3d content creation work.
Almost any Ryzen laptop these days will have faster integrated graphics than a SteamDeck just due to the age of the chip set Valve still uses.
I've had 2 now from different manufacturers and the firmware seems alright due to the integrated nature of the API making them all fairly homogenous.
Exactly, you can get decent integrated graphics with any recent Ryzen and you have lots of choice in form factor.
Well, I do play games on my laptops. But that's just a nice perk, what I bought them for is 3d content creation.
Also, comparing a steamdeck to a modern gaming laptop is like comparing a $1 water pistol to a super soaker.
That is my current approach as well. A steamdeck/switch/none + FW13 while traveling.
Laptops are vile piece of shit devices, as a rule.
All the complexity of a PC, in a package the size of a book, with the engineering quality of a Happy Meal toy.
I’m very had very different experiences, with MacBooks.
Well those are just so underpowered it literally hurts. All of disk size, expansion options and memory.
And booting something that isn't a funny variant of a locked down OS is relatively hard.
> Well those are just so underpowered it literally hurts. All of disk size, expansion options and memory.
That’s not a complaint have heard before. My needs aren’t huge and it has a lot more of everything than I need.
> And booting something that isn't a funny variant of a locked down OS is relatively hard.
I wouldn’t want anything else in it, but with a Mac mini I really wish it would run something Linux more easily. They are a great headless server, but the OS is really limiting.
Intel MacBooks were overpriced, under powered, overheating junk. They ran outdated processors at launch day and charged a premium because they had the best screens and track pads money could buy.
Apple Silicon Macs are a 180. Fantastically fast and efficient hardware stuck with an increasingly locked down OS, zero upgrade path and still a premium price.
If you’re holding on to the memory of Intel Macs I can certainly agree, they were not great.
Outdated processors or Super ULV processors? Their obsession with maximizing battery life meant that the processors were unable to throttle highly. Clearly they knew Apple Silicon was coming so they took their time re-engineering the devices. Why bother? At the same time i've heard stories of Apple being very pissed at Intel for delivering such poor chips for their target thermal design.
The trackpad is a device-selling feature though. They really are that much better than the competition.
You complain about complexity and engineering quality, but then say all of the options should be customizable here. I think one has to sort of pick what they want. Terrible build quality since the RAM dimms aren't soldered on, or, a completely un-upgradable system that's packaged nicely.
To go off your McDonald's analogy, you can get a lot of kCals without necessarily getting a lot of nutrients.
Edit: GP comment wasn't yours, but I think my point still stands.
I doubt that build quality and whether RAM is soldered on is related.
MacBook Pro with 8TB of storage and 128GB of unified memory here.
Skill issue.
Yes, and how much did you pay for it.
Just over $6,000
Sounds like money issue, not skill.
That is what happens when the industry has spent decades educating users that is normal computers are broken.
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.
GOD, thank you for saying this, I was thinking I was alone and going crazy.
How come people have become so obedient ?! That's crazy.
> How come people have become so obedient ?! That's crazy.
Most people have always been that way, will always be that way. IME the vast majority of people who don't stand for this shit are autistic.
I mean, it's a machine with moving parts. If the parts can move, they can not move. Even if I'm buying a printing press.
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.
I was considering such a device since surely those huge vents meant good thermals, right? Glad I didn't go for it.
With the ASUS I had a setup with a cooling pad where the metal grid cover was removed and the sides were sealed with foam to enhance flow from the pad's fan and only with that I could maybe get 30-45min of gameplay until throttling started.
Meanwhile the Framework has overall much higher power consumption, but still manages to whoosh all that hot air out. I can't take these companies seriously if a much smaller business that is not focused squarely on gaming is running circles around them.
My mother rocks an M1 Air which she got for pennies and it's a great all around home computer.
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.
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[1] https://rog-forum.asus.com/t5/rog-zephyrus-series/gx501-zeph...
[2] https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-zephyrus/rog-zephyrus-gx501...
Imagine if we had strong consumer protection laws. Companies would fear claiming HDMI 2.0 that was really HDMI 1.2. Instead they just figure “meh! If anyone complains we’ll let them return it.”
> The problem is Asus shipping extra features in their hardware that are not properly QA tested.
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.
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.
you're telling me they never expected the _gaming_ laptop to be connected to a MONITOR, KB + M? eyeroll o.O
External monitors still work in Optimus mode. Only if you use Ultimate mode where the mux switches to the Nvidia GPU does the issue arise.
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.
I think they did - I used to have an MSI gaming laptop years ago with a GTX560M if I remember correctly, and that used to throttle every several seconds, so every game you played stuttered. This one - not a single slowdown, but if you open it it has like 10 heat pipes and two fans that sound like jet engines - but it clearly works.
I'm glad to hear at least one manufacturer is trying. I can't imagine myself buying a gaming laptop again, perhaps for my kids when they're old enough, but I stick to desktop now.
My main drive in choosing the MSI I did back then was the thinness and lightness, which was counter-productive to good cooling performance, mine had a GTX970M but was about 1cm thick; the bottom of the case got so hot it would burn you if you touched it after a while of gaming.
Windows laptop users are just conditioned to the fact that they don't work properly and just deal with the issues.
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 did my 2015 Thinkpad - same problem, both an integrated and an external GPU, and I was constantly fighting with the drivers to get it to just make use of the external GPU. I'm plugged into a wall whenever the laptop isn't suspended/shut down for transport, stupid machine, stop making Autodesk and my games crash because you want to boost your battery lifetime numbers!
They had a special Lenovo driver that would occasionally become overriden by Windows updates but could be reinstalled manually, I dual-booted Debian though and getting the system to work properly under that was a nightmare. There were a couple years when I simply gave up, I got it to work with the iGPU and I wasn't running anything more graphics intensive than a browser so I simply left the discrete GPU idle while running Linux.
Incredibly frustrating.
I think all these manufacturers are desperate to get their published specs for battery life estimates to double-digit hours that can't be reached while running the discrete GPU at full speed all day. Heck, they can't be reached while running the CPU at full speed all day, you're not going to run a 35W processor and a 55W graphics card and a 20W display (10W when you arbitrarily reduce the max brightness when on battery power) all day.
You've got like 90 watt-hours available in the battery, at 100% usage on everything the real capacity is gone in under an hour...which is unacceptable. So Asus and Apple and Lenovo and everyone else have to come up with some hack to turn it off whenever it's on so that the spec sheet says you can get 8, 10, 12 hours of runtime.
We had dozens of 2013 MBP with discrete GPU mux where I worked. I bought one afterwards and used it until the M1 laptops came out, for pretty much everything you can use a laptop for. Never had or saw this problem in any of them, FWIW!
Was it a Fall 2013 or Spring 2013 Macbook?
The quip against Windows users is besides the point of the article:
>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.
Yeah, that's not shocking. Linux uses the Intel ACPI infra, whereas Windows uses Microsoft's. It's as good as they can do, but it's not going to be possible to perfectly replicate Windows, let alone improve such clearly buggy firmware, at least generally.
It is possible on Linux to override some of the firmware (most notably the DSDT, e.g https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/DSDT because so much hardware is broken). So, if you can make or get a fixed version, you should be good. A wholesale replacement of all the ACPI assets, though, seems unlikely. I could well be wrong, though.
Anyway, in this case, I suspect the poster was advocating for Macs.
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.
Or the Installer.app, at least from 2015 to whenever they finally switched to image-based updates.
A percentage of users were "unlucky" to hit a bug where Installer.app would end up in infinite loop trying to unpack a pkg file when updating OSX. My personal record is minor update that ultimately took a week.
I don't see Mac or Linux Laptops being that much different in that regard.
A HN comment slandering people because of their OS/laptop choice? Never heard that one before.
[dead]
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.
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.
> 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.
All the evidence points to corporations, in general, not caring about making products that actually work.