5 ms·

Impressive that they managed to ship crippling stuttering for 4 years in gaming laptops specifically. Makes you wonder about the end user psychology, evidently

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."

pjmlp 1y ago
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.
- Aldo_Malkinson 1y ago
  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.
  - LoganDark 1y ago
    > 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.
    - CyberDildonics 1y ago
      Where are you getting these ideas?
      - LoganDark 1y ago
        What ideas? The one that non-autistic people (majority of the population) are less likely to care about programming stuff? That's my own idea, hence "IME" (in my experience).
  - butlike 1y ago
    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.
SchemaLoad 1y ago
Windows laptop users are just conditioned to the fact that they don't work properly and just deal with the issues.
- PicassoCTs 1y ago
  [dead]
- IlikeKitties 1y ago
  I don't see Mac or Linux Laptops being that much different in that regard.
- CrossVR 1y ago
  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.
  - alexdbird 1y ago
    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!
    - CrossVR 1y ago
      Was it a Fall 2013 or Spring 2013 Macbook?
  - LeifCarrotson 1y ago
    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.
immibis 1y ago
All the evidence points to corporations, in general, not caring about making products that actually work.
CrossVR 1y ago
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.
- fulafel 1y ago
  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.
- Strom 1y ago
  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. -- [1] https://rog-forum.asus.com/t5/rog-zephyrus-series/gx501-zephyrus-unable-to-output-4k60hz-hdmi/td-p/717683 https://rog-forum.asus.com/t5/rog-zephyrus-series/gx501-zeph... [2] https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-zephyrus/rog-zephyrus-gx501-series/ https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-zephyrus/rog-zephyrus-gx501...
  - YesThatTom2 1y ago
    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.”
nodja 1y ago
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.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  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.
  - lostlogin 1y ago
    I’m very had very different experiences, with MacBooks.
    - AstralStorm 1y ago
      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.
gambiting 1y ago
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.
- alias_neo 1y ago
  > 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.
  - gambiting 1y ago
    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.
    - alias_neo 1y ago
      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.
nottorp 1y ago
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...
- tails4e 1y ago
  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.
Tade0 1y ago
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.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  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.
  - Tade0 1y ago
    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.
numpad0 1y ago
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.
bakugo 1y ago
> 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.
Self-Perfection 1y ago
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.

pjmlp 1y ago

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.

Aldo_Malkinson 1y ago
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.
- LoganDark 1y ago
  > 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.
  - CyberDildonics 1y ago
    Where are you getting these ideas?
    - LoganDark 1y ago
      What ideas? The one that non-autistic people (majority of the population) are less likely to care about programming stuff? That's my own idea, hence "IME" (in my experience).
- butlike 1y ago
  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.

SchemaLoad 1y ago

Windows laptop users are just conditioned to the fact that they don't work properly and just deal with the issues.

PicassoCTs 1y ago
[dead]
IlikeKitties 1y ago
I don't see Mac or Linux Laptops being that much different in that regard.
CrossVR 1y ago
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.
- alexdbird 1y ago
  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!
  - CrossVR 1y ago
    Was it a Fall 2013 or Spring 2013 Macbook?
- LeifCarrotson 1y ago
  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.

immibis 1y ago

All the evidence points to corporations, in general, not caring about making products that actually work.

CrossVR 1y ago

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.

fulafel 1y ago
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.
Strom 1y ago
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. -- [1] https://rog-forum.asus.com/t5/rog-zephyrus-series/gx501-zephyrus-unable-to-output-4k60hz-hdmi/td-p/717683 https://rog-forum.asus.com/t5/rog-zephyrus-series/gx501-zeph... [2] https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-zephyrus/rog-zephyrus-gx501-series/ https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-zephyrus/rog-zephyrus-gx501...
- YesThatTom2 1y ago
  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.”

nodja 1y ago

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.

ACCount37 1y ago
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.
- lostlogin 1y ago
  I’m very had very different experiences, with MacBooks.
  - AstralStorm 1y ago
    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.

gambiting 1y ago

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.

alias_neo 1y ago
> 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.
- gambiting 1y ago
  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.
  - alias_neo 1y ago
    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.

nottorp 1y ago

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...

tails4e 1y ago
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.

Tade0 1y ago

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.

matheusmoreira 1y ago
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.
- Tade0 1y ago
  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.

numpad0 1y ago

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.

bakugo 1y ago

> 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.

Self-Perfection 1y ago

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.