Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A and UX32VD

[kaefert66014235]

omg, you truly get down to 8,5 watts with Ubuntu 12.10? I found it incredible to get down to 12 watts, in the times of the alpha2 release when I bought my UX32VD the lowest I could get was 19 watts... I never looked at the windows power usage, I didn't even know that windows is capable of telling you the watts it takes out of the battery. Only thing I can tell about windows that it was horrible slow with all that bloatware.

To be honest, I also think that the battery time is quite horrible small with max 3 hours that I can currently get.

about the trackpad, I think its a fail on design and driver level, on windows it worked better. But I managed to get around with it by not removing the finger from the tochpad before clicking, just move to the button you wanna click on and directly press down when you reached it (hopefully you're over the area on the touchpad that can be pressed down )

I don't see a problem with the fans, the only time they are really loud when you turn the device on - during the bios tests.

the brightness thing resetting I have sometimes too, but mostly only when connecting or disconnecting the power, otherwise they stay mostly put. I think I disabled the brighness management in some gnome config utilty.

[Linuxisfast]

ux31a here. running arch linux (kernel v3.5.3) and can second the "easily get 4hr" with casual browsing and reading/typing.

My battery's power consumption sits at about 7-8 W which is better than my luck with any of my other recent laptops. I can push it to 6hr I believe although I haven't tried it.

good stuff in terms of battery consumption.

i also didn't need the second nvidia gpu. the integrated one is more than capable of playing 1080p content on my TV via HDMI using va-api. That's I'll need a GPU for.

I have similarly specced icore5 Intel HD3000 ASUS K53E which with Jupiter installed easily gives me 4.5 hours of surfing, typing and some conversion work.

[TommyDelVed]

Hallo!
I have a lot of problems with the install of Ubuntu (12.04 32 / 12.10 32 64) on ux32vd r3001v
I don't see anything during the installation, my screen is always black.
But, sometime I listen the tipical sound of ubuntu (drum), but I the screen..

Can someone help me?

Thank


p.s. sorry for my awful english.

[danieleds]

To be honest, I also think that the battery time is quite horrible small with max 3 hours that I can currently get.

Max 3 hours?
I get 5 hours or more with full screen brightness and wireless enabled.
I keep bluetooth disabled when I'm not using it, and most importantly I configured bumblebee. This really makes the difference, because it turns off the nvidia card when not used.

[kaefert66014235]

yes I configured bumblebee too, when I use optirun to start some application the power usage jumps up by 10 watts, but even without the nvidia card I am usally around 15 Watts. I also have bluetooth turned off, since I never use it.

[Fallen Guru]

Interesting that the power usage should be all over the board. What I did to get to 8,5W:
- kernel cmd line: pcie_aspm=force nmi_watchdog=0
- BT off in BIOS (I don't use it)
- nVidia card switched off via bbswitch
- card reader and asus_wmi module unloaded (both seem to be polling -> lots of wakeups)
- screen brightness at minimum
- all powertop recommendations implemented
- kb illumination off
- Wifi off
Obviously the machine is not very usable in this state but I wanted to know how far it could go, the answer being, not very far, really, for Ivy Bridge.
The 6W comparison figure was pulled out of a review, I've never booted Windows on this.

Say, does your fan control behave differently when on battery vs when plugged in?

[kaefert66014235]

Fallen Guru:
Well, considering the hassle you have made yourself to get to 8,5 watts my 11 watts don't sound that bad.

I hardly ever notice the fans of my UX32VD. Only when booting, they shortly turn up to full speed, and if the device resides on a textile underground, like on the bed, then of course it gets warm after some time and the fans spin faster. But not on the table and also not when I'm sitting on a couch and the notebooks resides in my lap.

[Fallen Guru]

I've got the battery tamed now, it seems: nearly 8h in idle and it looks like I might actually get 5h under a medium workload. The funny thing is, it isn't consistent. Sometimes power drain pretty much stays under 7W, sometimes the exact same configuration will struggle to stay below double ...
It's pretty much the same for fan control and CPU frequency scaling. When it works it's great but sometimes things just refuse to settle down. No obvious causes like runaway processes (in top or powertop).

Next stop, Wifi. The syncs are in the 60-70 Mb/s range, I certainly haven't seeen more than 130 Mb/s, it's the same for the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. The access point, an ahem Airport Express is supposed to be able to go up to 300 Mb/s sync speed. Real speed is ~15 Mb/s, and that's in a good mood ... Do I have a defective Wifi module, borked settings ...? How's your Wifi performance?

[kaefert66014235]

could you share details about what you did to get that kind of battery performance? My usage is not going below 11 Watts, and when I'm doing some easy stuff like browsing and watching pdfs I only reach about 2,5 hours. Really bad for the battery seems to be the switching between workspaces (compiz takes 70% of one cpu core for the time of switching, which makes the battery usage go up from 12 to 22 watts).

About 802.11n performance - When I put both the laptop and my router in a very isolated place, only a few inches appart, with the right angle, I managed to reach about 120MBit/s = 15mbytes/s real performance (iperf), but even then with strange pauses of up to 2 seconds of no data.

But in a more realistic setup, the router on an exposed position (I have around 20 to 30 visible wifi networks in the vecinity) I only get 1/3rd of that and less, so 5mbytes per second maximum.

[Mobidoy]

I have noticed that while in grub (was trying to boot in command line) the f5 and f6 function keys are working, if it can help solving it !