Asus ROG Strix GL503GE SCAR - wrong ram slot, scratchy noise, cpu always on max clock

[FULLMETALJACKET7]

Brand new GL503GE here, same problem with coil whine. C1E hacks helps, but it essentialy kills idle powersaving on the laptop. I don't like that. Coffee Lake was supposed to be good at powersaving.

Also I have a new bit of information: My colleague bought GL503VD (Kaby Lake i7, gtx1050) few months back and he's not reporting any sounds at all. So there is either something wrong with Coffee Lake (and/or gtx1050ti) implementation on this motherboard, or it's a random issue. That gives me some hope.

I'm also bummed the same way Vacs was about the extention RAM slot. The extension deck was the single thing that got me to buy this laptop instead of similarly priced MSI laptop with a slightly better specs. I also bought some upgrades right away to take advantage of it.

Aaanyway. It's going for it's first RMA tomorrow here in Czech Republic. Guy on the hotline was super cool, Asus has pickup service here, so fingers crossed.

Some people can't hear coil whine because of "bad" hearing. It's a very high pitched noise and most people don't even notice it. Same goes for the high pitched noise CRT tv's used to produce.
My wife can't hear the coil whine on my GL502VSK, and it's kind of loud, while I can clearly hear it. *Your friend's laptop probably also have the same coil whine issue but he can't hear it. Good for him I guess lol

[FarleyCZ]

Some people can't hear coil whine because of "bad" hearing. It's a very high pitched noise and most people don't even notice it. Same goes for the high pitched noise CRT tv's used to produce.
My wife can't hear the coil whine on my GL502VSK, and it's kind of loud, while I can clearly hear it. *Your friend's laptop probably also have the same coil whine issue but he can't hear it. Good for him I guess lol

I don't think that's the case to be honest. Hearing loss means you can't hear very high pitched frequencies. Like above 16kHz. Or 12kHz if it's really bad. Either his coil whine is on different frequency, or it's not there at all. My coil whine (and coil whine from other gl503ge's in YT videos) is not even 8kHz. It's high pitched, yes, but not that high pitched. 2 - 5kHz region I'd say. Hearing loss usually doesn't go that "low".

Your coil whine is probably much higher than the one on my laptop. (Sorry to hear that, very high frequencies are painful.)

(I'm TV broadcast sound engineer, I dare to say I know a thing or two about frequenies.)

[ssc134]

After a week of digging about the weird scratching sound coming from my GL503GE found out it was coil whine. The laptop's a month old. And I can't return it to on Amazon either. That sound gets on my nerves. Can't work in a silent room without a pair of headphones. Very bad design by Asus. Didn't expect this on an ROG.

[FarleyCZ]

Ok, so quick update about my laptop. They had it in the czech official ASUS service for over three weeks. They changed the motherboard and updated bios. It got a little bit better while idling, but still gets annoying when I move a mouse in Chrome or something.

The serious part is that the report includes a beautiful description about how this behaviour is essentially normal and if it's quiter than 10db, it's not a faulty product.

On the one hand I appreciate them for replacing my motherboard when they didn't have to, but it makes me even more sure that designers of this GL503 refresh just f**ked up big time and service centers all over the globe are trying to avoid a major recall. I'm extremely dissappointed in ASUS. That laptop would be amazing if it wasn't making this noise.

Is there any way we can fight back? I don't wanna cause any problems to that little service center, they just fix crap, they have no power over bad designs. ...but this is just not acceptable. Is there a contact directly into some ASUS operation center or HQ? I am really tempted to threaten them with making this a public matter.

[FarleyCZ]

...also there is another possibility. There might be something wrong with 8th gen Intels. There are reports on the internet of similar coil-whine horror stories concerning not only ROG laptops, but also ZenBooks, latest Dell XPS 13, latest Inspiron gaming series, I think I also saw even a HP Envy one. In quite a lot of cases there is a common detail and it's 8th gen i7 or i5 inside.

If that's true, that would be worst news we can get. ...in that case manufacturers can't do anything about it and Intel is too big to care.

[vacs]

I'm using the throttlestop fix to get rid of the coil whine since I bought it 3 months ago and so far so good, I'm not experiencing any heat or battery issues regarding the dissabled C1E so the problem would be gone if asus made a bios update that lets you dissable the C1E in bios like many other manufactors do (I recently serviced a dell notebook of $300 and had many options in the bios and a C1E toggle aswel)

the other thing that bothers me are the fans, my GL503GE runs under 50°C on normal light use (web, office, music and movies) but the fans never go off...on battery it's around 42°C and they do turn off the moment they go under 45°C so another thing asus should do is to set fans to go off under 55°C because my old GL552VW had one fan with wrose thermal specs and was mostly quiet under 60°C

[guuustavo]

About the noise issue, i bought a G703GS and have the same problem, check the sound here (5 sec mouse movement) : http://ge.tt/162boJt2 )

I have sent a complaint today.

[FarleyCZ]

Yeah, I'm slowly comming to terms that I just bought it as it is. Iľl use throttlestop to turn it off as well, if it gets too annoying.

But it doesn't stop me from writting angry e-mails. Already made a clickbaity topic about that on Linuses forum. I'll include that in the e-mails as a proof that I won't give up untill they admit they messed up. I would expect this behaviour from greedy corporate companies like Apple. Asus seemed way cooler to me before this.

[DvvDROG]

Hi, same problem G703GS GTX1070..

The sound is very annoying, and it started a few weeks ago. any information on how to solve it?

[TopOkay]

[SOLUTION SEEMS TO WORK WITH ALL i7-8750H ROGS]

Hi all guys.

Thanks to this forum I'm using a solution (sort of) for get almost rid of the scratchy/coil whine noise using only Windows power management settings.
Mine is a GL703GE-GC033T, but I think this can work on others models.

However, little preamble: my unit comes with 302 BIOS and Win10 ver 1709 build 16299.15
At begin I've used the pc without connection to prevent it from updating, and I'm almost completely sure that the noise wasn't here.
It comes after updating Windows to 1803 and BIOS to 310.
I've contacted Asus and they answer they are working on the problem... I hope so...


However I've created and modified some power plans as Passion64x said and done some tests with Passmark.

Main problem is that Windows use 2 types of power settings:
1) basically there is one power plan called "Balanced" in the "old" power settings windows and then the new slider with 3 power state (4 when on battery) that is shown doing left-click on battery icon
2) the old-way power setting option with power plans, if you create and set a new power plan the slider disappear

Now, the scracth/whine/noise is related to how cpu frequencies are managed (high freq = high noise, mid freq = intermittent noise, low freq = almost no noise or very low), indeed if I set the slider at MAX PERFORMANCE (or use a High Performance plan) the cpu stuck to max freq and the noise is "loud" and consistent. If I set the slider to better performance or better battery is intermittent and the freq will vary.

What I've done:
1) with balanced power plan active, I've set the slider in the center state (better performance, i think)
2) created some new power plan, one High performance and others starting from Power saver plan, and called them "Power saver", "85% cpu", "99% cpu".
85% and 99% max cpu will disable turbo boost as said in others posts.


These are the results with Passmark CPU tests and HWINFO monitor:

> default Balanced power plan with slider at max performance:
11188 pt --> max values: T 75C, supersonic jet-like fans, 3992ghz, cpu package power 59.962w, Power Limit Exceeded YES on all cores
= continuous scratching with high pitch noise

> default Balanced power plan with slider at better performance (slider at middle state):
11336 --> max values: T 75C, supersonic jet-like fans, 3991ghz, cpu package power 59.900w, Power Limit Exceeded YES on all cores
= intermittent scratching with low pitch noise

> High performance plan:
11128 --> max values: T 77C, supersonic jet-like fans, 3992ghz, cpu package power 59.935w, Power Limit Exceeded YES on all cores
= continuous scratching with high low/medium pitch noise

> Power saver plan:
10358 --> max values: T 64C, airliner-like fans, 3591ghz, cpu package power 54.075w
= very low intermittent scratching, tolerable (for me)

> 99% cpu:
7480 --> max values: T 51C, quiet fans, 2095ghz, cpu package power 28.253w
= continuous scratching but hardly audible

> 85% cpu:
6494 -->max values: T 48C, quiet fans, 1797ghz, cpu package power 24.795w
= intermittent scratching practically inaudible

...max freq of 99% and 85% are indeed the 99% and 85% of 2.2 ghz, the base frequency.

The power saver plan (in green) for me it's very good: noise doesn't bother me, cpu go almost at max performance and good temps under full load.
And if I want max power I can put balanced plan with better performance (in orange) and go at full power when needed...


I've searched the 302 bios for downgrade and do some tests but I didn't found nothing online.