Interesting that your Asus device has audio issues. my laptop is the Zephyrus G15 I think? (I know it’s GA503QR) and audio is fine out of the box.
definitely a great space heater too though, the power supply is 200 W, and I usually run Cyberpunk at reduced graphics settings to cut down on heat and fan noise. It will legit heat up a small room
It’s a bit of a shame it works for you, because yeah, they’re similar devices but whatever software nonsense ASUS did on Windows to try to fix their crappy downward-firing speakers on mine is not on Linux and they just sound like a 1950s radio. I don’t know that there is or can ever be a fix, honestly, since it’s clearly a quirk of this particular model. I could try to manually EQ them back to life or something, but… yeah, neither ASUS nor Linux maintainers are going to fix it for me.
I agree that it’s definitely worth losing performance most of the time, too. If not for the heat for the fan noise. It’s actually not whiney or high pitched, but it’s definitely not quiet.
I got this thing as a desktop replacement because I was working on the go for a while, and it did that job pretty well while I needed it. I’m not complaining. It’s still a beast of a laptop, honestly. As you can see from the benchmarks it absolutely holds up. Still, there are better, cheaper ways to get that kind of performance if you don’t need to carry them inside a backpack.
FWIW, Bazzite’s build for ASUS laptops does pick up the iGPU/dGPU system correctly and it does handle power management mostly fine. If not for the audio issues this would be a perfectly decent setup. As it is, I’m probably going to keep a Windows install on it for the foreseeable.
Unfortunately they also soldered half the RAM to the motherboard, meaning you can only upgrade half. My favorite feature is that the chassis screws are made of microwaved butter, so one of them has stripped. I upgraded the RAM to 24GB yesterday, and had to open the back at a slight angle and squeeze in there… couldn’t disconnect the battery or anything.
At least I can load up more KSP mods now!
I know nobody really cares, but I had a bit of time to go mess with the audio problems and I ended up rewiring the speakers with alsa-tools. As suspected, the default install doesn’t pick up the integrated speaker config properly, so it’s only using two of the four internal drivers. Overriding the mapping to blast the audio signal out of every speaker possible fixes the audio issues, but then the volume controls only map correctly at the midpoint and changing the volume messes with the mix of the speakers unless you use the alsa mixer instead.
I bet you can sort it out one way or another but man is this not practical compared to just… having per-model Windows drivers from ASUS.
(oh, and while I’m here, who cares about laptop backplates, those things have a million screws for no reason on top of a million plastic tabs, just do what you gotta do to yank that thing out and then put some chewing gum in there to hold it together)
Interesting that your Asus device has audio issues. my laptop is the Zephyrus G15 I think? (I know it’s GA503QR) and audio is fine out of the box. definitely a great space heater too though, the power supply is 200 W, and I usually run Cyberpunk at reduced graphics settings to cut down on heat and fan noise. It will legit heat up a small room
It’s a bit of a shame it works for you, because yeah, they’re similar devices but whatever software nonsense ASUS did on Windows to try to fix their crappy downward-firing speakers on mine is not on Linux and they just sound like a 1950s radio. I don’t know that there is or can ever be a fix, honestly, since it’s clearly a quirk of this particular model. I could try to manually EQ them back to life or something, but… yeah, neither ASUS nor Linux maintainers are going to fix it for me.
I agree that it’s definitely worth losing performance most of the time, too. If not for the heat for the fan noise. It’s actually not whiney or high pitched, but it’s definitely not quiet.
I got this thing as a desktop replacement because I was working on the go for a while, and it did that job pretty well while I needed it. I’m not complaining. It’s still a beast of a laptop, honestly. As you can see from the benchmarks it absolutely holds up. Still, there are better, cheaper ways to get that kind of performance if you don’t need to carry them inside a backpack.
FWIW, Bazzite’s build for ASUS laptops does pick up the iGPU/dGPU system correctly and it does handle power management mostly fine. If not for the audio issues this would be a perfectly decent setup. As it is, I’m probably going to keep a Windows install on it for the foreseeable.
Unfortunately they also soldered half the RAM to the motherboard, meaning you can only upgrade half. My favorite feature is that the chassis screws are made of microwaved butter, so one of them has stripped. I upgraded the RAM to 24GB yesterday, and had to open the back at a slight angle and squeeze in there… couldn’t disconnect the battery or anything. At least I can load up more KSP mods now!
I know nobody really cares, but I had a bit of time to go mess with the audio problems and I ended up rewiring the speakers with alsa-tools. As suspected, the default install doesn’t pick up the integrated speaker config properly, so it’s only using two of the four internal drivers. Overriding the mapping to blast the audio signal out of every speaker possible fixes the audio issues, but then the volume controls only map correctly at the midpoint and changing the volume messes with the mix of the speakers unless you use the alsa mixer instead.
I bet you can sort it out one way or another but man is this not practical compared to just… having per-model Windows drivers from ASUS.
(oh, and while I’m here, who cares about laptop backplates, those things have a million screws for no reason on top of a million plastic tabs, just do what you gotta do to yank that thing out and then put some chewing gum in there to hold it together)