ASUS F17 Gaming Laptop FX706L-ES53 / Users can Upgrade RAM, Add another M.2 NVME drive & Add an SSD /

 

I open up my newest gaming machine (Steam : CS:GO) 

Reviews on Amazon suggest no second M2 NVME port (wrong) 

Reviews also say there is no room for a SATA SSD (wrong) 

Here I have photographic evidence from my machine of why these reviews are wrong! 

This machine can take another stick of RAM, another M2 drive & an SSD

Let's have a look! Boots up from cold off in 5 seconds! Amazing

Mini Review 

After disabling most of the Windows 10 processes & turning off most of the features & uninstalling bloatware, I updated windows 10 to the latest version, downloaded & installed STEAM the online gaming  platform & then downloaded CS:GO // my favorite computer game! So far I have racked up a few hours, having played CS:GO for 163 hours total over a 5 year window of time. Yea, I am not a hard core gamer! I play a 15 minute round & then exit. Sometimes I play 3 rounds in a row. I often go months without playing at all! I usually play when its cold & bad weather outside, when its not as fun to go for a walk, a bike ride or motorcycle ride. Yea, I got a gaming laptop to play CS:GO // my gaming desktop was turned into a random X mining rig & I prefer to leave it in that mode generating profit like an asset which creative passive income, converting electricity & computer hardware into cryptocurrencies with high liquidity since I get paid in Satoshi or tiny fractions of BTC .. 

Fast Startup 

Super fast M.2 NVMe performance enables this machine to boot up to windows 10 login in 5 seconds from cold off! Thats faster than resuming the machine from a sleep state // WIFI 6 performance under 802.11ax super ultra fast maxing out the performance of our Comcast model routers throughput speeds! 

Desktop Performance Mode 

When the F17 plugged into grid power with the included 150w adapter, this 2020 gaming laptop accelerates CS:GO in performance mode, meaning hundreds of FPS or frames per second, for buttery smooth gameplay. I use a cheap optical vertical mouse (ergonomic, less wrist strain) not the touch pad for gaming. Ergonomic computer mice allow your wrist to operate without twisting in an unnatural ways making them more comfortable to use or utilize, especially for longer sessions of computer use!

Portability  

2020 F17 only 5.7 lbs, totally portable in many backpacks! I do not game on the go, but sporadically play games on my smartphone (extremely rarely, only if bored & stuck somewhere for hours with nothing to do) I do not care about portability, but do move the laptop between a floor desk, the floor, a table, my lap; so the lighter weight or lower mass actually a nice feature! 

17 in IPS LED LCD with 144hz

Screen very bright & crisp with good color, probably not art color accurate, its able to dim nicely. Night Mode in Window 10 reduces the blue light & makes the screen a nice dimmer orange shade better for nighttime use. The ASUS Crate App enables screen color modification modes for all sorts of different use cases to suit the end user! Some games & CS:GO turns the screen back into a performance setting (faster switch with more blue light) so consider wearing blue blocking glasses if you play this kind of machine near bedtime. With that, any light exposure can act like a stimulant that suppresses melatonin release in your brain *the sleep hormone* & promotes the release of cortisol the stress inducing wakefulness promoting hormone. Dr. Charles A. Czeisler helped to elucidate & disseminate sleep science about the circadian sleep wake cycle & hormonal control axis between cortisol & melatonin. The main ideas is that any small amount of light can act like a stimulate & cause sleep problems, more on that later.

Speakers & Sounds

The audio sounds flat amazing for a laptop, especially how loud it can get. It has wide dynamic range & really decent base for the two small speakers inside. Down-firing speaker modules are shock damper mounted with yellow rubber rings (see image) on plastic posts to reduce vibration translation into the frame of the laptop (prevents keyboard & case from vibrating) which also improves audio quality. The case was also tuned & low electrical noise audio driver DTX optimized to further enhance sound quality

This computer was $917 USD shipped with sales tax in early 2021 if your wondering! Today crypto currencies are booming as older fiat currencies faltering with inflation & quantum easing!

Have a look inside after the back cover removed! Removing the back cover was easy with a 000 + "Philips" technical driver, just "normal" screws & all but one in one corner, were the same length! 

Have a look at the EMI enhanced bottom cover of the machine, it contains grounding points with metal mesh foam contacts & some of the screw posts also ground the mainboard logic! The inside coated with a sparkly metal powder substance that looks like electrodeposition nickel alloy (speculative guess, or aluminum copper alloy) IDK /// Metals have loose orbital electrons, think of the electrons in metal kind like water moving through a column of ceramic zirconia spheres, not really sticking to them, but all around them. 

AC causes waves to form in the electric fields, kind of like water rippling or how sound passes through gasses in the air. DC causes electrons to actually flow through the metals, but this creates more resistance & cannot easily be used to exploit cool electromagnetic induction in transformers for simple voltage inversion which is very important for large long distance power transmission. This is why nearly all power grids worldwide use AC not DC! More recently, high temperature super conductors & high power switch transistors have enabled HVDC to work at the gigawatt scale, though to very limited market diffusion as of middle 2021. 

If you know what kind of metal magic ASUSTeK applied on the inside of the polymer bottom cover, please let me know in the comments (I greatly appreciate a greater understanding if you help & share this information with me & everyone else who finds this content!) 

Battery Information 

There were two possible combinations of this machine, this one FX706L-ES came with a 144Hz screen & the smaller 48 Wh battery such that there's room for an SSD. The other version FX706L-RS came with a 60Hz screen & a 90 Wh battery but no SSD install spot! 

48 WH / 11.4vdc = 4.212 Ah or 4212 mAh nominal capacity (typical) 4050mAh rated / Model B31N2176 / Cells made & assembled in China by Simplo Technology (Chong Qing) Inc. 

Typical of consumer electronics we have a 3 cell in series LiPO or lithium polymer battery, probably lithium cobalt oxide hard carbon in aluminized polymer pouches. This type of battery damaged by high heat & 100% charging & you can make this LiPo style battery last 5X longer by keeping it 30-80% charged & cooler. Avoid the top 10% between 90% & 100% as that causes swelling damage & avoid draining below 10% near 0% as that causes shrink damage, both of which will reduce the battery pack life & cause it to lose its ability to hold a charge, progressively. 

With regular 100% charge to 5% charge this kind of battery will fade to 70% or less of its original capacity within 300 charge cycles or 24 months. If you use the cooler 30-80% long life charging regime, the pack will endure 3000+ charge cycles or 5+ years, which ever comes first, while losing a similar amount of capacity. The worst thing for the battery would be to leave the machine plugged in constantly charging the battery to 100% while playing games that heat up the machine, thermal stressing the battery while its 100% charged. LiPo batteries subjected to constant 100% charging while heated tend to swell up or bloat or puff up & become a fire hazard if the case material snags a sharp edge inside the device & rips the cells casing, exposing the energetic cathode materials & electrolyte to O2 or oxygen & moisture or H2O or water vapor in the air, which can cause a violent fire, venting with flame, noxious smoke produced, thermal runaway, like the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 or Boeing Dreamliner battery. 

You can avoid fire hazard from Li-Ion batteries by keeping them partially charged 30% & %80! Partial charging easy with 30 min charges, you can plug the power adapter in & use your computer, look at the clock, then at +30 min mouse over the battery icon in the bottom right corner of the display & have a look at the SOC or state of charge %, when it gets up to 70% or 75% or 80% or 85% un-plug the power adapter. Now keep using your machine on its battery. Optimal storage of LiPO between 30-40% SOC! 

The disputed 2nd PCIe SSD or M.2 slot for a high speed second MVNe drive. Confused users of amazon either ordered the wrong RS version of this ES F17, or they are obviously unable to locate the clearly labeled & obviously visible additional drive slot location, equipped with a black retention screw pre-installed on the blue color motherboard. ASUS also screen printed with white ink the location of where you can install a second M.2 drive! 

Look, the Amazon reviewers were wrong about not being able to add another SODIMM RAM stick, does that make them "So Dim?" I cannot speculate on the cognitive performance of people that leave Amazon product reviews, but if your a high functioning intelligent person & read some of the comments, you will probably be blown away with the lack of coherent logic or intelligible content in the poorly written reviews with fake news // 

I am reminded of people leaving a 1 star review for a Invicta Grand Diver wrist watch with a picture of the water damage while the stem cover was clearly unscrewed. Yes, on a automatic self winding dive water, the stem cover must be screwed closed so the gasket inside can prevent water ingress into the case .. DUH! Read the instructions, its not the manufacturer of the watches fault or amazons fault if you do not use the product correctly. You must screw stem cover down to the crown or water will get inside! 

To be fair, you have to use your fingers to lift up the black plastic insulator film as I have done with my fingers in the image above to see the additional ram slot. Also note that the heat spreader on the include ram is crooked! Noting this upon first inspection, at first I though the RAM stick was not inserted all the way! lol 

And what do we have here but an SSD slot with 4 pre tapped screw holes to mount an SSD, also completely contrary to the poorly written inaccurate reviews of this product on Amazon! 

No, I do not work for ASUS but I am a professional device repair tech & have been inside a lot of consumer electronic products opened up for upgrades or repairs. I am 37 years old & have been building custom made windows OS PC's since I was 14, back in 1997 // A lot has changed since then! 

Yea, to protect the electronics on the board from the metal inside of the bottom cover, they have to cover some parts in an insulator film (black PVC film it appears) // that prevents electrical shorting from destroying board components like the SODIMM ram sticks etc. 

By the time some people access this information, the entire computer will be an SOC on a tiny logic board hooked up to a larger battery with absolutely no user replaceable or upgradable parts. Designed to fail with a finite life & then become e-trash, lithographic singular monolithic electronics in the future will be sealed, water proof, heat resistant & designed to last a certain amount of time, like 24 months & then be turned in for recycling, forcing the end user to buy a new machine. Smartphones are already like this in many ways! Many modern home appliance fail after just a few years & the repairs costs can exceed the replacement cost, causing many consumers to just buy another new one, their new one also designed to fail / greedy jerks in the companies making these short life products have college degree's in "life cycle analytics" a euphemism for "Designed Obsolescence" a terms that grammatically accurate, given that the manufactures specifically design products to fail after a short time interval. 

Prior to the 1980's, most products sold to consumers were designed to last a lifetime or a long time. People working at the manufacturers back then prided themselves on designing things so that end users could easily fix or repair at low cost & or just made things out of more heavy duty metal designs that hold up for 50+ years like some older fridge & metal lathes & machine tools! 

New plastic heavy things falls apart because the polymer dries out from heat damage & the plastic polymer becomes brittles & cracks. Apple made an iPhone like this (5C) & a plastic MacBook & after just few years of use the polycarbonate cases would start cracking & falling apart. Apple switched to aluminum unibody designs which is nice because aluminum highly recyclable very much unlike most forms of polycarbonate! To get fun colors aluminum can be anodized with acids & electricity & metal dyes to make cool colors like the 2021 iMac.

 

CPU & GPU are hooked up to the cooling fan fin heatsink dumping system (forced air) by hollow coated copper heat pipes that effectively take heat away from the hot chips & moves the heat into the radiator fins on both sides where two self cleaning *Asus Tech Fans* MIL810H, with brushless motor fans that take air from the top keyboard & special vents on the underside of the machine & force it through the finned aluminum or nickel plated copper heat fins so that the air can take heat away from the machines hottest running components. 

Even with CS:GO on low settings & running on battery in battery saver mode, these fans hum along at nearly a full speed, a very noisy state to keep thermal loading of the CPU & GPU to a minimum. Keeping these complex multi-billion transistor chips cooler makes them last longer! To that END Asus actually designed this F17 Gaming Laptop to have long endurance as a product, meaning it could last a long time if you are gentle with it! I adding a Noctua NH-09S cooler to my mining rigs Intel 9400F 6 core processor to reduce its temperature by about 10 degrees // based on reviewing thermal performance differences of the included Intel CPU cooling fan & the exceptional & expensive aftermarket Noctua solution! See more at https://noctua.at/en/nh-u9s

17 inch 144hz IPS LED LCD screen attached to the laptop case assembly with these strong steel screwed down & bolt & nut attachment hinges that look very durable & well made! 

I use this USB-A powered big single cooling fan with metal mesh cover by CoolMaster under the F17 to blow quiet forced air at 70 CFM at the bottom of the machine when I am playing CS:GO or doing other computational intensive tasks like A.I. work that makes the CPU & GPU heat up more // along with the power adapter & other electrical components of the system. Keeping your laptop cooler like this will make it last much longer! 

Blasting Your Eyes with Screen Light 

Since artificial lighting & especially since screens like TV & computer & cells phone were diffused into the public worldwide a corresponding increase in sleep disorders of many kinds noted by doctors who have patients complaining about difficulties falling asleep & staying asleep. 

Using Melatonin Supplement to Improve Sleep Quality

In the USA you can buy 1mg or 5m or 10mg etc Melatonin over the counter without a prescription & sometimes I take 5mg of Melatonin at bed time to help me get higher quality sleep & to stay asleep without waking up as much. I tend to wake up after about ~3.5 hours of sleep, wide awake for ~1-2 hours & then sleep ~2-4 more hours. Called Biphasic Sleep, this actually really commonly reported by people for the last 350 years & some evidence that its a genetic safety mechanism from deep history that allowed our ancestors to wake up for a safety patrol of their improvised living conditions in the middle of the night when nocturnal predictors our roaming around trying to find animals like people to eat as food. Back then, in earlier human history Nature was dangerous, especially before guns were a widely diffused technology! 

Human Over Development

Now in the 21st century, humans have "mastered" nature to the point of causing climate change & pollution problems & human overpopulation that's driving extinction rates in nature upward at unpredicted rates & and also causes eco-system destruction that indirectly ends sicken people with preventable diseases through the food web, since everyone eats foods from nature, made from plants or animals that ate plants or fish from the sea. This is why pollution is unethical, its people sickening other people & nature to improve the profit of a small minority or people. 

Greed a Mental Illness 

Greed causes people to ruin & destroy nature & the lives of other people. Greed should be classified as an antisocial pathology of the mind, or mental illness! Greed serves to increase social division, income inequity, air water & land pollution, degradation of ecosystems & destruction of natural landscapes which we cannot repair or replace to the original functional condition even with advanced ecological restoration! 

Ecological Restoration : Time Without Human Activity 

Only long periods of time without human impacts are areas of nature able to recover or heal. See, sin causes people to do sick unspeakable things to other people, to nature, to animals. Sin means a persons moral & ethical failing applied in real life in ways that makes life worse for everyone. With some irony, most people wish they could leave the world in a better place than when they entered it. Most people are not senselessly greedy, most people are moderate, reasonable, fair, wanting to do the right things, wanting to have loving relationships, wanting to be a good steward of the natural world, wanting to protect animals & nature from abuse; desiring spiritual & mental health & physical wellness & strength & intellect // not just endlessly more money!