ASUS GL702ZC

This page is about the Laptop ROG Strix AMD laptop. Runs pretty good out of the box, with some minor issues.

Backlight

This ASUS model comes with Radeon RX580. Backlight with xorg-xbacklight will not work; since Radeon cards do not support RandR. The relevant module for backlight is amdgpu_bl0. (Keyboard LEDs are interfaced with asus::kbd_backlight) light works well, and available in the repos. (The default should be the screen backlight) For example; the following commands will increase/decrease backlight of the screen;

$ light -A 5
$ light -U i

For controlling the keyboard LEDS using the same command; the target must be defined;

$ light -Ars "sysfs/leds/asus::kbd_backlight" 1
$ light -Urs "sysfs/leds/asus::kbd_backlight" 1

Fans

lm_sensors do not detect any interfaces for fan control. However, fan control through NBFC works well; and there is a profile for this laptop. Enabling and starting the service files, and applying the configurations are sufficient.

Troubleshooting

Secure Boot

The BIOS has an utility to load your own BIOS keys; however loading my own keys in the BIOS using the firmware interface did not work.

Fans turn 100% and computer becomes unresponsive after long idle time

Have not found a fix for this, but reporting this issue nonetheless. This might also indicate a hardware failure: certain power control circuitry can fail and require an RMA for a mainboard replacement.

Crashes with MCE

The system will sometimes crash (check the Phoronix thread). The problem seems to be the AMD processor. There is no suggested fix other than RMA; you can check if you are affected by running ryzen kill script. My personal experience is that I have two cores that cause these errors; and I had not have it happen much after configuring fans using nbfc.

To further investigate, check out Machine-check exception

Bluetooth and network issues

The wifi card is of model rtl8822be. Older kernel versions do not have the bluetooth module for this card (>4.19). Also, on 5.2; the rtl cards wifi modules were merged into rtlwifi; which was not working for a while. (See my BBS thread here) Currently, wifi works with the stable kernel; but is noticeably slower than the previous kernel module.