ASUS A8Js 14inch Widescreen Notebook

In our two year run, we haven’t reviewed that many laptops. This is the third, actually. Therefore, we haven’t yet finalized our testing scheme, but as we write more notebook articles, we will refine our processes. To test today, I will be comparing a few things to the recently reviewed Lamborghini VX1, also from ASUS.

Before testing, the computer is cleaned up of junk applications. The two most notable applications to be removed before testing was Norton Internet Security 2005 and also Skype. Other non-essential applications were closed. The only applications that remained running were laptop specific, including the power schemes and other various ASUS utilities.

First we have a slew of popular benchmarks, including Futuremark and Sandra. When it came to anything that involved graphics, the A8Js clobbered the VX1. The VX1 strikes back in all CPU related tests though, thanks to it’s ~10% faster clock speed.

* denotes that a lower score is better.

For our real world tests, simple scenarios were executed. The DVD playback and book reading tests were done using SysMark 2004 SE. The VX1 proved better in all battery related tests. Not surprising since it has a larger capacity.

* denotes that a lower score is better.

Since this laptop has a rather nice GPU, I chose to use five games for testing. I had a manual run through each game at both 1024×768 and the LCDs native resolution of 1440×900. The only game that was not run in native was NFS: Carbon, because EA refuses to support widescreen. Results are average FPS which were recorded with FRAPS 2.8.2 over the course of 3 – 5 minutes, depending on the game and level.

Every single one of the games ran great at 1024×768, which the exception of Half-Life 2 which has a habit of stuttering. Even Oblivion ran fantastic, I was impressed. At native resolution however, both CoD and Ghost Recon were not really playable. You -could- play CoD2 if you really wanted the sharper image, but GRAW was actually laggy at certain points.

I was pleased overall with the performance, especially at 1024×768. Oblivion ran at an average of 45FPS though at native resolution.. hard to complain about this.