ASUS A6J Short Review

I bought my ASUS A6J on Monday evening. On paper, its specs are below:

Intel Centrino Duo T2400
15.4” WXGA Color Shine LCD (1280 x 800)
ODD 8X DVD Super Multi/Double Layer
Wireless IEEE 802.11a/b/g
100GB 5400rpm HDD
Memory 1024MB
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 256MB
1.3M pixels camera
Bluetooth V2.0 EDR
Windows XP Home

At 354 x 284 x 35mm and 2.85kg, the A6J is big and thick, comparing to my 15inch PowerBook G4. But its 2-tone color scheme is great. It might not stand out in photo, but in real world, the A6J looks gorgeous.

Frankly, before the moment I saw the A6J, I never thought I would buy an ASUS notebook. My only experience with ASUS is many years ago when I bought an ASUS motherboard to build a Pentium box for fun. I do know they build quite good notebooks for many famous brands, including Apple. But I really don’t know how good their own brand is.

Before going to the shops, I spent quite some time to study Acer TravelMate 8204, 3282 and Aspire 5672, as only Acer’s Duo models are in quantity supply in Singapore. The first 4 shops I visited only had Acer’s models and I more or less already settled my mind for an Aspire 5672, until I entered the 5th shop. Among a sea of various brands’ notebooks, the ASUS A6J immediately caught my eyes. I can’t say it looks better than my PowerBook, but it does outshine Aspire 5672, even TM 8204. From then, I started to study its specs and touch it. It cost S$350 more than the lowest price I got for Aspire 5672. But if you put the faster CPU (1.83G vs. 1.67G) and much better GPU (X1600/256MB vs. X1400/128MB) into consideration, the S$350 is well justified, plus the A6J has superior build quality in my view.

I also paid more money to upgrade the RAM to 2GB 667MHz DDR2 (Patriot Signature Line). For most people, the built-in 1GB RAM is enough. But I run Virtual PC a lot, so 2GB is a must.

The A6J preloads with XP Home edition and both HD partitions are in FAT32 format. So after back home, the 1st thing I did was to re-format the Hard Disk and install XP Pro with SP2. I re-partitioned the HD into 2 NTFS partitions, and compressed one part to store VPC images. The formatting and installations took quite a while to complete. The box came with 1 restore CD and 6 additional CDs for all the hardware drivers and bundled software. Also included is the USB hot fix. Very convenient! ASUS score one here over Acer.

Then it was a long process to load all my applications, such as Visual Studio 2005, VPC 2004, Office 2003 and add-ons (One Note, Project, etc), SQL 2005 Developer, MySQL 4/4.1/5.0, Apache 2, PHP5, Zend Studio, etc …

After loading all my applications, I then copied some VPC images from an external USB drive to A6J. From then this baby started to shine.

This A6J is to replace my current HP Compaq nx6120 (Pentium M 1.73GHz/2MB L2, 2GB 533MHz DDR2 RAM, 100GB 5400rpm Hitachi HD exactly the same model as A6J). The nx6120 is quite fast when doing single task, but really struggled when doing multi-tasks. Or should I blame Windows OS sucks on multi-tasking?

Most of my VPC images are around 10GB. Previously when I copied them between nx6120 and USB disk, it was also fast. But if I wanted to do some other things at the same time, the system took quite a while to response and the copying speed also dropped to 50% or even worse. The A6J is totally different story. I could do many other things without significantly affect the copying speed. And the system is also very responsive. I immediately loved its performance.

I often have VPC2004, VS2005, Outlook 2003, One Note 2003, and Firefox running at the same time. When I did that on nx6120, it was a painful procedure I had to endure. With this A6J, the switching between those programs is at least 10 times faster. Now I enjoyed my work much more. The increased productivity will pay back the A6J cost very soon.

I only have this A6J for 2 days and am quite busy on a project, so I really don’t have chance to run any benchmark test. But I already can see the big performance gain over nx6120 during my daily work.

For battery usage, ASUS provide a utility called Power4 Gear. It has the following power modes:

* Game, High Performance, Super Performance: CPU runs at full 1.83GHz
* DVD movie: CPU runs at 1.32GHz
* Quite Office: CPU runs at 861MHz
* Presentation: CPU runs at 861MHz, screen is slightly darker
* CD-Audio: CPU runs at 366MHz
* Battery saving: CPU runs at 238MHz, screen brightness is significantly reduced but remains very visible.

After 1st full charge, I ran the system in Presentation mode. It lasted for 2 hours 35 minutes. Now after 2nd full charge, I’m running the system in Battery saving mode with all the services running at background and Bluetooth enabled, and writing this review. After 1 hour 25 minutes, it still has 53% power left. I guess it will marginally hit 3 hours.

The A6J has a very good screen. It’s very bright and clear. I haven’t got time to try the video cam, but it already works in the screen saver.

My only problem so far is on the keyboard. The typing feeling is not as good as my PowerBook, but it’s still acceptable, on par with nx6120. The problem is on the keyboard layout. Unlike most PC notebook, ASUS put “fn” key left to “Ctrl” key. It gives me a lot of troubles when I use any keyboard short cuts with “Ctrl” key. Yes, my PowerBook’s keyboard has the same layout, but Mac OS doesn’t use “Ctrl” the same way as Windows. Hopefully I’ll get used to it after sometime. But then I’ll have problems to use other brands. It might be ASUS’ way to tie me up.

Overall I’m very satisfied with my 1st ASUS purchase. If I need to rate A6J, I’ll give it 8 of 10. If I can find time this weekend, I’ll add more especially some graphics and 3D testing results. I may also take a few photos of A6J. But again, this big baby looks best in real world, especially when a big guy like me carry it around.

 

Good review.

Add a pro's & con's section / conclusions section so that quick skimmers can get a general idea without reading the whole thing.

Use Bold and italics to underline key statements.

And yes, benchmarks would be nice too.

Finally Get Pictures!



Enjoy your rig.

 

That's exactly what i thought with my A6VA! I love the design in real life. Great review, waiting for some nice pictures too.

 

Thanks for the review. As I understand it, the new Z92ja will be the built-on version of this laptop and your review has definitely kept it in contention. Too bad about the poor placement of the fn key. Have you considered remapping that key to Control and vice versa?

Oh, one more thing - do you find the resolution limiting? By this I mean that I see you have many apps running at the same time. It is always nice to be able to resize the windows so that you can view multiple windows, especially when doing development.

 

You'll get used to the function key after a while

I find myself hitting the windows key too often on a regular keyboards, cos thats kinda where the CTRL usually is

 

Thanks for your good suggestion!

 

Ya. Do you know any software doing it?

The resolution is OK to me. It's similar to my PowerBook (1280 x 854). Anything higher might force me to change the default font size. Anyway I connect a second monitor (BENQ 19inch) to it, so it's convenient for me to do development work. By the way this A6J comes with both DVI and Analog ports, so basically it can connect to most monitors and projectors.

 

Unless I can find something to re-map it as the other poster mentioned.

 

Hey does the A6J have a widescreen or a standard 4:3 screen?

Ive read some reviews which state that is has a standard 4:3 aspect ratio, but ive seen the specs which say it is widescreen.

Can anyone clarify this for me??

 

The FN can not be re-mapped unless you re-write the BIOS I believe.

 

I just downloaded and ran the latest free version of PCMark05, 3DMark05 & 3DMark06. Below are the scores I got:

• PCMark05: 3999
  [*]3DMark05: 3564
  [*]3DMark06: 1855

 

Mine is wide screen (1280x800). But I heard there are standard screens in some countries.

 

hey drmax,
i just came back fr sim lim
and the a6j i saw didnt look so wide
not as wide as the w3 though..
and the seller said it's not widescreen..
but specs said it's widescreen..

maybe the seller meant it's not wider-screen..

 

aye ? dysfun oso frm sg r? lol i juz bought today frm SLS too. tml take. they ran out of ram le. coz i upgraded to 2 gb too. ^^

 

LOL...Relvax, you really have to start using some proper English!

 

LOL sorry Auroras, saw a fellow countrymate and i just automatically switch to singlish mode haha... Sorry~ I should type and speak properly~ ^^

peace out~

 

huahahaha
i understand the impulse dude
*restrains self*
hey how much u get yours for? incl. upgrade..