Asus C90 Pre-Review Requests

Okay, Vicious and I are both working on reviews these are the topics thusfar:

Me: First Look, general review; will be finished at the latest 24 hours from recieving the notebook:
-All of the review trappings (Background, why/where to buy, etc.)
-Battery Life
-Noise
-Heat
-Benchmarks Benchmarks Benchmarks (both synthetic and real world)
-Overclocking report
-Aesthetic comments
-Detailed Availability report (for upgrades and such)
-Basic Pro/Con
-Most importantly: At first glance, is it a success?

Vicious (correct me if I am wrong here V): Detailed complex analysis of parts and software:
-Another angle for the normal review stuff
-Triple booting OS's to test the differences between x64 and x86, Vista and XP
-Detailed battery life report (based on different loads/settings/OS)
-More Benchmarks Benchmarks Benchmarks
-Overclocking detail report (how it works in each OS (will it help Vista roll with XP?)
-Detailed pro/con of the notebook and each of the OS's

We will be working together afterwards on answering any and all questions (probably the same thread, possibly different ones though).

The purpose of this thread is to see what else people want to know, as well as to find other interested owners who would like to help. The rules for that are as follows:
-You must have your C90 in hand or in the mail
-Send me a PM with your specs and level of knowledge
-There will be limited spots (I can only keep track of so many people, and V and I already have about identical setups so we really only need different hardware configs to see the difference in certain benches and suggested situations)
-Of course I will over-ride my limits if you have a unique test, bench or review that you would like to do.

The reason I put this in the forums is so that we can have a unified knowledge base for this computer, instead of scattering it all over the forums. The early success of this notebook is very important for the future of the series and potentially mobile upgradibility itself, therefore I want anyone who is interested in the product to have their questions answered thoroughly and succinctly, because the longer they sit on the fence, the more likely a new buyer will sway towards the bigger brands. It is probably apparent by now that I have a lot of faith and hope in both this laptop and Asus. If not the first I would not have pre-ordered and if not the second I would not be so ardent about having an eloquent, well-rounded and, most of all, informative thread in our forums.

So to start things off...what issues would you like to see addressed that are not on the list already?

 

screen brightness, and would be awesome if you could get a pic next to another laptop and put both at full brightness to see a difference

also the feel and sensitivity of the touchpad

 

Cool I can do those both, touchpad kind of comes with using it for everything else, and I have three screens to compare to (old laptop, cheapish desktop LCD and 60" rear projection TV.)

 

i have a viewsonic 22" and a westing house 17" along with a samsung 720p i can test it next to. if its needed

 

I have my 37" HD LCD to put it next to

Im not going to do much on battery life testing atleast not for now because I will be running so many bechmarks and doing so much installing that I cant do it from the battery. I can give that info on a personal basis on the forums after I get my main review done with.

All of my benches are iron clad as in built in test that never change, none of this fraps stuff and just giving an average fps for an area, thats not accurate. While good for a general idea of how well a game runs. For the purpose of my test to see wich OS is better than the other i need a very finite testing method and fraps wont cut it. Also last time I tried to get fraps up and going on Vista Ultimate x64 it was not working right. the program started and ran fine, but it wouldnt actually do anything. no numbers to show fps and not taking screenshots or recording movies.

I can tell from this thread and all the others that everybody is just so excited about the C90, since we cant have it in person we want to talk about it as much as possible

I was thinking about going to download all my testing materials today but then id have to swap them over to the new computer anyways so I'll just wait and d/l directly with the C90.

I also thought about just hooking my hdd to my desktop like I did for the hdd benchmarks and d/l them to the drive but I think windows install will go over them and I dont want a 4th partition just for files


You should dot he heat test Alex! see how well it stands up to 500degrees in an oven for 4 hours see if the exoskeliton melts off and it keeps running then sudenly its like the terminator comming out of the fire all alive with glowing red eyes and it comes after you! (hmm lack of sleep = creative imagination)

 

i have 6 hours in a car to do battery tests on the way to a campsite in northern california. Ill try to upload them when i get there throught my phone

 

dont you need a few charge/discharge cycles before you get accurate battery life readings anyways?

At one point I'll just leave it on and do web surfing at work one night and see how long it last, then try again the next night while looping 3dmark or something to simulate gaming (that shouldnt take too long )

There is rumor that the desktop cpu may throttle down and use less power than the moble chips even so if we underclock the cpu its battery life may meet or beat the G1S and others. Its the 6cell battery that really hurts not so much the power drain of the system when in power save mode.

 

you think the power save mode will have the brightness all the way down or just the cpu underclocked?

 

cpu changes mostly probably, you can then extended it with screen backlight changes hopefully and maybe even downclocking your video card (also if your in vista turn of aero and stuff like that will help aswell)

Im very confident you can get 90min out of the C90 if you tweak it for web surfing and word processing ect.

I doubt you will ever get say 2 hours to watch a movie or something tho. A wise idea for those who really need the battery life may be to just get a 2nd battery. Maybe somebody will take up my idea for a docking station type battery and we can have a 8+ cell battry that will get thru a movie easy.

 

well we will see the battery is my biggest wonder/concern, since i plan to take it to all my classes at school

though when gentech has it, i plan to order a backup battery to cover any times lost.

 

I would also like to note that I plan on releasing periodic updates to the review as I get more testing done (i.e. the battery charge, discharge cycles, undervolting/clocking, tweaking.) that stuff in almost all certainty won't make the first cut (but I will if I can). Expect them around the weekend time, when V is done or finishing.

Other stuff I will be adding as updates:
-Videos (if possible, contact me if you are interested/have the equipment!)
-Installation guide and Troubleshooting (probably second or third day)
-A CPU/GPU FPS charts (grid style, GPUs on top, CPUs down the side, intersection shows the FPS in whatever game on whatever settings.) [I also need people with different CPUs and GPUs here, we already have...the E6700]

 

That sounds abit too deep with the whole differnt cpu/gpu thing. Id recomend keeping test and charts isolated to test you can preform yourself to make it easier and keep more consistancy. Besides there is only the 8600gt for the most part right now and you can simulate any of the lower cpus just by downclocking. The scores should be 99% the same if not identical.

 

Well, I just want people to be able to tell what they are getting if they opt for the 6700 over the 6500, if anything. Since this is so customisable, people wanna know about the components just as much as the system itself.

 

hah hah hah, very nice V.

 

I'd also like to know more about the screen. Brightness, viewing angles, crispness, contrast, etc...

I'd really like to know how movies show up. Did you opt to have a Blu-Ray installed or not?

 

It comes standard with internal bluray + HDR actually.

the wireless card is optional however.

I plan to take lots of pictures, focusing on the screen actually because there are lots of external pics but not many if any screen pics. Plus not many people know how to take good screen pics.

Here is a review I did of my computer monitor, you can see that I have pretty much mastered the art of capturing photos of a computer screen, and know how to run it thru all the quality test. I will be doing all this for the c90.

check it out here:

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10105

 

OT:
I'm looking at pairing that monitor with my future C90. I can get it used for around 900 CDN (LVM-37w1). It looks like you are using the LVM-37w1 as well. I heard there is a fair amount of ghosting with it though. How do you find it for gaming?

Unfortunately we won't be able to output anything near 1900 x 1200 with modern games on the C90 but for video & older games it will look nice @ that rez.

 

It depends on what older games you're talking about...some "older" games don't support that high of a res. Chances are, if they do support that high of a res, you'll have to turn the settings way down to keep a good frame rate.

 

I'm thinking of games like prince of persia, nfsmw, ut2004, half life 2, trackmania nations, etc... I'm sure those games would run fairly smooth at med to high settings. I'm not totally sure if all these games support that rez but I'm sure that a lot do in the (2004/2005) time frame.

PS. sorry for leading the tread OT

 

Comes standard with blu ray? What?!?

And Alex and V feel free to ask me for anything I can help with. Dont list me as an "official" assistant because I will be busy with school these next few weeks (busy with my c90 too) but yeah anything you need feel free to ask.

 

yeah uh wtf? definetly didn't think the blu-ray came standard...wanna clear that up?

 

Maybe it's just a standard option

 

i am getting the e6600 so if you would like bencmark results from that just tell me which ones to run. also i would like to see if there is a difference in performance between the people getting 667 mhz memory and 800 mhz memory or if it is just pointless to go up the cost for the possiblity of overclocking.

 

haha 8x supermulti is standard, the Blu-Ray can be purchased for 500 bucks, HDDVD can be purchased for 350 bucks.

 

I would like to caution anyone here from making claims of reliability and quality good or bad in their reviews. There is absolutely nobody here on this forum besides my self and a few other dealers that can speak of past product quality and reliability. Please do not confuse quality and reliability for aesthetics and feel. those are very different terms and i see alot of people here bundle them into one category .... "quality". Try to separate those when you make a review.

 

You couldn't do it either Eddie. Until we have had them for 6 months or more no one knows how reliable they are.

 

never said i could. what i said was nobody on this forum can state the reliability or quality even after 6 months. only dealers can know such things as average return rate per model. but thanks for pointing out what i can not do. you are an expert in that field

 

I try my best

 

good one!

 

so did you get the tracking numbers yet?

 

Shipping time is 4PM PST today.

 

overnight right?

 

I would like to know about the whole OS comparison I cant decide wheter to buy vista ultimate 32bit or 64bit. Battery or software compatiblity arent an issue but rather which makes better use of the hardware

 

Cancer -- your install disc for Vista should come with installations of both 32 and 64 bit, so you don't have to choose which to buy

 

Oh didnt know that... still which should I install then??? (as in which will run better / make better use of the hardware)

 

The Asus website has the manual for the c90 here.
Answered a lot of my questions... except why they made the max memory 3gb instead of 4. Makes no sense to me.

I am getting mine from btotech. Won't get here till the end of next week.

@ Cancer: Right now it would be best to go with the 32 bit version. I have been researching that myself and there are many progs that do not work with the 64 bit version well. Drivers are also a problem with the 64 bit version, especially since all of them have to be Microsoft Certified now. If XP supported Direct X 10 I would definitely be using that.

 

Without getting all technical about how/why it wont support 4gb of ram, the easy answer to your question is that the 945g chipset the c90 uses just doesnt support 4gb of ram. Its a chipset limitation not a limit inserted by asus (still they could have used a better chipset...)

The big question thats up in the air tho is, will the computer even RUN with 4gb of ram. In almost all cases if you put 4gb of ram in a computer that only supports 3. It runs just fine, but you have 1gb of ram sitting there and doing nothing. The only info we have so far about compatabily is from Eddie at btotech.com he said dont use 4gb of ram because it wont post with 4gb of ram.

But that can be misleading and mean one of two things..

1.) the computer wont even boot up with 4gb of ram, its totally incompatible (my fear..)
2.) the computer runs just fine with 4gb present but not all 4gb is used and thus the computer wont post with 4gb of ram, it post with 3gb of ram.

He didnt clearify what he meant when I asked, so I guess I find out the hardway later today. I have a 2x2gb kit, so at first I'll try just 2gb to make sure everything is up and running, then I'll put the other 2gb in an see if it still runs.

 

Thanks for clearing that up. Problem I have is that if it is a notebook that is supposed to be upgraded why would you limit the memory by using the dated 945g chipset. Everything else was thought through well in my opinion (as long as everyone jumps on the mobile video card format).

I can't wait for your preliminary reviews.

 

Yeah I get mine today, I will take almost all day just to get my OS and stuff setup, who knows how much trouble I will have with drivers and stuff for 3 OS's. I'll try to just get some pictures and 3dmark scores and stuff posted up on the forums as a teaser, but my full review is going to take awhile.

 

Hi guys, the 8600M GT is DDR3:

 

Post clocks, please!

 

I think riva tuner is reporting the ddr2 model as ddr3 Ken, not sure on this but I recall something similar for a different notebook. I forget what program they used to get the actual true answer from. I think the best thing to do is phisically inspect it

So do you have a c90 up and running right now Ken? or did you pull that info from somewhere else.

 

Yeah I got mine today , trying to install some programs and games.

 

Question: ddr3 really that much better than ddr2?

 

have you been able to try battery life yet?


also is the touchpad really bad in your opinion or how is the sensitivity/feel to you?

 

I'll do battery test if I have time because I can't do other tests wihile running battery test.

 

The Compal IFL90 and Dell 1520 both show gddr3 in riva but from what the clocks show, is gddr2.

 

Not by a large margin, I think whats more concerning are from Eddies test they are affraid the actual clocks on the gpu are turned down for heat/power save issues. However with the C90 I dont see that happening, atleast not on purpose

The catch would be they are turned down for power save or quiet modes, but up to full in gaming mode. That makes alot of sense, so maybe there is an error in the software right now and the clocks are not up to where they are supposed to be when in gaming mode.

 

and hows the touchpad for you, in your opinion? sensitivity and feel

thanx by the way to you and gear2play for answering all of our questions!