Asus Z92T review

I bought this laptop from Dick Smith Electronics in New Zealand, for the price of $2,298NZD two days before Christmas. Anyone looking to purchase one now will find it at just under $2,000 - and for the features this notebook offers, I would highly recommend it.

The specs: This notebook is a great comprimise for anyone who is looking for a balance between power, graphics, portability and price.
The case:
The case is a fairly standard plastic, painted in a familiar silver. The design is not stunning or innovative, but it is still a good looking laptop - modern and sleek. The thin profile of the laptop means that it takes up less space in the laptop bag (which came in the packaging) - making it just that little more portable.
I can't attest much to the durability of the case. In the month and a half I have had it, I have already noticed a worn patch on the plastic, and some of the paint on the underside has peeled off - most likely due to the heat, as I will get to later.

Luggability:
At 2.8kg, the Z92T isn't too bad for a mid ranged laptop. The casing was smaller than the previous Asus Pentium M laptop I had, and carrying it around felt less clumsy overall. It's not an ultraportable, and it's not a desktop replacement. I don't expect too much variance from any other 15.4" laptop.

Keyboard:
The layout of the keyboard was quite good: I especially liked the Insert - Page Down keys being in a column on the far right. The keys were of a nice size and I had no concerns over the quality.
I did have a gripe with the placing of the function key on the keyboard, and this seems common with the Asus laptops. The row goes Fn, Ctrl, Windows, Alt. I would have far preferred Ctrl, Fn, Windows, Alt - as on the Acer I have. But it is a small gripe, and not hard to get used to.

The screen:
The Z92T comes with a 15.4" widescreen WXGA glossy screen. Glossy should not be understated. It is REALLY glossy. Using it outside can be a painful experience - any sort of glare would be incredibly distracting. I would say it is worse than a CRT in this regard. Of course, when used indoors out of direct light, the screen is shiny and the colours are great. But I would still count the screen as a negative.

Software:
Another reason for getting this was the Windows XP Professional that came with the laptop. It disappointed me the number of laptops I had to disregard because they came with Home, which would not allow me to join to a domain.
Preinstalled on the laptop came your average bloatware. A quick reformat with an OEM XP Professional CD sorted those problems. XP activated, was verified genuine and away I went.

The insides:
Coming with a Turion processor may disappoint those that think the Core 2 Duo is the be all and end all of laptop processors, but the X-52 in this little machine will still fly, and looking at equivalent machines, it brought the price down by around $500.
The GeForce Go 7600 is the reason I chose this model in the first place - it is almost unheard of for models in the $2000 range to have such a grunty card in them. It's performance in games is excellent for a laptop of this size, easily beating my old full tower rig (AMD 64 3000+, 6600GT, 2GB RAM) - while it's not going to beat a mid-ranged modern machine, this laptop can still keep up. An added bonus was the outputs. DVI, VGA and S-Video - no need for adaptors or anything. I was quite impressed.
Another reason for choosing this model was the 1GB of RAM it had in a lone stick. While performance would be better with 2x512MB, this leaves the option open for a cheap performance upgrade by just sticking another 1GB stick in the machine - something I was counting on when purchasing the laptop.
The dual layer DVD writer is now pretty much standard, so no real surprises there. When spinning up a CD, it could get noisy, but not any more noisy than I have come to expect from other laptops.
The 100GB hard drive was another of the Z92T's features that was just right. For the cost of the laptop, I couldn't really expect any more, and most of the models I looked at were in the 80-100GB HDD range. I can't say that I've noticed the hard drive being noisy.
I have no complaints about the wireless features. It includes both 802.11g and Bluetooth, both fairly standard today. The range on the wireless beats the 11g PCMCIA card, and I had no problem with the utilities - especially the fact that the Wireless utility actually went away for good when I said I wanted to use the Windows config.
The web camera is a nice touch, and while not essential, it was nice to have it. Used in normal light, it was quite good quality.

Battery life:
Under what I would call normal use: Using the internet with wireless, brightness up at a level I can see, and so forth, the battery would last slightly over 3 hours. I never bothered to check how long it would run games or DVDs on the battery.

Speaker Quality:
Don't bother.

Processor: AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-52 processor
Memory: 1GB DDR2 SDRAM, 2 RAM slots, 1 used, expandable to 2GB
Hard Drive: 100GB 5400rpm
Optical Drive: DVD writer dual layer
Display: 15.4" Widescreen WXGA
Video: NVidia® GeForce Go 7600 supporting 256MB discrete Memory
Video Camera: 1.3 Mega Pixels web camera
Audio: Built-in Intel High Definition audio compliant audio chip, SoundBlaster Pro Compatible, Built-in stereo speakers (1.5W)
Security: BIOS Booting, User passwords, Kensington Lock Hole
Networking: Integrated 10⁄100⁄1000 base T
Modem: Intel High Definition audio modem
Wireless: Integrated 802.11b⁄g
Bluetooth: Built-in
Card Reader ⁄ Writer: SD⁄MMC⁄MS⁄MS PRO
I⁄O: 1 x Headphone-out jack , 1 x Microphone-in jack, 1 x Line-in Jack1 x RJ11 Modem jack for phone line, 1 x RJ45 LAN Jack for LAN insert, 4 x USB 2.0 ports, 1 x IEEE 1394 port, 1 x TV Out (S-Video), 1 x Type II PCMCIA 2.1 compliant, 1 x DVI Port1 x VGA Port
Battery: Lithium Ion 8-cell
AC Adapter: Input 100-240V AC, Output 19V DC
Weight & Dimensions (mm): 2.80kg, 354 x 284 x 35.2mm (w x d x h)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Software: ASUSDVD XP 5.0, Power Director V3.0 DE, Medi@Show V2.0 SE Symantec Norton Internet Security 2005 (90 day trial), Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.1, NERO Express V6.0 ASUS NB Probe, ASUS Live Update, ASUS ChkMail, ASUS Hotkey, ASUS Power4 Gear+
Warranty: 2-Year limited global hardware warranty, 1 -year battery pack warranty

Summary:
The Z92T is a great mid-ranged laptop. The 256MB 7600 Go offers great performance in games, and the 15.4" size means that it's not too hefty to carry around everywhere. It is by no means a slow machine, and the fact that it is a Turion means that the price is reasonable as well. I would recommend this machine to people who can only afford one PC, and want to be able to play games without sacrificing portability.
This would be an excellent laptop for students.

Note: My own laptop died, and I have taken it back. For me, I don't think the machine was suitable. I have a PC at home for games, and I was never playing games on the laptop anyway. I will most likely trade it in for an ultraportable.

 

Nice, a few benchmarks would be interesting though.

 

Yes, unfortunately I do not have the laptop with me, or I would have run benchmarks first.

 

Thanks for the review Thaqui!

 

i have the exact same laptop, i can run some benchies if you like but I've put my 7200rpm HDD in it and put another 1GB of Ram in it.



Insane

 

And a few pictures would be even more nicer.