Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
Following on from the first impressions posted by georgem ( http://www.notebookreveiw.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=14622 ), here are my own observations after living with a W3A for almost a week. Comparisons are made with the Sony S series that it has replaced. For those that don't know, the W3A has the Intel 915 chipset with integrated graphics. My model has the Intel 750 (1.86GHz) CPU.
1. The W3A's display is brighter than the Sony, to the extent that I have to turn down the brightness to about 80% to avoid light colours from being washed out. However, the colours on the Sony seem to be richer. I find the W3A's viewing angle range to be fine. The illumination is uniform and all the pixels seem to be working. It would have been useful to have the extra height offered by the 1280 x 800 resolution.
2. The W3A's keyboard is not as good as the Sony - the keys are quite noisy and with not enough resistance. However, the separate navigation keys will be an advantage, once I get used to them.
3. The W3A's fan is much quieter than the Sony's fan. It "purrs" rather than "whines". It runs continuously while on mains power. Under light load, Asus Probe reports the fan speed as 1200RPM and the CPU temperature as 42°C. On high CPU load the fan speed increases to 1500RPM and the CPU temperature is around 60°C. However, the hard disk temperature is at 48°C. The hottest part of the computer is under the HDD rather than under the CPU. The HDD is hotter than in the Sony, which may be a result of the relatively low fan speed giving little cooling benefit to the HDD (there are front-mounted air vents to pass the intake air over the HDD).
4. The W3A has good and bad points about its layout. The side-mounted optical drive means that more space is needed compared with the front-mounted drive on the Sony. The layout of the connectors is OK. Something I have noticed while typing is that the W3A has an almost square corner along the front edge of the palm rest area. This is uncomfortable for resting arms on - the Sony has a much nicer bevelled edge with rounded corners.
5. The W3A's speakers are much better than the Sony's. There's a hint of bass!
6. The weight, with optical drive and the 8-cell battery is over 2.5kg, which was more than I expected. The Sony's 1.9kg represents more impressive engineering. The W3A has the non-metal screen back with the Asus logo close to the hinge. However, the display seems to be quite rigid - I am unable to bend it or depress the back in a way that changes the display appearance.
7. Battery life (with the 8-cell battery) is looking good, with well over 3 hours DVD playing time at 70% display brightness.
8. The supplied "notebook" mouse is more of a desktop size. The dongle is too fat to fit into one of the two sockets together at the back(fortunately I have an extension lead). The touchpad is OK and has lots of configuration options. The buttons are a bit stiff.
9. Reinstalling Windows is tedious: Load two Windows CDs and then wait while Windows installs itself, then load the driver CD and wait again. At least there is the option to wipe only the C: partition and not the whole hard disk.
10. The presentation setting in PowerGear insists on resizing the display, which messes up the sizes of non-maximised windows.
11. Performance: I have run benchmarks using both SiSoftware Sandra (www.sisoftware.co.uk) and OSmark V1 beta 6 (www.vanshardware.com). I am running an assymetric RAM configuration (1 x 1GB 533MHz + 1 x 256MB 400MHz). The BIOS reports this is in dual channel, but I have my doubts.
Sandra's CPU benchmark results are in line for what would be expected for the CPU speed. Of greater interest is the memory bandwidth. With my current memory configuration this is setting at about 2700MB/s. If I take out the 256MB module then the 1 GB module runs a bit faster, with a bandwidth of about 2950MB/s. 2 x 256MB modules gave a bandwidth of about 2875MB/s. These should, if theory is correct, be running in dual channel, but there seems to be little benefit. Conclusion: (as in the Tom's Hardware review of the W6) that the dual channel memory doesn't, at present, make much difference.
OSmark attempts to measure real work performance. For my 3 memory configurations, the results are: 2 x 256MB, OSmark score = 946; 1 x 1GB, OSmark score = 928, 1 x 1GB + 1 x 256MB, OSmark score = 993. As comparison, the Sony S2 with 1.8GHz CPU & 1 GB RAM scored 1,143 (the graphics test results benefit from the separate GPU).
Initial conclusions:
(a) The display seems much larger than the 13.3" on the Sony.
(b) The relatively quiet fan is a major improvement.
(c) For me, the integrated GPU seems to be sufficient and avoids a source of extra heat.
All for now,
John
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We all know that the metric system is too complex for we Americans. [
] j/k
I weighed my USA W3V on the scale and I'm getting 5.5lbs (about 2.5kg) with the optical drive and battery. Granted the scale I have available to me isn't the most accurate but it sounds like it's close based on your measurements.
Proud ASUS W3V Owner -
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W3A - Quick review and second impressions
Discussion in 'Asus' started by John Ratsey, Apr 21, 2005.
