W90VP-A1 First Impressions & Photo Shoot

Update: Full Review is Done! - http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=370294

Since the review is going to take a long time to compile, I'll share most of the photo's I usually include with everybody now and give my first impressions.

This unit is creating a big buzz so I know many of you are looking for the piece of information you need to persuade you to buy it or hold off for something else. So I hope maybe these pictures & my first impressions can help.

Pictures:
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What you see here in no specific order -
-All 4 sides at a 3/4ths view with a quarter present to show scale
-All 4 sides from a direct side angle with a quarter for scale
-The keyboard area with a 3/4ths view and a quarter on the touchpad for scale
-Max lid open angle
-The quick touch keys for media control & quick launch
-Screen brightness test 1x Full, 1x Half, 1x Lowest setting for brightness to show difference
-Various screen benchmarks for gradients and tests for dead pixels (note that the .jpg compression ruins the real colors on the gradients)

To view the pictures larger go directly to the album HERE


First Impressions:

Starting from opening the box...

First the box is an odd shape its tall instead of wide and it was HEAVY, I almost dropped it just picking it up from the sides instead of from under.

Opening it up I saw the bag & a box with all the goodies inside of it.

One of those goodies is a Razor Copperhead mouse, many of you are really going to like that, me personally though I will continue to use my wireless G7 mouse.

I pull out the bag next and, it was immediately and blatantly obvious the laptop was inside due to the weight. Pulling it out its well packaged and safe from bumps & scratches. The design of the laptop is smart with rubber stoppers on the lid to protect the screen.

I am incredibly impressed with the looks of this unit, it is by far the best looking gaming notebook I have ever seen, it looks snazzy, professional, and awesome all at once. The colors are so well blended, the aluminum is very nice and scratch resistance and maybe even more important finger print resistant!

The power brick... its HUGE, it may as well be a real life red brick thats about how big & heavy it is. The laptop itself is also big but you already know that.

So I am a guy that picks on people for complaining about the weight of there laptop or bag, I call them weight wienies and tell them to go to the gym. Well tell you what, carry this around all day and you wont have to go to the gym, the weight is very real, putting the backpack on with the laptop & brick in it made me feel like I was going hiking with a fully loaded camping pack.

So if your sensitive about weight, your going to have a hard time with this. It is not a ultra portable netbook, this is a full fledged desktop replacement with enough power to out preform the majority of peoples actual desktops plus Asus really built this thing solid, there is no flex anywhere and not a hint of cheapness on the frame or body.

Getting past that and turning it on for the first time. I am happy with the volume of the speakers, they are pretty loud and thats important to me, nothing worse than not being able to hear something.

So sound is good but the 1st place award goes to the screen! Oh my God, the screen is just heavenly on this thing. Unlike the G50V that had a big body with a small screen this laptop makes use of almost the entire lid area for this one big awesome screen. After you hike this baby to ground zero and boot it up it all pays off. Your surrounded with a high resolution large size screen that makes you feel like your on your desktop at home. The 1920x1080 resolution is a joy to have giving you so much room to work with for video/photo editing or viewing forum posts where people have no idea what image thumbnails are.

In my gradient tests I have never seen gradients so smooth and full before, I have no idea the specs of this panel but it is absolutely top end stuff, the blacks are nice and black and all the colors rich and vibrant. When its game/movie time on here your going to giggle to yourself with glee.

So thats the biggest & first paradox to pass, is the weight/size of this unit. its big and its heavy but it pays off in spades for the big screen to go with it and the full sized keyboard & number pad.

They keyboard I am still getting used to, I have been typing on my 10" EEE for the last 2 weeks, so I cant give fair review yet, and for some reason I keep putting my left hand 1 key to the left from where its supposed to be.

The quad core in here is something I was very much looking forward too, no disappointment there, my cpu test showed it to be much faster than any dual core right now with 17 seconds for the Wprime test. Of course this is a best case scenario and what really matters is gaming for most people, so all those benchmarks will be in the full review. I will tell you this though, if your a video editor, or a photo editor, or anything like that. Those programs make use of all 4 cores and this will be faster & better. Even at stock 2ghz it will perform as fast as a 4ghz dual core, and with the built in 14% overclock bringing it up to 2.3ghz thats as fast as a 4.6ghz dual core cpu!

So I pointed out some of the good things, I have to say anything bad I can think of.

So far the only "bad" thing is the bag for me. I have never liked any of the Asus bags, this one looks a bit better than the one that came with the G50V but still not something I like, and the clamshell design it has pretty much uses all the space for the laptop and the brick making it hard to find a place for all the accessories I travel with. So finding a bag for this is a must for me, Im thinking of looking for one of those briefcases with wheels kind of things. As it will be hard to find a backpack for a 19" notebook. Plus rolling it around makes the weight not a big deal anymore.

So I say final line is

If your a serious gamer, if your a video editor, if your a photoshoper, if your a big movie fanatic, you need to look closely at the W90 it may just be what you were looking for.

If your just looking for a normal laptop for normal things and you have no real special interest or needs, you should look for someting else.

Highlights for this model:

- 1920x1080 huge screen
- Blueray Player
- Dual 7200rpm hard drives for 640gb of space and built in Raid
- Quad Core CPU
- Dual Video Cards
- Finger Print Resistant
- Professional & Sleek looking
- Full size number pad for spreadsheet work + accounting
- Great Asus Warranty
- Loud 5 speaker sound

 

"No... These are tears of happiness"
Thank you so much man, Finally an outside review beside notebookcheck...
Hats off to you... Now we play the waiting game to see those benchmarks

Too much rep given :{

 

Love the pictures +rep.

The keyboard looks kinda small from the pictures.

 

Excellent start, Vicious, I can't wait to read the full review!

One question: did it come set up in RAID 0 or did you have to enable that? Did you lose the recovery partition?

+ rep for you...

 

Independent drives both partitioned into 50/50 is how it came stock.

So I see 4 hard drives in "My Computer" each with like 170gb or so.

Im probably going to leave it like that, though I may use partition magic to make them only 1 big partition each instead of split into two.

 

wow i am envious.
great review, + rep

 

What a Beast!

1. Can you take a pic of the w90vp-a1 with the g50v? I like to compare.
2. Is that brush aluminum on the lid and deck?
3. Gaming wise is it better than the W90Vp-X1 w/ T9600 2.80GHz?
Great review for starters.

Thanks ViciousXUSMC!

 

I set it up and I am downloading all my steam games at home before I go to work tonight, with my 15mb/s down fiber connection it goes really fast.

UT3, Portal, & TF2 are the 3 that I am installing from steam.

Crysis, DMC4 I'll take to work.

On the forums and navigating the web on the unit and so I can give further insight to the keyboard and touchpad.

Keyboarad is great, I can type reallly fast on it, keys require a shallow press to activate and have a medium feedback with almost no press down sound, you here them come back up though when you type fast. No keyboard lag or missing keys at all!!!

The touchpad is big and works well exept I am having a bit of trouble with the scroll thing on the right side. I am really spoiled from the EEE it has multi touch so I can scroll with 2 fingers and tap with 2 or 3 fingers to do a middle or right mouse click so its hard for me to use this one. I will always use a mouse (or wacom) with this unit so its not a big deal.

The touchpad buttons are really nice, they are big and take a light press to activate and give a light click when pressed in, so its not easy to press them on accident but easy to do so when you want, and does not make any loud noise like some other models do.

I still need to get used to some of the keyboard spacing, and the number pad on the right is smaller than normal so may take getting used too also.

One thing I need bad is a cooling pad or something to tilt the unit upward with, I cant use laptops very well without having them tilted up, I wish they would build levers into these things to hold them up like that, seems like a good idea that nobody does. Since the unit is so big and has really good cooling I think getting this huge cooling pad for it is not really something you need to do, so I just want to find a little stand for it, or one of those cooling pads that is just 2 fans that sit under the back to hold it up.

If I was going to go all out with a cooling pad the LX Cryo is the only one I can think up but its big/heavy and expensive.

One more thing I may need. Does anybody have an extra FRAPS key? I need one so I can get the new version of fraps to bench with.

 

Do you think they make pelican cases big enough for it?

 

I dunno, Im thinking the right place to look is maybe at travel luggage, should be cheaper and bigger. Just get some foam or something to line it with if needed.
The Pelican is overkill IMO and this thing is very scratch resistant and well built so you do not need to encase it in a bullet proof case

Id if anything get a memory foam bed liner and use that it adsorbs impact really well and wont cost too much and give you an abundance of material.

Id like to get an Intuios 4 for this thing at some point too. Look how well it will match -


Its very close to the color of the inside of the unit, plus with the res and screen size i see myself wanting to photoshop more often on this unit.

 

Vicious... Can I ask what you do for a living (You can afford all this sweet tech) You have a Wacom tablet... so im guessing some kind of graphic designer?

 

Vista's built-in repartition tool has done well for me every time, if you don't want to bother loading Partition Magic...

 

Excellent review. Your opinions reflect my own experience with it perfectly.

 

Na I wish I had some high paying job

I just am good with managing my money, the bulk of the w90 came from selling the G50V, and I only wish I had a nice intious 4. I have the small graphire 4x5 that goes for under $100

 

You could do alot with your knowledge my good man, you could make your own website, make video reviews, or tech help videos and such on youtube. There are plenty of ways for you to make good money, I have alot of respect for you, I am hoping you do some great things... If not you are an enormous help and a huge part of this site.

 

Yep thats true of the corps

 

Well i dont know of any good luggage mfgs. Besides it wouldnt be good in this enviroment here in afghanistan plus you are a Marine right? You should know the nature of Marines.

 

Once a Marine always a Marine, so your right to call me one, but I am not active duty anymore. I was in when I was 17 and did a 5 year term. Im back home with wife and kids these days.

 

ei vicious, can you tell me how many fps you get from playing crysis on a 1600 x w/e resoultion all high or very high on your new laptop? do you go below 30fps? is it all constant 40- 60 fps on that new laptop of yours?

 

We will see, although keep in mind he doesn't have the Xtreme x9300 processor

 

30fps average in DX9 with it maxed out 1920x1080
Totally playable and infact a waist to play it on all very high, high is going to look the same and give a big fps boost.

 

DX9? you mean DX10 right?... I hope so with those specs you should be running Dx10 at very high and get like 40+ fps... wait whatr your specs again?

 

Machine looks sweet.

I actually like the bag that is bundled with the W90. Almost tempted to buy one from a user.

 

No DX10 is lower, its the old drivers, only rercently has ATI boosted DX10 performance in crysis and the stock drivers are older ones.

I have a few things to try to update to new drivers but before I do that I have many tests to run with the out of the box stock config that way I can properly review the normal performance.

If you know about crysis you know it looks exactly the same in DX9 as it does DX10, the sunshafts and motion blur are the only two things I know of in DX10 that are not in DX9 and you can manually add the sun shafts effect to DX9 with a custom config.

This was maxed out 1920x1080 all VERY high being just over 30fps average is quite good.

 

Meh not my cup o' tea but it would look right at home if it was green and you were master chief

 

I haven't actually played crysis in DX9 so I jumped the gun a little lol, I guess Im just spoiled lol

 

I played it on DX9 on my desktop with dual 4850's and a quad @ 3.6ghz DX10 just was not worth the fps loss, it looked exactly the same.

 

Nice slideshow. What camera are you using?

 

That was the D70 with the 18-200 Sigma lens.

 

Looking to the full review my man. I'm out at Corporal's Course now...got 10 days left, so I'm hoping for a laptop after I graduate!

 

well good luck at Cpl's course at Al Asad. Im waiting on my puter too.

 

so did you notice any fps drop most especially on the last stage or the ice stage? ist that all max 1920 x w/e? what about 1600x w/e? how many ghz is ur quad core?

 

Thank you for the great review and information ViciousXUSMC.

I can't wait for mine to show up!

 

I have been looking for a review like this ever since I ordered the a1 (good job on the review). I can’t wait until I get this beast in a couple days. Even though this laptop isn’t that portable in some peoples' eyes, It definitely is going to help me out when I have to move from duty assignment to duty assignment.

It’s a shame that the qx9300 can only be over clocked 5% because I was thinking about upgrading the q9000 to the qx9300. But I don’t think it would be worth the money..

 

No, it's 37fps at 1920x1080.

Here's the one I just ran:

 

any slowdowns though on some stages?

 

Will you please run the Gpu test as well, Im not really that interested in the cpu results (I am getting the X9300 if I get that one ) please

 

I hate those partitions. Say I have 4 hard drives, to confuse things up. Is partition magic freeware?

 

No, but you could use free alternatives such as gParted after booting from a Live Linux disk.

Backup your data first!