Asus V6J

The Asus V6J is a 'thin and light' notebook with a 15in. screen, running Intel's Core Duo T2400 processor. It looks good, is generally well designed and performs very well indeed. However, we'd like to see a bit more battery life.

Design

The V6J has an eye-catching look. Its dark slate-grey external livery is matched on the inside, the only contrast being a flash of silver piping around the top and bottom sections of the clamshell edges and a quartet of blue LED status lights towards the back of the lid.

The 15in. V6J is a 'thin and light' system that should be equally at home in the briefcase or on the desktop. At 2.6kg it's perhaps a little heavy for continuous carrying, but this relatively svelte (33.1cm wide by 27.2cm deep by 3cm high) system should fit neatly into a bag. The case tapers to a point at the front, which makes the V6J look both elegant and thinner than it actually is.

There is no catch holding the clamshell sections together. They fit firmly enough when seated on a desktop, but there's always the danger that a rogue pen or other implement in a carry bag could force the two sections apart, fall between screen and keyboard and cause serious damage to either or both. We always prefer a catch to secure a notebook in transit.

The screen is a 15in. TFT with a native resolution of 1,400 by 1,050 pixels. This is not a widescreen format, but the display can accommodate two documents open at the same time.

The 86-key keyboard provides a comfortable typing platform: there's a good return and a solid ‘click’ on each keypress; the keys are large, with a row of two-thirds-height function keys above the number row. Unusually, the dark-grey touchpad has mouse buttons made from a single strip, with the left and right portions separated by a blue LED that's lit while the V6J is powered.

More LEDs -- tiny, and mostly blue -- sit on the front left edge, indicating various aspects of system status. The stereo speakers are also housed in the front portion of the generous wrist-rest area. A bank of long, thin buttons just above the keyboard provide shortcut access to services such as the wireless connections; there are more blue status LEDs here, too.

The beveled front edge is devoid of any connectors, while the left edge houses a multi-format DVD recorder, a single ExpressCard slot, an IEEE 1394 (FireWire) port, an infrared connector and VGA-out port. On the right edge is a full complement of four USB 2.0 ports; two of these are very close to one another and, depending on the size of your USB connectors, it may not be possible to use them all at once.

This right-hand side also houses a card reader that accepts SD, MultiMedia Card, and Memory Stick media; Also here are the modem (RJ-11) and Ethernet (RJ-45) connectors, plus microphone and headphone sockets -- the latter with S/PDIF support. An internal microphone is embedded just above the keyboard.

Features

The V6J is powered by Intel’s Core Duo T2400 processor, which is the third fastest chip in the Tx00 family, running at 1.83GHz. Like its siblings, the T2400 features a 667MHz frontside bus and 2MB of Level 2 cache, shared between the dual CPU cores. Our review system had 1GB of RAM, but you can fit up to 2GB in the V6J's pair of SODIMM slots. The chipset is Intel's 945GM Express.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are both built in, the latter courtesy of Intel’s PRO/Wireless 3945ABG module. Wired Ethernet is handled by a Realtek Gigabit PCI-E module. Graphics, meanwhile, are taken care of by a dedicated module, nVIDIA’s GeForce Go 7400 with 128MB of video memory (plus another 128MB of dynamically available system RAM). The 5,400rpm Fujitsu hard drive in our review model had a capacity of 100GB; alternatives are available at 40GB, 60GB and 80GB.

Among the bundled applications included with our review system is a useful tool for managing Bluetooth connections and devices. Asus includes a carrying case and optical mouse with the V6J, but neither were supplied with our review unit so we can’t comment on their quality.

Performance & battery life

We're getting used to impressive benchmarks from Core Duo notebooks, and the Asus V6J proved no exception. Considering that it uses the third fastest CPU in the family and has 1GB rather than 2G of RAM, its MobileMark 2002 score of 256 compares well to those posted by Acer's 2GHz/2GB TravelMate 8204WLMi (281) and Fujitsu Siemens' 2.16GHz/2GB LifeBook E8110 (281). MobileMark 2002 runs nine applications (Microsoft Word 2002, Excel 2002, PowerPoint 2002, Outlook 2002, Netscape Communicator, McAfee VirusScan 5.13, WinZip 8, Macromedia Flash 5 and Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1) in a simulated real-world workload.

MobileMark 2002 also reports a battery life score, and here the Asus V6J is slightly less impressive. Our review model was fitted with an 8-cell 4,800mAh battery, but delivered just short of three hours' life (173 minutes) in desktop mode with screen brightness set to maximum. That's not bad at all for a fast system with powerful discrete graphics, but ideally we'd like more.

Story URL: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/notebooks/0,1000000333,39259811,00.htm