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Asus A8Sc exclusive UK preview
We've got our hands on to one of Asus' first Santa Rosa notebooks to land in the UK, the A8Sc.
The A8Sc has been slightly redesigned from the previous A8S model, which never made it to the UK in the first place.
It's a surprisingly thick 14.1in notebook that tipped our scales at 3.10KG including power adapter. The dark plastic construction is good though and it all makes for a solid piece of kit.
Asus included a Core 2 Duo T7300 in our preview model with 4MB L2 cache, however this version won't be on sale in the UK. An A8Sc with a T7100 is to go on sale though, this being the only T7000 chip to have a castrated 2MB L2 cache.
Graphics are handled by Nvidia's Geforce 8400M G, the slowest of the 8400M chips. It comes with 128MB onboard memory and, like all of Nvidia's DirectX 10 parts, this can be increased using Turbo Cache, whereby main system Ram is allocated to graphics card.
It's still a useable graphics part though, returning a 56 fps average in Fear and lowly 1183 in 3DMark06.
Rather unusually, there are completely separate DVI and VGA ports for connecting to digital and analogue monitors respectively. It's more common to see a DVI-I port and a dongle that can handle both analogue and digital signals. Asus' video sockets lack the screw fittings so you can securely attach the monitor cables. There's also an S-video output for hooking up a TV, however the graphics card can only handle two monitors at any one time; so if you plug in a TV and DVI (for example) then the notebook display will turn itself off.
Another great feature to the A8Sc chassis is the inclusion of five USB2 ports spread across three of the four edges - full time notebook users will know this gives real benefits since even four USB ports can sometimes not be enough.
The chassis doesn't feel cluttered thanks partially to the lack of media keys. The volume control wheel is an interesting design because it gives the same usability of an old-fashioned analogue volume control.
The screen is limited to 1,280x800 pixels but the quality is very good and covered in a rather extreme reflective coating to improve contrast; whether or not this is a good thing is a matter of personal choice.
The keyboard feels a little soft to type on where we prefer a crisper key stroke. There is a generous amount of key travel though. The trackpad looks stylish, although the left and right clicks are made of a single piece of plastic, which is extremely frustrating to use.
The software bundle is made up of Asusdvd V7.0, Power Director V5.0, Medi@Show V3.0 and Nero 7 Essentials.
The operating system is Vista Home Premium, which causes some problems in benchmarking battery life - every tech magazine and website has been stumped - partly because the tool of choice, MobileMark, isn't Vista-compatible yet, and partly because Vista includes so many high and low level power saving features that must be put to the same level to ensure consistency that it's all a bit of a conundrum for lab monkeys.
Well, PCW has discovered an ingenious (and semi-automatic) method of discovering the battery life. As a teaser, it involves consistent power-level settings, an intensive Excel spreadsheet being run and a fascinating Vista log that says how long your computer was turned on for.
So, in our new battery test, Asus kept plugging on for just one hour six minutes. You'll get far more battery life under less strenuous usage, but we've seen considerably better battery life from other Santa Rosa notebooks.
Performance was average for a Santa Rosa machine, scoring 4400 in PCMark05, a score we'd expect to drop by a few hundred marks with the slower, retail model.
The T7100 model, combined with 2GB Ram and a 160GB 5,400rpm hard disk will come labeled as the A8Sc-4P034C in the UK. And priced at £849 inc. VAT, it's a reasonable offering, although there are cheaper Santa Rosa notebooks out there.
Posted by Emil Larsen on June 20, 2007 | Permalink
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