X-bit labs

Asus U1F: Ultra Compact High-End Notebook (page 12)

Category: Mobile

by Alexander Britvin

[ 11/01/2007 | 05:11 PM ]

The ASUS U1F is equipped with Intel GMA 950, an integrated graphics solution, and we tested it in all versions of 3DMark: 3DMark 2001SE Pro, 3DMark 2003 3.6.0, 3DMark 2005 1.2.0 and 3DMark 2006 1.1.0.

3DMark uses its own rendering engine to create a set of 3D scenes that load the graphics subsystem in various ways. Compared with the previous version, 3DMark 2005 uses Shader Model 2.0x/3.0 instead of Shader Model 1.x, provides full compatibility with Shader Model 2.0, includes more complex tests (over a million polygons per each frame), and employs normal maps. 3DMark 2006 brings support for HDR, Uniform Shadow Maps, and multi-core CPUs. It is overall oriented at Shader Model 3.0, but two out of its four graphics tests work within the Shader Model 2.0 framework.

Integrated graphics solutions usually don’t usually offer high performance, and the ASUS U1F is not an exception. To prove the point, here are the results of a few gaming tests.

We tested the notebook in two modes in Quake 3 :

• 640x480; 16 bit; Vertex Lighting; Low Detail; 16-bit Texture Quality; Bilinear Texture Filter
• 1024x768; 32 bit; Lightmap Lighting; High Detail; 32-bit Texture Quality; Trilinear Texture Filter

And in one mode in Quake 4 :

• Overall Quality – High; Resolution – 1024x768; Format – 4:3; Multi-core Optimization – Yes. Other settings were left default

There was no standard demo record in Quake 4 , so we had to create it by ourselves and we use it in every review of notebooks on our site so that different notebooks could be compared under identical conditions.

So, the U1F is not a gaming notebook. With all the external splendor, its graphics capacity isn’t strong. The manufacturer designed the U1F for work rather than for play as it is a business notebook.