X-bit labs

Santa Rosa + Vista: Three Notebooks Reviewed (page 9)

Category: Mobile

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 11/04/2007 | 04:18 PM ]

Notebook delivers pretty loud sound. The speakers are located on the front edge of the case and are aimed at the desk.

Asus A8Sc cooling system sucks air into several holes from beneath the notebook and ousts it through a slit on the right-hand side, which may be an inconvenience for those who prefer to use an external mouse.

Asus A8Sc model that we managed to get for our tests was equipped with a dual-core Core 2 Duo T7100 processor working at 1.8GHz frequency and featuring cut-down 2MB cache. However, it performed very well during our test session in all applications that didn’t require powerful 3D graphics.

Although Nvidia GeForce 8400M G graphics card belongs to the latest Nvidia graphics accelerator family and complies formally with DirectX 10 requirements, it could only display the Windows Vista Aero interface, because it only had 8 stream processors and 128Mb of memory. However, the video memory capacity may dynamically increase up to 384MB thanks to Turbo Cache technology, although it can hardly help the situation, which we have seen during our test session. But I have to admit that GeForce 8400M G has its advantages as well, which makes the use of this graphics solution absolutely justified in Asus A8Sc notebook. Unlike Intel graphics core, this GPU supports hardware H.264 decoding and allows watching HD movies without any problems.

Among the drawbacks of Asus A8Sc hardware configuration we should mention not only the absence of Intel Turbo Memory and weak 3D graphics. Another significant disadvantage is the use of 1GB DDR2 SDRAM working at 667MHz in single-channel mode. It is possible to enable dual-channel mode, but you will need to install an additional DDR2 SODIMM.

This mobile computer features a smaller battery than usual, with 50.6Wh capacity. As a result, it has not very long battery life. As our tests revealed, the notebook may not last even 2 hours on battery under some types of workload.