by Galina Sudareva
12/13/2004 | 07:57 PM
ASUSTeK Computer Inc. has established a firm position in the world hardware market, supplying notebooks, computers, mainboards, graphics cards, servers and server platforms, controllers, audio cards, optical drives and what not. The Taiwan-based company owes much of its success to the quality and reasonable pricing of its products, quick response to any market changes, and competent tech service.
Today I’m going to review two new notebooks from ASUS which have come to replace the A2 series: A4B00L and A4S00G models. The former is positioned as a budget notebook for office, and the latter as a high-performance machine capable of replacing an ordinary workstation. Both notebooks are based on processors with support of Hyper-Threading technology, have a widescreen matrix and a big amount of system memory. They also offer the opportunity to quickly, easily and cheaply upgrade obsolete parts. These features will be covered in more detail below.
Glancing over the A4B00L or A4S00G you can immediately tell that these models are not for frequent business trips or long work in “field conditions”. They are really too big (356 x 286 x 42mm) and heavy (3.5kg) for that.
The two reviewed models have identical cases – the design and the number and type of ports and connectors are the same. So, the lids of the notebooks are colored dark gray; the area between the touchpad and the keyboard is the same color, while the screen bezel and the bottom surface are black. A light silvery bezel goes around the sides of the notebooks. The design is overall simple, but not quite harmonious.
A rather high-sensitivity microphone is integrated into the top left corner of the screen bezel. The widescreen panels of the notebooks have a diagonal of 15.4” and a maximum resolution of 1280x800 (A4B00L) and 1680x1050 (A4S00G); they are bright and good at reproducing colors. You can control the screen brightness using the appropriate functional keys; the current setting is then displayed on an onscreen scale. The brightness range is rather wide, but the minimal brightness level is of no use anyway – the screen is too dark. Moreover, you’re going to see below that the reduction of the screen brightness doesn’t bring any bonuses in terms of battery life.
On the top panel, near the right screen hinge, there is a row of buttons: a round power on/off button (highlighted with bright orange), a button to disable the touchpad (to avoid accidental touches when you’re typing text), a Power4Gear+ button (it browses between different power-saving modes), and quick-launch buttons (to quickly start up your Internet browser or e-mail client).
The system status indicators are divided into two groups and are also found on the top panels of the notebooks. The first group is located at the base of the screen above the quick launch buttons and consists of the following indicators: HDD, Num Lock, and Caps Lock. The second group is located under the touchpad’s buttons, which is not very handy as they are not visible with the lid is closed. This group includes:
Next to the second group of system indicators, there are an Audio DJ button which allows playing CDs without booting the OS up (you just attach the computer to a power source, press the Player on/off button and insert an audio disc into the optical drive) and the player controls (Play, Pause, Previous track and Next track). Each notebook has four stereo speakers; one pair is located on the sides of the front panel and the other pair is above the keyboard next to the quick-launch buttons. The speakers give out a loud sound, especially required for watching movies and listening to music.
The full-size keyboards are made of opaque (A4B00L) and translucent (A4S00G) black plastic, and this is the only difference between them. The functional keys are labeled blue (press and hold [Fn] to use them). The Page Up, Page Down, Home and End keys form a vertical column on the right; there is a numeric pad as well as two Windows keys available. The Insert, Delete, Print Screen and Pause keys are in the top row, next to the functional keys. The keyboard is overall handy and comfortable.
The touchpad is accompanied with two buttons that replace the mouse’s left and right buttons, but regrettably it doesn’t have an additional scroll button or a joystick. You can use the right side of the touchpad for scrolling; there’re special marks on it for that purpose.
There’s nothing on the front panels of the notebooks, save for a lid latch and the above-mentioned stereo speakers.
The following components are found on the left panel:
The following items are available on the right panel of the notebooks:
And these components are located on the rear panel:
On the bottom of the notebooks, there’s a big cover for the entire size of the bottom with a pocket for the owner’s visiting card. You can remove the cover by undoing four screws and shifting it off. Under the cover you see two memory slots, a hard disk drive and a miniPCI WLAN card, components of the cooling systems, an optical drive bay and a battery cell. This engineering solution helps to replace or upgrade any component of the notebook quickly and easily.
The following table compares the communicational capabilities of the two notebooks:
As for the accessories you get with the notebooks, we received our samples of the A4B00L and A4S00G with just the basic things like power adapters (quite large and heavy), power cords with plugs of various types, CDs with drivers and utilities and programs for playing DVDs, editing videos and creating slideshows.
Having identical cases, the A4B00L and the A4S00G models are anyway differently positioned in the market by the manufacturer (the former is a budget notebook for working in office while the latter is a desktop workstation replacement). Of course their configurations differ and reflect their positioning.
So, both notebook models feature the Mobile Intel Pentium 532 processor (3.06GHz, Prescott core, 0.09-micron technology, 533MHz FSB, 1024KB L2 cache, support of Hyper-Threading when powered from an external power source). The notebooks are both equipped with 80GB HDDs from Hitachi with an 8MB cache buffer, but of different spindle rotation speeds (the A4B00L comes with a 4200rpm IC25N080ATMR04-0 drive, and the A4S00G is equipped with a 5400rpm HTS548080M9AT00 HDD). The similarity between the configurations ends here, though.
So, what about the difference? The A4B00L is based on the SiS 661MX chipset, while the A4S00G – on the SiS 648FX. As for the graphics subsystem, the A4B00L uses the chipset-integrated graphics core with support of shared memory architecture; the user can choose the portion of the system memory allotted for the needs of the graphics subsystem (32, 64 or 128MB). The other notebook employs a discrete graphics processor ATI Mobility RADEON 9700 with 64MB of dedicated graphics memory, which allows enjoying modern 3D games.
Besides that, both notebooks have two memory slots (the maximum memory amount supported is 2GB). One memory slot is occupied in each notebook by a module of PC2700 DDR SDRAM of 256MB (in the A4B00L) and of 512MB (in the A4S00G) capacity; the other slot is empty. To access the memory, you open the big cover on the bottom of the notebook’s case by unfastening four screws.
The audio subsystem integrated into the SiS 7012 South Bridge (the South Bridge is the same in both notebook models) provides a sound of good quality and volume; you can enjoy listening to audio and video recordings with these notebooks.
The integrated DVD-RW drives of the notebooks have the following speed formulas: 24x CD read, 2x DVD read, 16x CD rewrite, 4x DVD rewrite, 24x CD write, 8x DVD write (in the A4B00L model), and 16x CD read, 4x DVD read, 10x CD rewrite, 4x DVD rewrite, 24x CD write, 8x DVD write (in the A4S00G model). The configurations of the notebooks don’t include a floppy drive, although I think the ASUS A4B00L, being an office machine, might have come with one, as floppy diskettes are still used in many offices.
The cooling systems of both notebooks are identically noisy, but not too much. Unfortunately, both notebooks became rather hot at work, especially near the touchpad and at the bottom. I measured the temperatures of the notebooks as they were passing through the Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 test:
The next table summarizes the technical characteristics of the reviewed notebooks:
I tested the two notebooks from ASUS with their preinstalled operating system – Microsoft Windows XP Professional with DirectX 9.0a. I disabled network services, audio subsystems, power-saving services, antivirus software, screensavers and error messages before the tests. The computers were tested at the maximum and minimal screen brightness settings and at the maximum resolution of the LCD matrix (1280x800 for the A4B00L and 1680x1050 for the A4S00G).
I used two power modes in my tests. First, I selected the Always On power mode for the maximum performance and the shortest battery run-down time. Then, I switched to the Max Battery mode for the maximum battery run-down time.
Our tests:
The results of the synthetic tests SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark 2004 are presented below, and they are good overall. The table also shows that both notebooks drop their performance in three times when they are powered by their own batteries as the systems start to save on the power resources.
So, the results of CPU Arithmetic Benchmark and CPU Multimedia Benchmark are very good and similar (3 percent in SiSoft Sandra) between the two notebooks as they have the same central processor, the 3.06GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 532 model. The processor performance of the A4S00G is 16 percent higher in PCMark04, however, due to the influence of side factors (different chipsets, graphics subsystems, hard disk drives, memory size). The memory performance differs, too, as the A4S00G comes with 512MB of memory against the A4B00L’s 256MB. The 5400rpm spindle rotation speed of the HDD of the A3S00G results in a higher HDD performance (the A4B00L uses a 4200rpm drive).
Next, I checked out the performance of the two notebooks in Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests which ran scripts of various real-life applications and produced the following results (unfortunately, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 wouldn’t run on the ASUS A4S00G and I couldn’t do anything about that):
So, the results are good enough, and the A4S00G offers more performance in office applications than the A4B00L. The same A4S00G should have won Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004, too, but again, this test wouldn’t run on that notebook.
Here are diagrams for the same numbers:
The notebooks also had good results in gaming applications, but each in its particular category, of course, because the A4B00L uses an integrated graphics subsystem, while the A4S00G features a discrete graphics controller with dedicated graphics memory. So, I used two graphics quality settings in 3DMark 2001SE Pro: 1) 1024x768 resolution, 16-bit color, Z-buffer and textures, and 2) 1024x768 resolution, 32-bit color, 24-bit Z-buffer and 32-bit textures. You can see the results below. Unfortunately, 3DMark 2001SE Pro wouldn’t run on the ASUS A4B00L, falling down into Windows after the pass of the initial test module. So, the following table contains the results for one model only:
These are quite assuring numbers – the ASUS A4S00G permits you to play modern 3D games that require DirectX 9.0 support. Note, however, that the performance of the system degenerates in double when it is powered by the battery. Such parameters as Fill Rate, Advanced Pixel Shader, and Point Sprites remain practically the same irrespective of the power source.
The A4S00G beats the A4B00L in Unreal Tournament 2003, of course. They just belong to different weight categories. The A4S00G is about 65-80 percent faster depending on the specific map. The precise numbers are tabled below:
And diagrammed here:
I checked out the speeds of the notebooks in Quake 3 with two graphics quality presets:
The A4S00G is 61 percent faster than the A4B00L in the first mode and 81 percent faster in the second mode. The numbers are listed below:
And here’s the diagram:
So, the A4S00G can be a good replacement of a gaming computer, too. It can run modern games with advanced visual effects at an appropriate speed. I can’t say the same about the A4B00L, however, which is going to make a slideshow out of DirectX 9.0 games (if such a game would launch on it).
Next, I measured the battery run-down time with the help of Battery Eater Pro 2.30 at the highest and lowest screen brightness settings, and in three test modes:
The results of the test are listed below:
As the table shows, the A4B00L and the A4S00G cannot boast a long battery run-down time, but the manufacturer doesn’t promise it, either. These notebooks are intended as a replacement of office computers and workstations, i.e. to be used as stationary computers.
The table shows that the battery of the ASUS A4B00L can last up to 1 hour 29 minutes in the classic mode, 2 hours 2 minutes in the reader’s mode, and 1 hour 30 minutes in the DVD watch test. The battery of the ASUS A4B00L can last up to 1 hour 18 minutes in the classic mode, 1 hours 51 minutes in the reader’s mode, and 1 hour 27 minutes in the DVD watch test.
By reducing the screen brightness to the minimum, you don’t achieve any significant battery life bonus with these notebooks (and this setting isn’t comfortable even for reading): 20 minutes in the reader’s test and 11 minutes in the classic test with the A4B00L, and 16 minutes in the reader’s test and 7 minutes in the classic test with the A4S00G.
The results of the battery life tests are presented below:
My tests show that the A4B00L and A4S00G notebooks feature good performance and excellent ergonomics, but their unassuming exterior might be better, more memorable. The bulkiness of the notebooks doesn’t add them elegance at all. The battery run-down time of these computers isn’t high, either, but the manufacturer doesn’t intend them for field conditions.
The ASUS A4B00L model suits well for everyday office work as it is fast enough in multimedia and office applications. This notebook, however, is less confident in games. You can only use it to play old games (not requiring DirectX 9.0 support).
The ASUS A4S00G is a powerful notebook capable of replacing an ordinary desktop workstation. This machine can be used for work as well as for entertainment: playing modern games, watching videos and listening to audios.
You should keep in mind the fact that the A4B00L and the A4S00G may be small enough for your desk (if compared to a desktop computer), but are rather too bulky to be used as portable computers. If you travel often and want to find a “voyage notebook”, you may want to consider other models.