ASUS N43SL Jay Chou Special Edition - A Bold Statement

ASUS N43SL Receives An Artistic Touch

ASUS has channeled considerable resources to raise their N-series notebooks to superstardom status of late. To begin with, the Taiwanese CE maker has paired up with Jay Chou to create a spinoff of the original N43SL entertainment notebook and was showcased at a glitzy media event held in Taipei. More recently, we've also received word that ASUS has been rubbing shoulders with Jason Mraz, Andy Morahan and Don McCullin for their "In Search of Incredible" global marketing campaign, primed mainly for the N45SF model bundled with its own SonicMaster subwoofer. What about Jay's protege? For all its celebrity hype, is the Jay Chou Special Edition (we'll call it JCSE for short) better than its predecessor?

At its heart, the JCSE is an aesthetical makeover of the silver N43SL edition launched earlier this year. It is laudable, in that Jay Chou himself has invested a great deal of heart and soul into the JCSE's design, such as the Chinese porcelain motifs and little artistic nuances inspired by his music and personal tastes. Retailing in red or gold variations, ASUS has chosen to stack the JCSE with a more conservative hardware compared to the preliminary N43SL. For instance, while ASUS is still offering Intel's Sandy Bridge Core i5 and i3 processors with the JCSE, the quad-core Core i7-2630QM has clearly been left out of the equation. Apart from that, most of its hardware remains status quo, including the discrete NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M GPU as well as speakers developed by the Bang & Olufsen ICEpower team. It's time now to check out the JCSE's construction before we scrutinize its performance benchmarks.

Body Talk

Jay Chou has left his mark on almost every facade of the JCSE. For starters, the glossy lid itself is emblazoned with a beautiful red ring filled with Baroque-inspired patterns. Look closer, and you'd find motifs such as French playing card suits (hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades), piano keys on the inner ring, as well as a Nunchaku camouflaged by the busy artwork. According to Chou, the Nunchaku is a representation of his song "Shuang Jie Kun". Not surprisingly, the man is an ardent fan of the late Bruce Lee too, having starred as Kato himself in the recent remake of The Green Hornet. The "Incredible J" insignia might not seem much, but it took Chou repeated tries to get the calligraphy right.

Geared as a multimedia notebook, the JCSE sports a thickness of 37mm at its thickest point, and weighs in at 2.4kg. On its right flank, sits two USB ports - a USB 3.0 slot marked in blue, and a conventional USB 2.0 next to it. Other occupants include a DVD drive and Wi-Fi switch. Over to the left are where most of the usual ports reside, apart from sharing the space with the heat vent. ASUS' inclusion of a HDMI slot will be appreciated by those who prefer to watch their video clips on the big screen. A VGA port is included, although it has been relegated to the rear of the notebook. The four LED indicators are seated at the edge of the front lip. In other words, you can still peek at their statuses even with the lid closed.

Inner Sanctum 

Upon opening the JCSE's lid, its shiny red speaker grilles would probably grab your eyeballs before anything else. Speaking of which, we were very much impressed by the speakers' spatial quality and clarity, as tuned by ASUS and B&O. Just below the grilles are two power buttons situated on the left and right extremes. The left one fires up the Linux-based Express Gate platform, which enables you to surf the web promptly instead of waiting for the primary OS (Windows Home 7 Premium in this case) to boot up. Other Jay Chou elements include a specialized "J" on the keyboard and his signature etched on the wrist-rest. The keys offer a soft tactile travel. However, their close alignment between keys could make it hard for the touch typist.    

The 14-inch screen sports a 16:9 widescreen aspect with a native resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. It's not quite Full-HD, but its perfect for 720p clips. It was wonderfully bright, but like most notebooks' LCD panels, the JCSE is yet another victim of tight vertical viewing angles. Chou's contribution isn't limited to the notebook's hardware. We also discovered three wallpapers, four albums, a screensaver, as well as a start-up tune composed by the Taiwanese artist. The JCSE isn't free of bloatware, unfortunately, and it is evident once you browse through the ASUS Utilities folder. Some are useful, however, such as the Power4Gear Hybrid application which enables you to throttle the CPU and power settings for those who are less savvy. 

Performance Benchmarks

Welcome to the battle royale of entertainment notebooks. For our performance tests, we've decided to reference the JCSE against the Dell XPS 15z and HP Pavilion dv6. As you can tell from the table below, the JCSE touts the same Intel second-gen Core i5 processor as the 15z. While the XPS is using a higher end HM67 chipset, it shouldn't affect mainstream performance testing since the HM67 only has the edge where overclocking and RAID fixtures are concerned. However, ASUS might have a hard time beating the HP dv6 though, given its superior Core i7 workhorse and GPU. 

PCMark Vantage

Our PCMark Vantage results did not yield any surprises. With an overall score of 5817 PCMarks, the ASUS JCSE was almost on par with the Dell XPS 15z in many aspects, except for the TV/Movies and Productivity suites. As predicted, the HP Pavilion dv6 nabbed the top spot by a decent margin, and its robust hardware was most evident in the gaming suite. What does this say about the JCSE? Translated in real world terms, the ASUS notebook has a slightly above average work rate and consumers shouldn't be too concerned about its efficiency levels. Less intensive games shouldn't be a problem with this chap.

3DMark06

Again, the three contestants racked up results in tune with their hardware specifications as anticipated. Graphics performance on 3DMark is typically governed not just by the GPU, but the CPU and other software variables. As mentioned earlier, the ASUS JCSE and Dell XPS 15z share the same Core i5 processor and memory configuration, with the exception of minor graphics variations. The JCSE had a slight advantage due to its mid-tier GT 540M module which packs a 672MHz core speed, compared to Dell's GT 525M rated at 600MHz and marginally slower architecture. Vantage's Gaming Suite gave us a hint of what the Pavilion dv6 can do with its Core i7 2630QM workhorse and Radeon HD 6770M, and it did prove its mettle with a final score of 11,349 3DMarks. 

Far Cry 2

Results on Far Cry 2 corroborated our opinion that the ASUS JCSE is well suited as a casual gaming rig. For the purposes of testing across a standard resolution, we had the game running at a fixed lower resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels compared to the notebook's native screen estate. The JCSE showed healthy results of 63.38 frames per second, which makes it highly playable on the meeker medium quality graphics setting. Naturally, frame rates dipped to 41.5fps on the Very High quality mode. This doesn't mean Far Cry 2 is entirely unplayable; it still is, however, gameplay may suffer from minor choppiness. The JCSE also carries an integrated Intel HD 3000 GPU, and needless to say, results will be significantly poorer on the integrated alternative. So its best to use the integrated graphics while surfing the web or other light workloads to save on battery life.

Battery Life

We opted for integrated graphics to maximize the 56Whr battery's lifespan. Besides, it makes little sense to run our DVD (X-Men: The Last Stand) video on the discrete option since a standard-definition video isn't exactly very resource intensive. You can do this via the NVIDIA Control Panel, for we did not discover any ASUS application to select between the two GPUs. The good thing for us is that we also have appropriate comparison results to share, so how did the JCSE  fare? Well, it made it to about three hours, sputtering out after a run of 2 hours and 55 minutes to be precise. That's not too impressive in fact, considering Dell's XPS 15z lasted about an hour longer despite its involuntary use of discrete graphics. In addition, Dell's hearty battery life can be credited to its beefier 64WHr cell, which understandably gave it more mileage. The HP Pavilion dv6 also fared much better in comparison, and we believe this could be due to the notebook's more conservative overall clock speed although it touts four CPU cores instead of two and has a much more powerful discrete graphics module too. Also note that the battery capacity for the HP machine is lower than that of the ASUS JCSE and has a larger screen to power. Considering these traits, we were left wanting more out of the ASUS machine.

Power Consumption

An average battery life typically yields a similar result on our power consumption benchmark, given that our formula consists of dividing the notebook's "watt-hour" rating by its battery life as a denominator. In essence, the better the battery life, the smaller the power consumption value would be. In this case, the results were once again stacked against the Taiwanese's favor. Judging by our calculated numbers of 19.17 watts, the ASUS JCSE failed to trump its adversaries despite having the advantage of a smaller 14-inch screen estate and less power-hungry integrated graphics alternative (Intel HD 3000). Pound for pound, Dell's 15z still stands to benefit from its formidable 64WHr cell which gave it a final power consumption rating of 15.84 watts. The HP dv6 also proved to be more power efficient, seeing how it was unfazed by its larger 15-inch screen size and lesser-rated 51.51WHr battery pack. 

Portability Index

The ratio for our Portability Index is derived by dividing the battery life of the notebook by the product of its volume and weight. In simpler terms, the larger the ratio, the more portable the notebook is. Given its relatively bulky profile, average battery life, and 2.4kg weight factor, we did not expect the JCSE to ace this round. And true enough, its final PI ratio was closer to that of its hefty multimedia competitors, such as the HP Pavilion dv6. As you can tell from the chart below, ultraportables like the Acer Aspire S3, Sony Vaio Z and the Apple MacBook Air have little trouble achieving a portability index ratio of 2.0 or above, but those are a difference class of notebooks. As far multimedia notebooks are concerned, the JCSE was once again unimpressive, but the results are to be expected and not really out of the norm. The Dell XPS 15z however is looking really good in comparison.

The Final Word

Celebrity-endorsed notebooks have been dotting the consumer landscape in recent history. For example, HP did work with Vivienne Tam on a number of their netbook offerings since 2008. For our test model in question, it is apparent ASUS and Jay Chou have invested a great deal of effort into the JCSE's design, although there are little upgrades being made to the original N43SL's hardware. If you can put aside the JCSE's overall glossy texture, its artwork may actually grow on you over time, if it doesn't grab you instantly that is. As a multimedia notebook, it has most of the bases covered, such as a HDMI output, a USB 3.0 port, as well as a legacy VGA port. The only limitations are its lack of a Blu-ray drive and a full HD display. On the bright side, you get to enjoy a 2-year warranty with the JCSE instead of one.

Performance wise, the JCSE did above average on most of our tests, except for its battery longevity. Based on figures crunched on PCMark Vantage and 3DMark, it is clear that the JCSE isn't built for vigorous tasks, but it should do well where day-to-day tasks are concerned. Yes, it is also suitable for casual gaming if you can avoid intensive titles such as Crysis on maximum resolution. Its 6-cell battery lasted approximately 3 hours on our DVD video run. For casual surfing, you can probably achieve a mileage of up to 3 to 4 hours before having to recharge this baby again. The JCSE is far from being a portable notebook, especially when you consider its heft and battery life. However, its audacious looks and hearty performance should mitigate its shortcomings by a notch. To add, ASUS is also currently throwing in a 4GB thumb drive with any purchase of the JCSE. Ardent fans of Jay Chou scouting for an entertainment notebook may consider adding the made-over N43SL to their shopping list. That is, if they can live with the JCSE's average battery span.

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