ASUS NX90Jq - Aural Nirvana

The Sound of Music

The Sound of Music

The ASUS NX90Jq is a major departure from ASUS’ usual notebook series, and it shows. From the concept and the design, you’re looking at a really swell looking machine that's made to be featured as a center piece of any room you choose to house it in. It's quite an unusual but pleasing design that's not found in most notebooks. While we do love the appearance of its polished aluminum finish, it does not hold up well to constant usage as it attracts fingerprint smudges very easily. And due to its shiny finish, it's also more obviously noticeable.

On the interior, the removal of the trackpad from its usual position and the inclusion of dual trackpads at both ends of the keyboard means that you’ll have to have to learn and adapt to its new location. By default, you would constantly find yourself moving your hand to the middle of the palm rest area to try and activate the trackpad wthout realizing that it has been shifted (and that's something we ran into all the time). Once you get acclimatized though, then the dual trackpads can be quite handy. It's a shame the trackpads aren’t capable of working together simultaneously, otherwise they would make for an interesting new way of interacting with the notebook.

Audio-wise, we’ve mentioned its strengths and its faults, and suffice to say, the notebook does have an advantage over most other notebooks with its better sound quality. However, if you are serious about your audio while desk-bound, you would want to get a decent pair of external speakers. This is the irony of the NX90Jq - a notebook designed for sonic performance, but yet doesn't quite deliver the audio prowess your would perceive with its towering speakers.

On the upside, thanks to its hardware specs, you'll be getting pretty decent performance from the NX90Jq, so no complains there. You may want to however tone your game's graphics quality settings to medium to get the best results since the graphics subsystem isn't top of the line. Combined with the audio of the NX90Jq, it should make for a pretty decent gaming experience - relatively speaking over most other notebooks.

Now, you’ll have to consider if what we’ve mentioned so far is to your liking, and whether it’s worth the price tag of the ASUS NX90Jq. At S$3,888, the notebook is expensive enough to buy a proper desktop gaming machine and with some spare change leftover. That said, you’re paying purely for the design of the notebook and to some extent, the better sound system. To iterate again, while audio is better than most notebooks, it wasn't living up to the hype or expectations, so that's where we felt a little let down. Otherwise, for a massive 18-inch designer-piece notebook, we think the premium asked is sort of justifiable when compared to what other DTR notebooks are going for with their capabilities. So if you know that the ASUS NX90Jq will fit nicely into your home decor, then why the heck not?