Aural Nirvana
For some of you, the new ASUS NX90Jq premium class notebook may seem strangely different from your usual run of the mill notebooks. When you start talking about multimedia notebooks, manufacturers usually load them up with all the bells and whistles. In fact it's not strange to find such multimedia notebooks packing powerful processors, Blu-ray playback, a pair of branded speakers that deliver some measure of audio fidelity for the user.
ASUS instead has chosen to go with a different approach, redefining the way multimedia notebooks are designed. For a start, its exterior sure doesn’t portray itself as a notebook and it looks more like a shiny large aluminum document holder of sorts - well at least when it's top is closed. Designed by David Lewis, a chief designer for Bang & Olufsen, the notebook comes packing with two giant speakers flanking the sides of the 18-inch Full HD screen. This makes the top half much larger than the bottom, but rest assured it's sturdy enough and won't fall over.
With a top made of shiny and reflective polished aluminum, the notebook was pretty challenging to photograph. Even then, the exterior is reflecting the roof of our light box.
Once you open it up, it resembles more of an All-in-One (AIO) desktop machine or at least a Desktop Replacement (DTR) class notebook. Our handling of the ASUS NX90Jq further confirms our initial impressions. The unit is quite large and heavy due to the build quality and sizable speakers which the notebook is endowed with instead of the usual built-in branded speakers. However, it's this unique design that sets it apart from the usual mill of notebooks. It is also one of the more advanced notebooks in the market, even sporting the USB 3.0 interface. Read on as we uncover more of what this beauty is capable of. As usual, hit the specs tab to get the full specs details of the product.
Flanked by the two speakers at the side, the ASUS NX90Jq is a very elegant looking notebook that's unfortunately a little too reflective.
You won't be lacking for ports here on the right side with two USB 3.0 ports, one e-SATA/USB combo port, a HDMI port, VGA out and the audio jacks.
On the left side is the slot loaded Blu-ray DVD combo drive, SD card reader and another USB port.
Lend Me Your Ears
On the notebook's interior, there are a couple of things that make this notebook quite unique. For a start, well, we’ve mentioned the pair of giant speakers. These aren’t just your ordinary notebook speakers. ASUS has worked closely with Bang and Olufsen ICEpower to design the speakers as well as utilizing ICEPower's MobileSound 3 audio IC for amplification and digital signal processing. This should bring about much better audio performance than usual implementations and ASUS has coined this combined solution as SonicMaster technology for easy marketing to end-users.
A closer look at the speakers based on ASUS SonicMaster technology, which is in turn co-developed with Bang & Olufson ICEpower. ASUS touts that the speakers have oversized resonance chambers that are ten times larger than those found on regular notebooks, thus improving its sonic performance. We'll soon relay our findings on audio quality from our formal testing.
Using a standard range of music genres, we put the speakers and our ears to the test (our full audio track test list can be found in our ). Unexpectedly, we found the speakers to be soft. It certainly wasn't loud enough to justify the huge size of the notebook, and we noted significant attenuation at the low and high frequencies. This doesn’t bode well for the speakers, especially since we also found its bass to be weaker than anticipated. That's not to say that the huge tower speakers aren't any good. In fact, they actually sounded surprisingly clear and bright. Overall, the speakers are better than what you would get out of a normal laptop, but they are not a substitute for a decent pair of external speakers, which could be a lot cheaper than splurging on the NX90 notebook series.
The base of the notebook sports a nice and spacious keyboard; it's so spacious that the area below the keyboard acts as a palm rest. The only thing missing however, is a trackpad where you would normally expect it to be. Instead, the NX90Jq comes with two trackpads located at both ends of the keyboard, which sort of suggests that you could spin a gig to complete a DJ-like experience. Sadly both trackpads operate exclusively, and you can’t use both at the same time (which would have been an interesting navigating experience it were possible).
The keys are laid out in an isolated style, and the trackpads are located on both ends instead of below the keyboard.
There's also a row of dedicated buttons for controlling the multimedia functions of the notebook.
Performance and Benchmarking
While the NX90Jq was designed to impress externally, ASUS hasn’t neglected the internal hardware, packing the unit with more than decent components in the form of the Intel Core i7-720QM (1.6GHz) and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M . For comparisons, we've singled out the and the Lenovo IdeaPad Y550P notebooks which have similar processors and other components to the ASUS NX90Jq. From specs alone, it seem like the ASUS has an edge over the Lenovo machine but it could be outclassed by the Sager. Let’s find out in our detailed benchmarks.
Specifications / Notebook | ASUSNX90Jq | Sager NP8690 | Lenovo IdeaPad Y550P |
Processor | Intel Core i7-720QM
(1.60GHz, quad-core with 6MB L2 cache) | Intel Core i7-720QM
(1.60GHz, quad-core with 6MB L2 cache) | Intel Core i7-720QM
(1.60GHz, quad-core with 6MB L2 cache) |
Chipset | Intel HM55 | Intel PM55 | Intel HM55 |
Memory | 4GB DDR3 | 4GB DDR3 | 4GB DDR3 |
HDD | 2 x 640GB SATA 7200 RPM | 1 x 320GB SATA 5400 RPM | 1 x 500GB SATA 5400 RPM |
Video | NVIDIAGeForce GT 335M | ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 | NVIDIA GeForce GT 240M |
Futuremark PCMark Vantage
As usual, we start off with the trusty PCMark Vatnage benchmark for an all-round experience of the system. While it doesn’t have a crazy high score like the Sager NP8690, it easily outscores the Lenovo IdeaPad Y550P by quite a bit. Then again, the results are to be expected from a machine using this processor and having discrete graphics unit like the NVIDIA GeForce GT335M. This is not a bad thing to be honest, just that it's not anything out of the blue. The performance is definitely good compared to other lower specced notebooks.
Futuremark 3DMark06
On the graphics side of things, the NVIDIA GeForce GT335M held up well, delivering a score of 8324 3DMarks. While it’s not in the Sager NP8690’s class, the NX90Jq still holds its own pretty well in a benchmarking scenario. Let’s see how it does when it comes to a real world gaming benchmark in our next test.
Far Cry 2
If anything, being able enjoy the booming sounds of explosions and gunfire while traveling in the very noisy African jungles would make sense with the audio capabilities of the NX90Jq (at least in comparison to most other notebooks). So we hoped the notebook’s hardware would keep up to the task. Thankfully, it didn't disappoint as it scored around 21.39 fps at 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution at Very High quality. While commendable for its hardware specs, that's still going to be a pain to have a smooth game play. However toning the quality to Medium quality settings made the game much more playable with 36.71 fps.
If you’re willing to dial down the resolution though, at 1280 x 1024 pixels resolution and with graphics set at Medium, the game play was smooth with an average frame rate of 46.29 fps. What about with Very High quality settings? As you can see from the graph below, it dropped to about 27 fps which was quite decent. Of course the Sager notebook scored almost twice that result with a much more powerful GPU in return for an almost non-existent battery life. There's always two sides to the equation, so lets check the battery life and power consumption aspects on the following page.
Battery Performance and Portability Index
The battery isn't removable as far as we could see, but what's interesting in this shot is that you can see how the speakers protrude from the sides.
Well, with the NX90Jq more or less a Desktop Replacement (DRT) notebook, we don’t expect the notebook to be carried around much. Its hefty weight of 4.4kg means you don’t want to be lugging this around without transport, and honestly, it’s a machine best used in a living room or study to accentuate your decor.
As our battery life testing below shows, this is one notebook that will work without a power socket for a decent amount of time. As usual, these numbers are obtained from our DVD video tests, which we would like to add that the brightness and volume were set to 50%, just like in all of our other notebook tests.
Power efficiency too shows that the unit does seem to use less power compared to the other two notebooks that we've compared against. Since the battery capacity of the ASUS and the Lenovo notebooks are quite similar, power efficiency here does play an important role in obtaining a longer battery life. This is perfectly reflected in the previous graph above as well.
Lastly, our Portability Index is a test where we take the notebook's battery uptime divided by the product of its weight and volume. The resulting ratio, the higher the better, just means how much more portable a notebook is compared to others of its class. As can be deduced, due to size, weight and battery life of the ASUS NX90Jq, it’s not a very portable notebook. Of course, that's to be expected for any notebook in its category.
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?
Made for the ears, the ASUS NX90Jq is a new premium notebook that packs a snazzy design combined with stand alone speakers. Does it justify its S$3,888 price tag? Well, yes, but only if you've an penchant for cool designs and have the cash to spare.
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