ASUS U35Jc: Jogging in Place

Gaming on the U35Jc

The NVIDIA GeForce G 310M at the heart of the ASUS U35Jc is already a known quantity in our gaming suite: just 16 of NVIDIA's "CUDA cores" strapped to a paltry 64-bit memory bus. Knowing that bus is already going to strangle the meager number of cores on the 310M, it's not unreasonable to expect that the reduced video memory clock in the U35Jc is only going to exacerbate things. The 310M was never a very good gaming option to begin with—barely a passable one—but mercifully its time with us is almost up. NVIDIA's GeForce 400M series should be trickling into the marketplace soon, and with that hopefully ASUS will have a better option than this for the next refresh. We'll start with the 3DMarks.

In each of the Futuremark benches, the U30Jc and U35Jc fall in line exactly where we'd expect them. Note how massive the gulf in performance is between these two (and the HD 5470) and the mainstream-class GPUs, though.

And there you have it. Outside of Mass Effect 2, which may have the benefit of the newer video drivers in the U35Jc, the crippled memory speed has a measurable impact on performance in every game, and actually brutally curtails performance in the otherwise hardware-friendly Left 4 Dead 2.

These results all prove something we already knew, though: the GeForce G 310M is barely adequate for anything but the most basic gaming. It's a definite improvement over Intel's HD integrated graphics, but these games are just on the cusp of playable at our lowest settings and the laptop's native resolution. The reduced clock on the 310M's memory in the U35Jc just exacerbates an existing problem. We need faster hardware; the GeForce 400M series can't arrive soon enough.