ASUS X72D/K72DR: Three Cores, No Waiting
by Dustin Sklavos on October 25, 2010 12:01 AM ESTBattery, Noise, and Heat
We'll get this out of the way right now: between having to power a 17.3" screen, an AMD Phenom II tri-core processor, an RS880 Northbridge, an SB850 Southbridge, and the Mobility Radeon HD 5470, the anemic six-cell, 48Whr battery included with the ASUS X72D is hopelessly overmatched.
Given that the X72D is so substantial to begin with, it's difficult to imagine too many situations where you'd want to run it unplugged. That's good, because it isn't going to last that long anyhow: even completely idle and with the wireless off the X72D can't eke out three hours of running time. When tasked with media playback, you'll be lucky to finish a movie. This notebook just wasn't made for running off of the battery.
In order to test noise and heat, we ran 3DMark06 in a continuous loop for an hour with HWMonitor running in the background. We recorded the results with HWMonitor.
The thermals aren't very good, but the X72D seems to be tuned to favor silence. Under load the fan would spin faster and was audible, but it was a fairly quiet whooshing sound and wasn't hugely distracting. Temperatures of the computing surface of the unit are actually perfectly fine under load; some heat does radiate off of the top left side of the keyboard (near the exhaust), but overall the unit at least feels cool under load. Still, this is another place where the increased form factor of the 17.3" chassis could have been better used to manage heat: a peak temperature of 91C on the processor cores may be within spec, but it's still high.
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e36Jeff - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
you are supposed to read that as 3 cores running at 2.1Ghz, not 6.3 Ghz(e.g. 3x2.1). Its not a literal math statement. They probably just assumed people would be able to work that one out themselves.Meaker10 - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
Plus if he meant 3 times 2.1 he would have put 3*2.1 which is the accepted maths notation on a computer.jlazzaro - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
I guess some things elude even the greatest super saiyans...snouter - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
Yeah bro, you straight outran the coverage on that one. lolSimKill - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
Yes what e36Jeff said.And for multiple processors you put the N x in front of the processor name
eg. 4x AMD Phenom II N830 would be read as 4 processors.
AstroGuardian - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
I don't know what's the point in Asus trying to compete in notebook market. They just fall to the bottom. Why not just make better motherboards and VGA cards where they are actually good?SteelCity1981 - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
Um...I don't see how you can compare this notbook and make an assumption towards Asus's entire line of notebooks. Asus has some really good gaming notebooks out on the market.Powerlurker - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
Asus regularly tops reliability ratings for laptops. If you're willing to give up configurability, they have some spectacular deals out there.DMisner - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
bah, please dont bother reviewing anything portable with an AMD cpu till bobcat is releasedmino - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
Why ? Their current budget platform is actually usefull.On a side note, boating about SB "GPU" while bashing 5470 AND not even mentioning Ontario/Llano was pretty silly on Dustin's part ...