ASUS U41JF: Arrandale's Not Dead Yet
by Jarred Walton on March 28, 2011 7:35 PM ESTGeneral Performance – Overclocked Arrandale vs. Sandy Bridge
We’re dealing with a lot of similarly specced laptops in the benchmarks, with a lot of Arrandale + GT 420M/425M choices. For this review, we’ll focus on the two Sandy Bridge laptops we’ve tested, one with quad-core i7-2820QM and the other with a dual-core i5-2415M. The dual-core is a new MacBook Pro, and I can confirm that at least the dual-core i5-2520M laptop I’m testing right now is faster in nearly every benchmark, sometimes by a significant margin, so take the MBP13 numbers with a grain of salt. Then again, i5-2520M has more aggressive Turbo modes and a higher base clock than the 2415M.
It would help if all of our laptops used the same hard drive (or SSD), because PCMark in particular is highly influenced by that component. As such, the i7-2820QM results in those two tests are largely meaningless since it’s the only system in these charts with an SSD. The remaining tests are much more of a CPU benchmark, though, and here we see the overclocked i3-380M keeping pace with slightly faster Core i5 processors. The MBP13 looks particularly poor in the x264 test, so I’m not entirely sure what’s going on there. Quad-core SNB naturally plays in a different league, often doubling the performance of dual-core Arrandale.
In practice, though, any of the Arrandale laptops is plenty fast for typical use. The one area where dual-core Sandy Bridge really eclipses Arrandale is when you can use Quick Sync to accelerate video transcoding; everything else, it might be 10-30% faster in theory, but in practice that only becomes apparent when you’re running CPU intensive tasks. We’ll be looking at this more in a future review, but for now let’s just say that with a good SSD all of the systems (with the possible exception of the HP dm1z) will handle any task a home user might reasonably run.
Moving to the 3DMark results, the Vantage Entry-level score is the best showing for SNB, and even there the GT 425M in the U41JF comes out 12% faster than the quad-core and 37% faster than the dual-core. 3D06 and 3D03 come next, with a lead of 44-47% and 70% over the quad- and dual-core SNB. 3D05 gives the GT 425M its biggest wins, with margins of victory of 53% and 96%. Of course, these are all synthetic graphics tests, and while some games might correlate well with 3DMarks, there’s no substitute for benchmarking actual games….
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lexluthermiester - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
As opposed to HP and AMD? Or was that sarcasm?ajp_anton - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
Have you ever considered flipping that graph and make a simple "Watts (lower is better)" instead?sleepeeg3 - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link
Appreciate your comments on the LCD. I had an different Acer, which probably was not much different from the one in your graphs and tried to switch to the ASUS - horrible. While the Acer was no gem, the ASUS was almost intolerable. I ended up returning it, because of trackpad skipping and partly for the horrible LCD.That said, would I be willing to pay for an IPS panel in a cheap laptop that I am going to use and abuse? Especially one in an Acer with a chafing, integrated LCD power cable that is causing some of the LED backlights to fail, requiring replacement of the panel. Maybe $100 more if I knew it was an IPS, but it's not critical for something I do work on, when I can go home and type on the fantastic 26" IPS I am typing on now. It is amazing to sit behind someone with an Apple laptop and see their gorgeous screen, but on the other hand I know they paid $2000-3000 for that battery sucking, incompatible brick so it's alot easier to tolerate.
Bottom line though, it would be nice to have more choices and for there to be a clear standard for LCD display technology.
mschira - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
save another 100g by ditching the DVD drive,give us a better (highres screen) - you have a buy.
So. Yea well.
M.
duploxxx - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
While this is a nice update / upgrade if you want it is nothing more then stretching the life cycle of an EOL platform.By adding the GT425M, sure the performance is a better then the UM but the playback already shows what will happen with battery in real life not to mention any gaming on battery.
SB will clearly have the lead in poweroptimization for the CPU while still the need is there for a dGPU, the HD series are just not strong enough gaming wise.
Liano on the other hand will provide the gaming performance in the same 35W package.
Watch the P520+5650 real close that is the performance it will have but with a more optimised CPU, when AMD is able to get the idle power under controll of the whole package (mainly needed for idle and surfing), the platform will be a much more balanced solution, the right one for this kind of notebook offers.
Chris Peredun - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
"DVD-RAM (Matshita UJ892AS)"Really? A DVD-RAM drive? Haven't seen one of those in years. ;)
Methinks you meant "DVDRW" instead.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
DVD-RAM is another standard, and that's the way the drive chose to identify itself. Technically, every DVD-RAM capable drive is also able to support DVD+/-RW as well, but I suppose just keeping the model number in there is sufficient.Chris Peredun - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
DVD-RAM isn't used very often these days, that's why I suggested the change to the more common "DVDRW" - but mea culpa, apparently this drive can in fact read *and* write to DVD-RAMs.geniekid - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
I'm still using my UL80VT from 1.5 years ago. When I'm away from home, I still use it to play semi-old-school games like TF2 and Torchlight. The battery life is amazing if you mode down to integrated graphics and watch movies or surf the internet. If the U41JF is two refreshes away from the UL80VT and still offers the same battery life for about the same price (I bought my UL80VT for $850) with the ability to run modern games, I have no problem recommending it to anyone who's on the fence.Alexo - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
Are there any (current or upcoming) laptops that combine a good screen with long battery life?I understand that the Tnikpad X220 is available with an IPS panel (although it has a rather small screen and no discrete graphics).
Are there other options?