ASUS UL80Vt and G51J: Going for the Gold
by Jarred Walton on December 15, 2009 1:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Closing Thoughts
We've already discussed our thoughts on the UL80Vt and G51J - you can read the details on pages two and three. Both are great laptops, and while we didn't give either the coveted Gold award they are closer than we've come in quite some time. For those that are wondering, anything earning a Bronze Editors' Choice is (at least in my mind) a 90% score; Silver means 93%, and Gold means 95% or higher. Basically, Gold awards are reserved for unequivocal recommendations, and we do have a few minor complaints with both of these laptops, mostly oriented around the LCDs.
The LCD situation continues to disappoint, and not just from ASUS. In browsing through laptops at the local Best Buy, Costco, Wal-Mart, and Target stores, we found exactly one laptop - out of more than 100 - where the LCD was clearly higher than a 500:1 contrast ratio. What's worse, most laptop manufacturers source LCDs from all of the major panel manufacturers (AU Optronics, Chi Mei, LG Philips, Samsung, and Seiko Epson/Sony), and it's not uncommon to have a single laptop using panels from two or three vendors. If you are truly concerned with LCD quality, you may need to shop locally or purchase a higher-end laptop (i.e. Dell Studio XPS) where they only use one LCD brand… and you can expect to pay quite a bit extra!
Besides LCDs, let's talk for a moment about a few other irritations we've noticed over the past year. One big complaint we have is that every Windows Vista and Win7 laptop we have tested has difficulty "remembering" the detailed power settings we configure. We've seen this on every laptop (unless it was an XP based netbook), some more frequently than others, but Win7 and Vista have a penchant for restoring many of the "default" power options on a regular basis. Specifically, the systems will restore HDD/LCD/system timeouts, prompt for password on resume, and a few other settings.
Maybe I'm more OCD than the average Joe, but when I tell a laptop not to enter sleep mode EVER (unless I press the sleep button on the keyboard), I'd like that setting to stick. This can be particularly frustrating when it happens during testing and you realize that the battery drain test is now invalidated because the system went to sleep. It's also annoying when your LCD turns off while you're watching a movie with friends.
Software like ASUS' Power4Gear might be partly to blame, but we've experienced the same issues without custom power utilities. Windows XP never changed our power settings "automagically", and we wish Vista and Win7 would stop mucking with areas where we modified the default configuration. Until we can prove otherwise, we're going to go off the assumption that this is a Microsoft issue; the fact that it was present in Vista and continues to occur in Win7 doesn't make us feel it will be fixed any time soon.
Outside of complaints, we've got a few interesting items due for release in the very near future - around CES 2010. Intel has the next generation Atom platform (Pine Trial with Pineview CPU) ready for liftoff, and they're likewise getting set to release Arrandale. The power requirements of current mobile i7 CPUs are clearly not fit for anything targeting longer run times, and we're hopeful that Arrandale will improve the situation. Looking at what you can get out of current CULV designs sets the target we want to see mobile i7 eventually reach, but we're doubtful any of the currently planned Arrandale parts are going to come anywhere near matching the 10W TDP of CULV processors.
Arrandale and Pineview also have something else in common: they integrate a GPU into the CPU package. That means things like NVIDIA's GeForce 9400M chipset are no longer an option, which is unfortunate considering the part is about four times as fast as current Intel GMA 4500MHD designs. However, the UL80Vt shows one real solution to the problem: if you need faster graphics, you can get a hybrid GPU setup. It's not necessarily ideal (especially if you're Apple), but on Windows 7 the switch between IGP and dGPU is quick and relatively painless - about a 5 second delay.
Right now, the ASUS UL80Vt is the high water mark for a do-everything laptop: office, gaming, and mobility are all handled with aplomb. If you don't need the Turbo33 overclocking for a performance boost and you're not interested in gaming, you can find dual-core CULV laptops (Celeron SU2300) for as little as $400, complete with Windows 7 Home Premium and 2GB RAM. We are very curious to see if Intel can beat such laptops with Pine Trail; right now it looks like Intel's only serious competition in terms of mobility is Intel. AMD has some lower power 45nm CPUs (the Athlon and Turion "II" models) now shipping but we're still trying to get one for review. We haven't seen anyone claim more than 6 hours of battery life with such a design, though, which means we expect closer to 4 hours in Internet surfing. As long as the price is right, such designs remain a viable alternative.
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crydee - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - link
From reading other forums it sounds like the UL30VT has a nicer LCD and build quality. As soon as they start selling those and with the same battery as the UL80VT the price should be lower for an overall smaller laptop and no dvd-rom. That sounds like the laptop I'd want. 13" will be easier to handle the smaller resolution.duffmann - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - link
On my ASUS UL30a (which also has a SU7300) there is an option to do a 1-5% overclock in the BIOS. By default it was set to a 3% when I recieved the system effectively making it 1.339GHz. Is this option also present on the UL80Vt and if so, do the "stock" numbers in the article correspond to 1.3GHz?JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - link
I did not check in the BIOS (and the laptop is on its way back to ASUS), but CPU-Z/Intel TAT showed a clock of 1.30GHz at stock and 1.73GHz overclocked, so if there is a BIOS overclock option it was not enabled.rubbahbandman - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - link
I got the Lenovo Ideapad Y550 over the holidays and think it should be considered as well if you're looking for a budget gaming laptop.For $820 (not including tax) I got:
*Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 (only 25watt processor) vs i7 720QM (45watts for similar performance, and costs far more)
*4GB DDR3 (pretty standard)
*Nvidia Geforce 240M (23watt videocard) vs 260M (75watts)
*320GB HD (5400 RPM, my worst part, but at least it's low power, quiet, runs cooler, and doesn't vibrate as much as a 7200)
*HD LED 1366x768 native resolution doesn't seem like a disadvantage to me. It's comfortable for the eyes and doesn't require as beefy a videocard, uses less power too I'd imagine than 1920x1080. While the 240M offers far less powerful than the 260M, it good enough to play most games at 1366x768 with high settings and doesn't draw nearly as much power or produce as much heat as the 260M.
*and it comes with bluetooth, wireless N, nice 'laptop' speakers (w/a tiny sub), win 7 64bit, hdmi, dvd writer, eSATA, 6 lbs, (no TV-tuner though).
*with only a 6-cell battery I can surf the web for 4hrs 15min with my setup. gaming on the other hand is about 90min-2hrs, which is still very good compared to most.
bennyg - Thursday, December 17, 2009 - link
There's budget midrange gaming and there's budget highend gaming, you're comparing quite different categories hererubbahbandman - Thursday, December 17, 2009 - link
"ASUS G51: Affordable Midrange Gaming"FTA
I'm just pointing out there's affordable midrange gaming at less than $900 for laptops versus the $1400-1500 price tag for the G51. Neither of the computers in this article would be considered "high-end" for laptop gaming.
JarredWalton - Thursday, December 17, 2009 - link
The only thing significantly faster in laptops would be something sporting dual GPUs (for now). GTX 280M laptops are about 20-30% faster at most in gaming, which isn't much considering the majority of such laptops will cost well over $2000.Mostly, I call this "Affordable Midrange" because I consider $1500 to be the top of the midrange laptop market in terms of cost. The GTX 260M is about twice the performance (slightly more) of the GT 240M: 96 vs. 48 SPs, and clock speeds that are marginally faster, with 256-bit vs. 128-bit memory interface. Also, if you're going to quote 23W for power on the GT 240M, the GTX 260M would only be 38W -- 82W is the difference I measured between system idle and gaming load, which is going to be split between the CPU, RAM, GPU, etc. (I also only show a 31W difference between 100% CPU load and gaming load, which corroborates that 38W figure from NVIDIA.)
Of course, the GT 240M is going to be around 2.5 times the speed of the G210M in the UL80Vt, so you'll be able to run any game as long as you're willing to drop the details. Where the GTX 260M is able to run games at 1080p with medium to high detail, the GT 240M will be limited to 900p at ~medium detail.
Hulk - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link
The flex results from the torque applied to the screen.Wesleyrpg - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link
As well all know Asus underclocked the GTX 260M in the G51J from the defaults of 550/1375/950 to 500/1250/800 for heat management issues, but im wondering how much extra performance can be squeezed out of the system by 'overclocking' the GPU to its default speeds and beyond. I'm also curious to know how this affect the systems temps!Can the Asus G51J take advantage of faster RAM like DDR3-1333 or DDR3-1600 modules? At what point does the machine start to gain/lose performance because of extra bandwidth/latency of the faster modules?
Wesleyrpg - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link
ok so i did some testing and got some very interesting results, i ran 3dmark06 three time and here are the average results!10069 (500/1250/800)
SM2.0 4417
SM3.0 4036
CPU 3179
Temp min/max 64-91
and now for the GPU running at 550/1375/950
10983
SM2.0 4854
SM3.0 4559
CPU 3191
Temp min/max 64-92
Thats it......a 10% improvement for a 1C in temp? Maybe im not getting the whole picture here or maybe Asus are downclocking for longevity reasons?