ASUS' N82Jv: Jack-Of-All-Trades
by Jarred Walton on September 11, 2010 11:10 PM ESTASUS N82Jv-X2 Low and Medium Gaming
Following our new testing procedure, our gaming results for this midrange GPU and system will look at Low, Medium, and High quality settings. It should come as little surprise that High settings are typically too much for most titles, but we'll get to that in a moment. First, let's start with a look at Low and Medium testing. Again, the M11x R2 and A660D are going to be the main comparison points; the former has the same GPU with a slower (and lower power) CPU, while the latter comes equipped with AMD's "equivalent" of the GT 335M.
Low quality settings aren't where the GT 335M is designed to play, so frame rates are generally close to or above 60 FPS. The faster CPU in the N82Jv certainly shows up, though it's not the knockout blow you might expect. ASUS beats the M11x R2 by an average of 17% at low detail settings; we expect the margin would grow a bit if we compared with the i5-520UM equipped M11x, but even then there are hints that the system is becoming GPU limited. The lead over the A660D with HD 5650 ends up being 12% on average, but with the A660D winning out by 6% in DiRT 2. Also note that Toshiba is using lower clocked 450MHz 5650 chips, plus the P920 as we already showed is no performance powerhouse, so HD 5650 at 550MHz should come out on top of GT 335M by 10% or more.
A quick look at the Dell Studio 14 also shows why we don't like the gap between 5470 and 5650 in AMD's mobile GPU lineup: outside of StarCraft II, the N82Jv/GT 335M ends up being nearly twice as fast as the HD 5470. The reason StarCraft II doesn't conform to the other results is that Optimus tends to create a few bottlenecks when frame rates get above 60 FPS. Remember that Optimus transfers the completed frames over the PCIe bus to system memory, so you're dealing with memory bottlenecks as well as PCIe congestion. For 1366x768, we're only looking at around 240MB/s of bandwidth, so that shouldn't cause too many issues, but clearly something is holding back the Optimus systems in SC2.
Moving up to Medium details doesn't radically alter the picture, although some of the gaps change slightly. The lead over the M11x R2 drops to 14%, indicating we are becoming more GPU bound. The N82Jv is 13% faster than the A660D, which is nearly the same as the low detail results, but a look at the individual games shows AMD moving into the lead in L4D2 and ME2 by a small margin, while in STALKER and SC2 the GT 335M lead grows to around 35%. How much of the lead comes from the CPU difference vs. the GPU difference isn't entirely clear at this point, though we should have an Acer AS5551G-4591 in house next week to shed some light on things. Also note that the lead over the Studio 14 jumps to 92% average, or 103% if we drop the lower 34% lead in SC2. (Note to Dell: We'd love to see the Studio 14 with an HD 5650!)
Medium quality gaming is where the GT 335M comes into its own. All of the games are at 40FPS or higher, except for SC2 where our intense benchmarking sequence drops average frame rates to 34FPS—still very playable for an RTS! These are all recent titles that can tax laptops quite a bit, and there are plenty of older/less taxing games that will work great on midrange mobile GPUs (World of WarCraft should break into the 60+ FPS range, for example). Is a $1000 laptop going to come anywhere near a $1000 desktop? Not a chance… but then you can't pick up your desktop and walk out the door to go to a LAN party in 60 seconds flat.
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JarredWalton - Sunday, September 12, 2010 - link
I guess I *heard* about the Envy 14 (or the old Envy?) six months back. Here's hoping it will still arrive soon....Roland00 - Sunday, September 12, 2010 - link
4 months is a life time in the computer world though. Almost every series gets a refresh every quarter.Now the old envy were 13 inch and 15 inch. They were released during Oct 09 to coincide with the windows 7 launch. While I praise HP vision they didn't really sell well in stores due to the fact they were expensive (starting at 2000+ at the time), had no optical drive (which I see as a benefit but some customers couldn't understand) and the 15 inch cold get very hot. The 13 inch was designed to be fast enough with a culv or lv processor and 4330 video card and up to 14 to 18 hours of battery life (depending on configuration, measured in mobilemark, a bad test I know.) How it obtain this battery life is it had a standard 4 cell battery but it also had a detachable 6 cell battery that was the entire width and length of the laptop so if you attached the battery it is just like the laptop got thicker. The envy 15 inch had the same philosophy with the battery but it instead packed a quad core, a 1080p screen, either a 4830 or 5830 (depending on refresh), and up to 16gbs of memory. On paper, the first envys were trying to be a windows macbook pro that were either trying to be faster (competing against 15 or 17inch) or had better battery life (competing against 13 inch and macbook air).
Now I been more impressed with the 14.5 inch and the 17 inch for while they may be bigger and heavier due to the optical drive, they are trying to be more "balanced" via having more moderate price options available at the start.
blackrook - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
How does it all work? Do they send products to you spontaneously, or is it agreed upon by both you guys and the companies?I'm intrigued with what you guys would think of it...even though I already bought it. Almost like a reassurance that I've made a solid decision, heh.
Fingers crossed.
JarredWalton - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Either they contact us or we contact them, trying to get products for review. Some companies are more than happy to send products out (i.e. ASUS) while others seem to sample few if any products.mrmbmh - Sunday, September 12, 2010 - link
Hi,very nice article! thx Jarred!There are some popular notebooks you've not reviewed yet..... like U45jc Asus and HP dm4 (light-weight 14"s)
Can you review them or at least join them into LCD comparison benchmark?
Thanks.... : )
zoxo - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
You can be assured that the LCDs are utter crap on those too. The Envy from hp seems to be a step up, but it doesn't have matte option. What a shame!Akv - Sunday, September 12, 2010 - link
The proportion of gamers in the comments of reviews websites is almost 100%, but that is not the proportion of users, who might for example prefer a reduction of price in exchange for graphics just sufficient for productivity and video. Or the same price with an increase of storage, of silence instead of gaming, etc.The divergence between users when it comes to laptop is even stronger, so much so that I would not be surprised if the proportion of users who want gaming on a laptop was insignificant, although still of course quasi 100% of reviews websites comments.
I regret that, on this website as many others, the heat and noise are not even evoked, whereas it seems to me the main element of the build quality for a laptop.
I was interested by the expertise on LCD quality. If I have to pay for a laptop I really want to display photos correctly, and to be able to read comfortably. I would be ready to accept less horsepower in exchange for better display. I would not even refuse an atom netbook with a perfect matte screen.
seanleeforever - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
that, my friend, is a good comment.i too overly frustrated with all the gamer's comments with cares nothing except GPU and CPU. there is much more to a laptop than play games. (besides, you shouldn't play games on notebook anyway)
if the image is the key, consider the following as rule of thumb.
best :IPS/AFFS+ screen, they are the best (lenovo X201 Tablet, HP dream color)
second to the best: MVA screen in Fujitsu T5010
distant third is 8-bit TN panels w/ RGBLED backlight (Alienware and Dell Precision M6500)
distant forth is 6-bit TN panels w/ RGBLED (Dell M4500, sXPS16, Lenovo T/W510, W701/ds, Apple MBP (15-17"))
you would also need to consider the heat, noise, fan position, key layouts, which is something anand will never cover in detail because it doesn't sounds as cool as GT335M.
JarredWalton - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
It's not a case of it "sounding as cool"; there just isn't much to say that's noteworthy. If the laptop is particularly loud and/or hot, we'll make a note of it, but the N82Jv is basically "average" (or perhaps even below average) in these areas. That comes form the components, with the HD 5650 and GT 335M built to hit specific TDPs so they can fit in laptops. If you're not doing anything taxing, the N82Jv runs cool enough that there's no worry. At load, fan speeds ramp up and it gets warmer.Vivek and Dustin don't have the necessary tools for testing power/temp/noise, so I haven't been focusing on those in order to keep the reviews consistent. But since you asked, the N82Jv runs at around 70-80F temperatures (give or take) idle, and bumps up 5-10F under load. The keyboard and palm rest tends to be a bit cooler than the bottom, though certain areas get hotter than others, naturally. The hottest spot I found under load was on the bottom under where the GPU sits, and it was 105F.
Noise levels are basically at the limit of my SPL meter at idle (30dB), but under load it can get noisier. I measured 39 dB(A) at a distance of about 12". So as a whole, this is good and certainly nothing I would consider problematic. I'm far more concerned with the plastic chassis and low quality LCD on the N82 than I am with the heat/noise.
The Crying Man - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
You guys could all use HWMonitor or GPU-Z at least to give us an idea of temps at idle or load.