Asus N80Vn-A1

Key Specs
Processor: 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5800Memory: 4GB RAMStorage: 320GB hard driveOptical Drive: DVD±RWScreen: 14.1 inchesGraphics: Nvidia Geforce 9650M GT (1GB)Weight: 5.7 poundsDimensions (HWD): 1.4x13.3x9.8 inchesOperating System: Windows Vista Home Premium

Review
Reviewed by: John R. Delaney Review Date: February 2009
Built for professionals who require a bit more 3D muscle than most business notebooks offer, the Asus N80Vn-A1 ($999) delivers solid performance and state-of-the-art security technology in a durable 14-inch chassis. It suffers from a few flaws, however, including subpar battery life (attributable to its discrete graphics) and a temperamental touch pad.
The 5.7-pound N80Vn-A1 is done up in a shiny, dark purple, scratch-resistant finish designed to maintain its high-gloss luster even after extended use. A subtle silver bead design infused into the lid’s finish gives the system a high-tech look without appearing gaudy.
Beneath the lid sits a bright 14.1-inch LED display with a resolution of 1,280x800. The screen is coated with a glossy antiglare treatment that is somewhat reflective but not overly so. The panel produced crisp and uniform colors, and the viewing angles were quite good from either side. A set of down-firing Altec Lansing speakers provides decent audio output but tends to distort when the volume is cranked up.
The full-size keyboard is firm and offers plenty of room for comfortable typing, but the touch pad is skittish. Despite our efforts to adjust the pad’s sensitivity and speed settings, cursor movement was intermittently slow and stubborn. A fingerprint reader is sandwiched between the two mouse buttons, which were more responsive than the touch pad but produced a loud clicking noise.
At the top of the keyboard deck are the power switch, buttons for enabling and disabling the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, a Splendid key that toggles through five display modes with preset luminance characteristics, and a Power4Gear key that cycles through four power-saving modes, from Battery Saving to High Performance.
Last but not least is a button that opens Express Gate, a Linux-based interface from Splashtop. Express Gate lets you quickly access certain applications such as a Web browser, a music player, a photo manager, Skype, and Splashtop’s online gaming portal, all without booting into Windows.
A Webcam embedded in the upper bezel works with Asus’s LifeFrame software, which lets you capture video and still shots and offers some fun effects for video chat sessions. Image quality is what you would expect from a 1.3-megapixel camera: grainy, but adequate for e-mailing and videoconferencing. You can also use the camera with the SmartLogon Manager utility to enable face recognition as an added security measure for logging in to Windows.
I/O ports are plentiful. In addition to five dedicated USB ports, the N80Vn-A1 contains an external SATA (eSATA) port, HDMI and VGA video outputs, a Gigabit Ethernet jack, and a FireWire port. The only drawback is that several of these ports are mounted at the rear of the unit. There's a DVD multidrive on the left side of the chassis along with a 54mm ExpressCard slot, an eight-format card reader, and headphone and microphone jacks. A 320GB hard drive comes loaded with Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit) and Cyberlink’s DVD Suite with Power2Go media-burning software. You’ll also find all sorts of Asus utilities and applications aimed at business users, including Copy Protect, which prevents unauthorized reproduction of your data; Security Protect Manager, which lets you consolidate all of your passwords, credentials, and network account information into a single user identity; and NB Probe, a cool little utility that monitors system health, including CPU temperature, CPU speed, and hard drive use.
Other business features include a Trusted Platform Module circuitry option, though our tested configuration did not include this. A Data Security Manager utility that lets you encrypt and password-protect folders is onboard, though. The N80Vn-A1 also has some BIOS security features, including I/O Security Lock, which lets you lock down the ports to avoid unauthorized data transfers, and hard drive password protection.
With a Core 2 Duo T5800 processor running at 2GHz, 4GB of DDR2 memory, and Nvidia’s GeForce 9650M GT providing the graphics muscle, the N80Vn-A1 turned in a score of 3,189 on the Futuremark PCMark Vantage benchmark test, which is slightly above average for this class of notebook. Gateway's M7818u and Fujitsu’s LifeBook A1110, both of which are bigger but have the same T5800 processor, came in at 2,919 and 3,042, respectively. The N80Vn-A1’s iTunes and Windows Media Encoder scores were in line with those of other T5800-based notebooks but slow compared with the average thin-and-light, 13- and 14-inch system.
Predictably, the dedicated Nvidia graphics solution gave the N80Vn-A1 a significant 3D performance boost when compared with systems using integrated graphics, but it still can’t hang with the more powerful gaming rigs we’ve seen. Its Futuremark 3DMark06 score of 4,502, for example, left the Gateway and Fujitsu systems in the dust (they scored 949 and 953, respectively). This result is also four times the average for a thin-and-light. Graphics excitement ends there, however. A score of 28 frames per second (fps) on the F.E.A.R. 3D gaming test while running at its native resolution means the system can handle midlevel Direct X 9 (DX9) gaming, but it struggled with the more demanding DX10 Company of Heroes test, scoring a lowly 12.6fps. The graphics certainly suck the life out of the six-cell battery, which lasted only 1 hour and 56 minutes on our DVD rundown test, about 40 minutes below average for a system this size.
The Asus N80Vn-A1 offers some nice business features and has more than enough chops to handle your productivity needs. Business users who sometimes need to manipulate photos or video on the road will appreciate the graphics boost. But we would have preferred switchable graphics so users could decide between power and endurance. Nonetheless, sub-$1,000 14-inch notebooks are tough to come by, and the N80Vn-A1 is a powerful little system that won’t break the bank. Price (at time of review): $999