Finally... ASUS W3J REVIEW!!!!

Here you go guyz.. ...

http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=147338

 

Is it weird that I'm really excited to read this? I suppose not...

Thanks!!!

EDIT: 512MB x 2? I wonder where this config is for...doesn't look like US markets but...

 

No pictures, but that's what TheKingDavids posts are for...

THANKS! Short and to the point review, so glad.

 

The disk skipping shouldn't have to do w/ the horsepower of the comp...

Love all of the good words on the display. So key in my opinion.

 

Nice overall review - I'm also pleased with the description of the display, it sounds like this will definitely be one helluva lappy In terms of where this laptop may have been from, since it came with the bag & the mouse and was noted to have "Col ourshine", I'm thinking it is in Great Britain/Europe.


So... I guess April showers being... May W3J's? Can't wait

 

!! he said nice black

oh
he said nice blackkkk

 

Great review! Can't wait to buy mine W3j. The stores here in Sweden said that they should have it in stock today (20th) but they didn't seem to have it anyway. :\

 

Man, I hope it's not 2 x 512mb...that means those of us who want 2gb will have to buy 2 one-gig sticks. And on top of that, with 2 x 512, we'll have to take some stuff apart to get under the keybaord to replace the stick. I was hoping to just be able to put in a gig stick and call it a day.

Should we expect the same for the U.S. release?

 

The US model is specced with 1x1024MB DDR2 667. The UK version has the 2x512MB DDR2 (533, I think?)

 

What store might that be?

 

http://www.itservice.se/dialectit/index.jsp?showArticle=939161&refId=1
http://www.webhallen.com/prod.php?id=57390
http://www.datorhandel.com/se/products/W3J-H008P%2FSWE
http://www.tdjdata.se/product_info.php?products_id=6368

 

what review?

 

The review is linked in the first post in the thread.

 

it's not really a full fledged review but more of an initial impression. So it looks like this guy had issues with DVD skipping and sound loudness. I dont think the DVD skipping is because he didnt have his power adaptor connected. As far as sound, my sager 5720 sucks pretty bad. There's no way this Asus could be worse than that.

 

is the mouse and carrying case standard issued with all w3j packages?

 

Apparently that's a European package. According to ProP, the US/NA model will not include the carrying case, but I don't remember about the mouse.

 

eh the loudness issue is really irrelevant. i mean comon you guys watch DVDs in your house with a labtop and its stock speakers? lol this isn't college, my Sony FE is crystal clear..except you need a hearing aid at full volume if you were to appreciate it : ) If your on and airplane i don't think i would enjoy you watching Chuck Norris delta force at full blast no matter how quiet.

 

The US models come with nothing other than this lovely machine. No mouse, no bag.

 

So far the review is nice, but like most I look forward to a more detailed review that includes gaming performance (since it'll give a better idea about performance and heat generation)

 

i am concerned about this thin palm area plastic.
Does anybody know if T60p, SZ120PB, FE590, N3530, N6410, D820, dv8220, nc9340 have plasticy palm area?
Is there any model that has magnesium alloy or CRP supported palm area?

 

Thanks for posting that link...at first it looked like the W3J was going to have the same volume "issue" as the W3V...but he said he found a way to correct the problem in the Bios, I wonder If whatever he did in the bios is able to fix the W3V's volume???

Anyways, It's nice to finally have more opinions available to us...also, as far as the case and the mouse, I wouldn't count anything out until It's actually ruled out in person...by a retailer or a North american consumer...Asus is funny like that, you never know anything 100% for sure until someone has the final package in hand.

 

Personally, I'm good w/out a bag and mouse if it means we get 1x1GB vs. 2x512MB.

 

i would kill for battery info on this. but no one is going to test it the way i want to know about. (screen at minimum setting, proc at lowest setting, no wifi/bt, office).

 

looks sweet
i'm still torn between the w3j and the a8jm .. ohh the anguish ..

 

I'm PRETTY sure you'd get 4.5-5 hours that way... without undervolting (But then again, I don't think you can really undervolt Core Duos yet...)

 

yeah... battery life is really my deciding factor. i keep hearing about weak battery life on some of the newer asus laptops, but people are testing it in a MUCH different environment than i would be using it.

 

The dealer i spoke with told me it comes with 2 x 512 ram.

 

According to proportable.com it gets 4-5 hrs also. Wow guys this looks like one sweet notebook. Wish I could get one Undervolting should give it another 20 minutes.

 

You're exactly right...plus you can drop a second battery into the media bay and extend it at least an extra hour and a half, if not more.

I don't think it's that the battery life is poor, it's just that the laptops are more powerful and more power hungry by default.

 

what makes even a greater impact is the ati powerplay. There is an "optimal battery", "balanced", and "optimal performance". The misleading thing is that none of them are dynamic. In other words, they should be renamed to "Low", "Medium" and "High" since the peformance and clock is fixed. So i manually change them (the default is max for AC, balanced for the first 75% of the battery and low for the last 25%).

I would like a battery test when that setting is set to Low the whole time. I'm sure on that setting you'd get 4.5-5 hours -- maybe more. However, with default powerplay settings, i doubt W3J owners will get much more than 3 - 3.5 hours (and with high, you'd pull off maybe 2 hours).

 

my current laptop (a 3 year old toshiba) manages 3-3.5 hours of battery life. i cannot justify replacing it with something where i would need a second battery to equal the battery life of my toshiba. really, i'm probably going to need longer battery life, cuz my course schedule for next semester is horrible. 3 hours might just barely squeeze me through a day, if i'm lucky.

 

I think with the second battery you'd clear 3.5 without a problem - probably into the 5 hour range.

Unfortuately it might take a trial by fire...or wait for the first round of reviews and what the battery life is "really" like.

 

I wonder what battery life you would get playing Doom 3 or FEAR or something with the optical bay battery in. Do you think you could get at least 2 hours?

 

When I get my W3J on my first day off work I am going to get a case of beer in the evening and sit down at my computer. That will probably be Sunday evening or Monday evening. I will post a thread in the forums and just sit there for like 5 hours and answer every question anyone has about the W3J and run any free benchmarking software anyone wants me to run and answer any specific question that anyone is wondering like how the keys feel or how hot it gets etc...I will just refresh the thread and keep answering questions as fast as I can while I surf the web and have a few cold beers. I might get a digital camera here soon so that would also be cool I could take any pic anyone wants to specifically see and post it.

 

you might need to consider a different laptop. From the two reviews of the w3j, and others using the latest ATI x series cards.. it seems that the x1300, 1400 and 1600 are more battery consuming than their predecesssors. I think the W3J is good for something using an x1600 though.

 

Goren, acutally I have stilll yet to come to that conclusion.

Lets say we have 3 laptops, the internals are basicaly the same.

1) Yonah + X1600 + Internal Components = Total Power Consumption (W3J)

2) Yonah + Intel GMA 950 + Internal Components = Total Power Consumption (hypothetically W3aj)

3) Pentium-M + X1600 + Internal Components = Total Power Consumption (hypothetically W3vj)

4) Pentium-M + Intel GMA 900 + Internal Components = Total Power Consumption (hypothetically W3ve)

Now when both Yonah and X1600 was released everyone wondered about batterylife.

Intel claimed the Yonah will consume equal or less batterylife. We saw some intial benchmarks of this, and we saw no difference in batterylife when comparing Pent-M and Yonah.

However, there was one exception, when doing heavy tasks, the Yonah by itself got roughly a 10% boost in batterylife over the Pent-M.

When the X1600 came out, there were about 3-4 power saving techniques it had. Overall ATI claimed it would increase batterylife by 10%.

Now you would have take those above 4 laptops and run the same setting and test batterylife under the same conditions. The point im trying to get to really, is whether its the Yonah or X1600's fault that batterylife on Gaming units are lower than the older technology (Pent-M + X700).

We know:
2) is greater than 1)
4) is greater than 3)

The problem is 2) greater or equal or less than 3)? This answer can sorta be solved when MSI releases their new 15.4" notebook, with a Turion and X1600.

Since the Turion is roughly equal to the Pent-M (sorta) then you can compare another 15.4" to the new MSI 15.4" and see which one get longer batterylife.

In my opinion the fault is the Yonah, not the X1600, because you can really see the X1600 using its power saving technology. However we know Yonah consume's more power than the Pent-M.

But this doesn't make sense because we know the Yonah can get 10% batterylife when doing High performance tasks, when compared to the Pent-M.

This only leaves one other thing, the Internal Components of the laptop that can acutally add up and cause batterylife to be lower than it should.

Alot of this is just speculation, because there is almost no possible way to test this out, unless a company wants to run a similar comparison.

I may be wrong in what i've said, plz correct me

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

You seem to be forgetting where the actual power decrease comes from.

Yes, the Yonah uses the same or less power than Dothan but the real difference is in the Front Side Bus (FSB) used, the chipset and the wireless controller.

The i945 Express chipset is utilizing the same manufacturing process (130nm) as its predecessor, the i915 chipset, but the difference is that the i945 Express is a lower voltage design of ICH6 used in the Sonoma platform. It also incorporates more aggressive clock gating (turning off power of selected parts of the ICH when not in use) and IO Buffer gating (same as clock gating, just with the IO Buffer).

They also have made the power design of the PCIe ports better, resulting in less voltage required for the PCIe controller.

Now, about the Front Side Bus (FSB), a higher Front Side Bus will require more power but overall the entire platform uses around 3W lower compared to the ICH6.

The Yonah (TDP of 31Watt) itself switches between 1.3V to 0.7625V in its lowest power state.

Dothan with 2MB Cache and 533Mhz Front Side Bus (TDP of 27W) switches between 1.404V to 0.988V in its lowest power state.

Unfortunately I haven't looked for datasheets for the Intel GMA900/950, Mobility X600 (RV380), X700 (RV410) and X1600 (RV530) although the main difference is the die size and manufacturing process.

The Mobility X600 is using 130nm with Low-K (75 million transistors), the Mobility X700 is using a 110nm process (120 million transistors) and the Mobility X1600 is on a 90nm process with a die size of 157 million transistors.

UPDATE:

Found some numbers for the Mobility X600 GPU. It consumes 1W in idle mode and 9-10W under maximum load.

The Mobility X1600 is consuming 0.95V at reduced clock-speeds (idle) but can scale to 1.2V under full load. Also to consider is that the Mobility X1600 GPU has enhanced power saving techniques compared to the previous generation of mobile GPUs.

 

Great thanks, pressure, so you seems to have basically solved my question of which CPU is better, Yonah + Chipset and new internal components is better than the Pent-M + Chipset and the old internal components.

Can you solve or shed some light on the Vid card power usage? Which one consumes less, the X1600 or X700 and why?

There's also another factor we can't exactly measure for, it is undervolting. For the most part, it seems we are always comparing Pentium-M + X700 with undervolting batterylife figures to Yonah + X1600 without undervolting values. Thus of course it would seem that the older technology seems to get better batterylife.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

Will try and look for datasheets for the graphic chips and then compare them.

Wish all companies were providing as much information as Intel when it comes to datasheets.

 

3.5 to 5 is a pretty big jump. Optical drive batteries don't really add as much as it seems. The W3J setup of 8 cell main + 6 cell optical doesn't give you the equivalent of a 14 cell battery.

The review that started this post is reporting about 2 hrs net surfing with wifi. Thekingdavids reported like 3 hrs, which is consistent with the W3V (on average settings; obviously other things can be done to increase battery life). I'd be surprised then if the optical battery upped it much past 4 hrs, if that. I hope I'm wrong, but of course we'll all see in a few weeks.

 

you get about 30min per cell. you will clear 5 hours with both batterys about 5.5 if you have the lcd medium brightness.

 

If what you say is strictly true, both batteries should give you 7 hrs.

(8 x 30) [main] + (6 x 30) [optical] = 420 min = 7 hrs.

I don't think anyone is claiming that much. In reality battery life depends on so many things, many of them specific to a particular laptop, so there is no real rule of thumb.

The only two people who actually own W3Js and have posted have reported 2-3 hrs of battery life with the 8 cell. And W3Vs have been known to get 3-3.5 hrs with average usage (e.g., incl. wifi, not undervolting CPU, etc.). So on average I'd be surprised if both batteries gave you much more than 4 hrs, and the 8 cell alone much more than 3 hrs (as seems to be the case from the two actual reviews out there).

 

8x30 alone from the main battery puts it at 4hrs, which seems a tad optimistic ..
Taking the figure for the main battery as 3hrs puts it at 22.5mins per cell; using that amount rates the extra at 6*22.5 = 135mins or two and a quarter more hours, for five and a quarter total; still quite respectable (and realistic, I think.. puts it right near SRD's estimate too)

 

Ok then its save to say for the W3J we know each cell will give roughly 25 mins.

8x25 = 200mins/60mins = 3.3 hours
^This is prolly attainable with CPU at lowest setting, GPU working to a minumum, wifi on or off (doubt it make a big difference), BT off, screen brightness as low as possible but still usable. Performing light tasks like MS Word and Interent Surfing.

Then you can add the hotswap battery which is 6 cell x 25mins = 150mins = 2.5 hours.

your Grand Total Batterylife will be 5.7 hours minus any unkown things that may sap the battery.

Personaly if the W3J can acheive 5.7 hours, then i would be able to bring it to school without the power brick. Use it for like 2-3 hours for classnotes, and then use 2-3 hours for general use when not in class. And then go home.

Now if wifi was off the entire time, then possibly it MAY hit 6 hours but then you gotta minus wear and tear on the battery, over time.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

Wifi definitely makes a big difference, probably around 30min and very possibly more depending on the machine.

These sorts of simple multiplications often are misleading. When using both the main and an optical battery, they aren't drained the same as a single battery so you can't just add them together. I would be very (pleasantly) surprised if the optical bay battery added more than 1-1.5 hrs, max. Definitely helpful, but people dreaming of 6 or 7 hrs of battery life will be disappointed. No laptop with these specs and this performance and this size will hit those numbers.

Again, my prediction for avg usage is ~3 hrs with main 8 cell, ~4-4.5 hrs with dual battery. Decent for a machine like this, but nothing spectacular. If you just want to squeeze 5-6 hrs by turning the display to barely visible, turn off wifi/BT, CPU and GPU to lowest setting, etc., why the heck are you buying a W3J?? Might as well buy a cheaper rig w/o a kick ass CPU and GPU. This is a performance rig.

 

Well, for me, I want something with the battery life to get me through a day of school (3-4 hours), but I also want to be able to use it for gaming when I'm not in class and have access to AC power. The main reason I'm replacing my Toshiba is because I can't game on it (yay S3 trident video chipset!). Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a laptop that's small (12-14.1"), with a dedicated GPU and decent battery life for under $2000?

 

I do because I had the same problem when I was searching. Good point about the W3J flexibility. It's just that so many people defend the W3J battery life based on running it like some bargain basement Dell. People looking at buying it should know that yes, you can configure it to have great battery life, but it is NOT the reason to buy a W3J. It has plenty of strengths, but battery life is not really one of them. People looking for great battery life to use for school or business only should look elsewhere (esp. b/c they can find cheaper alternatives).

And "elsewhere" doesn't mean non-ASUS -- ASUS makes a range of lappies, and the brand alone is worth plenty b/c of the rep for solid build quality, etc.

 

Seriously...that's the W3j...the battery life will decent (if not better than decent) and it's one of the few 14.1" w/ true gaming capabilities.

It's always going to be a balance between performance and battery life where ever you go.

 

Yeah I think you're pretty much stuck with either the w3j or the Sony SZ but the SZ is over or just at $2000...

And I personally would take the w3j because the x1600 is quite a bit better, I would say the quality is better, and it looks cooler. I haven't seen any battery tests for the SZ since it first came out (or ones that were real extensive). It can switch between graphics cards which is supposed to help a lot but I wouldn't expect anything over an hour that of the w3j:

"the actual battery life is more like 2-4 hours with 3 hours being the average that I get with the settings I normally use (no wireless, medium-to-high brightness)."

That is from the NBR review.

 

Sorry, it doesn't work like that. The cells used in the main pack are almost certainly higher capacity than those in the hot-swap pack. You can't directly compare 3000mAh cells and 2000mAh cells, for example.

-mm