Otaku Gadgets

14-inch laptops are not the best place to look for affordable graphics. You have a lot of laptops that have the processing power to crunch anything you throw at them. But when it comes to powerful graphics, there aren’t many to choose from. Plus you can forget affordability. That is exactly where Asus’ X83Vm-X2 14-inch laptop has hit the jackpot so to say. It is the perfect combination of power, graphics, features and affordability.

Asus has always had a thing for making gaming laptops. May be they want to position themselves as the affordable alternative to Alienware, who knows! The point here is that they usually have good dedicated graphics in their laptops and their latest – the X83 is just about as affordable as it can get with a full fledged list of features.

The only thing missing on the laptop is Bluetooth and a FireWire 800 port. Other than that you will find every other modern port that you might want. The modem port is missing as well but I don’t think anyone will miss it much with the 10/100 Ethernet port. For some intriguing yet unfathomable reason, Asus has also included an infrared port.

The laptop has a 14.1-inch TFT-LCD display with LED backlighting, displaying a maximum of 1280×800 pixels. One fact noted by most reviewers is that the screen is exceedingly bright. Some have even gone on to say that it is twice as bright as regular laptop screens. But even with all that brightness, the screen is not all that great. Struggling to keep the price down, Asus has skimped on the quality and hence the screen has a low contrast value. The viewing angles are also quite narrow. But given the price and the specs, the 1280×800 display resolution is actually acceptable.

It runs on an Intel Core 2 Duo P7450 processor that is rated at 2.13Ghz with a 3MB L2 cache and a 1066Mhz Front Side Bus. The P here stands for Penryn core and that means it has a lower 25watt TDP. So it consumes less power and generates less heat, contributing to the all over efficiency of the laptop.

Altogether, this chip is enough for anything that you might want to do. Of course by anything I do not mean extreme things like 3D rendering (that will take ages) but you can run all the current softwares at acceptable speeds. However, the RAM is where the true speed lies and thankfully Asus does not skimp here.

The X83 comes with a robust 4 Gigs of PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM at 800Mhz, which is really fast enough for most games and softwares. This is especially good for gamers because of the graphics card that comes with the laptop.

The X83 comes with an Nvidia GeForce 9600M GS with 1GB DDR2 memory. It looks nice in print but there’s a problem here. The GeForce 9600M GS is the same as the GeForce 9500 GT with the only difference being the slower DDR2 memory in the 9600 instead of the fast GDDR3 memory that is found in the 9500. This is a very important difference because the slower memory effectively renders the 1GB memory quite useless. It is actually just meant to attract buyers and in reality it would’ve been much better off with just 512 Megs of memory or even 256 for that matter.

But all is not lost yet my fellow gamers. This card has one advantage to it – it is eminently overclockable. That means you can actually tweak it to take the performance up to the levels of a stock 9700M GT. Most games will run just fine at the native resolution with anti-aliasing off. If you want anti-aliasing, you are asking for too much. Also, do not expect to run Crysis on it or anything. For everything else, this laptop will do just fine.

When it comes to storage, the X83 again has something that you do not expect to get at this price bracket (coming to that in a bit). The laptop comes standard with a nice and big 320GB SATA HDD. Spinning in at a 7400 RPM, it is a fast one too. It is not Western Digital but it is pretty darn close to it.

In the optical drive department it carries a dual layer CD/DVD recordable drive featuring the LightScribe technology developed by HP. This essentially rounds off the whole suite of major features and it does that quite nicely.

The X83 also has a built-in 1.3 megapixel webcam, which is only slightly higher in resolution that most other laptops in this segment. In addition to that you also have Intel Wi-Fi 5100 (a/b/g/n), which makes sure that you are okay to go on almost any Wi-Fi Network.

The usual well-rounded warranty that we have come to expect from Asus has been lowered here and is limited to parts and labor through 1 year.

The good news is that the laptop is going to give you a good battery life with the 6-cell 11.1-volt 4800mAh battery that comes standard with each Asus X83Vm laptop.

If you are still missing the Bluetooth, let me remind you that a simple USB dongle will fix it and will hardly cost you $15-20.

Coming to the connectivity and expandability, Asus leaves the X83 wanting for nothing. It has five USB 2.0 ports – one on the left, two on the right and two at the back. On the left there’s one firewire 400 port, one headphones port, one microphone port, the optical drive, an ExpressCard54 slot and an 8-in-1 card reader. On the right side there are two USB ports as mentioned and a ridiculously small air vent. This vent might be problematic because it is quite close to where your hand would be when you are using a mouse.

The keyboard is where Asus has done something quite inexplicable. Why would anyone think of making dark brown keys with light brown lettering on them for a laptop? It is not as if the keyboard is backlit. So if you are working in the dark, you better get used to typing without seeing because this color combination is not very usable in any condition except a brightly lit one.

Other that little snag, this is one laptop that I would highly recommend and here’s the reason why – the thing retails at a best buy of $799! I cannot think of any other laptop with specs like that and a price like this. It is also possible that the price will come down with time. So all in all, you would be crazy not to get this laptop if it is 14 inch you are looking for.