Review: S96J Review

Specs
Asus S96J 15.4" 1280x800 Glare type screen X1600 graphics
Core Duo T2400
2 x 1GB 667
100GB 7200
3945ABG Wireless
QSI MultiDrive

Appearance
As always, it's subjective. No doubt you've seen the pictures of this in the Core Duo thread and all I can say is that it doesn't get any prettier in person. Definitely sleek and modern...running about in the middle of the pack in terms of looks, but not timeless and sophisticated like the really gorgeous notebooks out there.

Screen
VERY happy here. Significantly brighter than an E1705. The viewing angle is great. Horizontally, the screen is readable from any angle and just loses some brightness as you move beyond 45°. Vertically, things start washing out around 40°.

The panel that mine came with is the AUO B154EW01.
Pixel Pitch: 0.259
Response Time: 16ms
Contrast: 300:1
Brightness: 180

As far as the resolution, here is a screenshot of the notebook beside my VX924 19" monitor with 1280x1024 resolution.



For me, it's perfect. Low enough to be readable at a quick glance, but high enough to comfortably fit most things. In fact, the WXGA resolution was one of the main reasons I chose the S96J over the Z96J.

Benchmarks
Let me know what you want to see.

3DMark05: 3659
And here's the first revelation. When I check the display adapter properties it says the X1600 has 512MB memory. That leads me to believe (If it's not a display error) that it's stealing the second 256MB from system memory when needed. If so, then the specs out there for this system are wrong.

Ergonomics
The hottest it's got so far has been a little warm....not uncomfortably warm in the slightest.

Noise will be determined by how you spec it. The fan runs most of the time but is just barely audible while sitting normally infront of the notebook.

The keyboard is typical. Nothing exceptional in any regard...positive or negative. There is quite a bit of flex in the keyboard though.

The touch pad is superb. I didn't install the drivers for it, but the built-in XP drivers have perfect sensitivity. When I tried the touchpad drivers, there were some quirks with the scroll function....it didn't work nearly as smoothly as the E1705 scroll function. Clicking on the touch pad is a tad too sensitive. The buttons are really bad. If you click anywhere but the middle of the upper edge, they make a loud click noise.

Value
You can speced out this system with this config for a total out of pocket price of around $1400.

I ordered from GenTech. I ordered Tuesday and it was at my house Thursday and they very promptly answered all my inquiries.

Battery Life
With the standard 6-cell battery, I was watching a DVD and surfing/downloading for 1 hour and 50 minutes before it was about out of juice. Something to note is that I did this with full brightness.

DVD Viewing
Brightness is just perfect for me. The level of ghosting is just under the distracting threshold....i.e. there if you're looking for it, but almost unnoticeable if you're paying attention to the movie. But this is where I first noticed a very distracting issue with the notebook. Small clusters of lighter hued pixels look almost like freckles and make almost any application look grainy which is a big problem when watching movies or editing photos or video. The problem might be fixable, but, so far, there has been no word from Asus or Intel or any reseller that this issue is being looked at.

Assembly

This is the top of the notebook. Very plain and modern and unbranded.


If you order your notebook unassembled you'll get the heatsink/fan assembly uninstalled like this. That tiny little square there towards the middle that looks about the size of a Cheezit is the $40 3945ABG wireless card I also ordered. I went with the T2400 because the priceerformance ratio was about equivolent to the T2300. These take SATA hard drives.


You flip it over and unscrew a couple screws on the main plate and slide it off to reveal the business portion of the mainboard. On the lower left side you can see the GPU and it's four memory chips. The lower right is the slots for your sodimms. I used Corsair 667 and it worked perfectly. The socket for the CPU is there at the top.


This is after the heatsink fan assembly has been set. Some things to note. The CPU and GPU make direct contact with the copper portions of the heatsink......a very nice feature. Because of this I removed the stock gray goop and used AS5. Don't get impatient here as the stock gray goop is thick and sticky and you may be tempted to try to scrape it off........just use a dozen or so passes with alcohol on a paper towel and it will eventually come off. The heatsink is held down by seven little screws that do an excellent job of bringing it down nice and tight around the CPU and GPU. The graphics memory still needs thermal pads though.

Chances are, if you've never built a notebook or Athlon XP desktop that you'll be unfamiliar with CPUs that don't have an Integrated Heat Spreader. So you'll need to be a little more careful. There's no IHS, obviously, because heat dissipation is better without it.

Also, watch the screws. I stripped one of the tiny ones that's needed to hold the mini pci card down. Even a tiny philips srewdriver may not be tiny enough for those....but, in all fairness, they were really really on there. Once you get it installed you'll need to hook up the two wires taped to the chasis beside the mini pci slot, but since I haven't done that yet I won't give further details at this point.

Something else important. I found no assembly instructions whatsoever. Clearly Asus is expecting qualified/trained personnel to be doing this kind of thing. Not a big deal if you're very familiar with computer assembly, but you'll need to rely on common sense and reasoning and experience when figuring out which screws go where and what to peel off and what not too and have to place things. Thankfully the processor came with instructions for it's own installation.

Knowing what I know now, would I still have ordered it unassembled? Probably not. This is more akin to adding a heatsink to a video card than it is assembling a desktop computer. My experience with stripping the screw and feeling my way along assembly and distractions during the process and the time it takes to complete it all safely and cleanly just probably isn't worth it....especially when most places do assembly for free. I do feel good, however, for doing it because I know what will be involved if an upgrade to Merom is possible and because I got to see first hand how beautifully these Asus notebooks are designed inside. Say what you want about the aethetics of this notebook and the noisy touchpad buttons.....underneath all that are solid, performance components that fit together with precision.

To Come
Gaming impressions, temps, etc.

Conclusion
The notebook is a very high value and performance is exceptional. The keyboard and touchpad are really kinda middling, but haven't bothered me greatly.

Before purchasing this notebook, however, heavily consider whether or not the graininess of the screen will bother you. I'll try to get somne pics of it up in a few days.

I'll update it in greater detail, but it is fairly easy if you've built a desktop PC before. Though it's more similar to mounting an aftermarket HSF to a video card than builting a PC. I documented most of the process....and will include those in Monday's update.

But I found NO instructions included so you need some aptitude for computers and kinda feeling things along to do this. Overall, it was nice to know exactly what's under the hood, but if I had to do it all over again, I think I'd save myself the hassle....especially since most vendors aren't marking up the components by much if at all.

Core is 450...memory is 400.

Cool.....please post your impressions as well once you get it. I love to hear some contradiction or validation of mine.

The black and gray two-tone is bleh, but it still really wouldn't look so bad if it weren't for that black ridged strip above the keyboard that looks like the dashboard of a old Peugeot or the moulding around a television set circa 1982. Seriously....it's almost retro.

Still, under the hood, this thing is all Porsche as best I can tell.