Review: Hooga's Asus z80k

I ordered my z80k from www.geared2play.com during the christmas season. Due to delays that were of no fault to geared2play (my bank was closed LOTS Christmas/New Years/Surrounding Days), it arrived on the evening of the 19th. Here's the specs:

AMD Mobile Athlon 64 DTR 3400+
ATI Radeon 9700 128mb
1024 mb RAM
40gb 7200 RPM Hitachi Hard Drive
15.1" SXGA+ Display
DVD/CDRW 8x/24X24X24X combo drive
Windows XP Pro
Li-Ion 8 cells, 14.8V, 4800mAh, 71WHr Battery Pack
Intel 802.11b/g internal WiFi card 54mbps

Other features:
oh what the hell here's a link to a specs sheet
Specs Sheet
The specs match what was installed. Does ne1 know how to test your memory speed btw?

I was looking for a desktop replacement (as in "I don't need a desktop") that could play last generation's games rather handilly while still being able to handle schoolwork, browsing, and new games. I think I chose a good lappy for those purposes.


Looks:
Nice. Silver on top, black plastic on the bottom. Geared2play didn't forget the Built on Asus label, thank goodness. Inside is silver. Base is curved; slanted upwards. Er... my descriptsions aren't very good mayb some pics later will help.
EDIT:
Next to my wireless mouse

2 new pics below. Glow one is cool.



Size/Weight: 15 inch screen won't make for a small lappy. The listed size on geared2play is:
35.6 x 28.6 x 4.2 cm
3.5 kg
So I went at it with a tape measure and the kitchen scales, and that's about right. 7 3/4 lbs. Not exactly a thin and light, but better than... say... a p4 lappy. And much better than I was expecting for an AMD 64 DTR.
Size Comparison with various stuff. Those batteries are AA size.

A little over 1 1/2 inches:

Power Brick is well... a brick. Brick sized, brick shaped:



Design: WOW. Must really compiment Asus on their thoughtful design. Like not putting any ports on the front, placement of the power button so it won't turn on accidentally, touchpad is off center to match the center of the letters of the keyboard, lappy's feet raise it off the ground so the fans can be on the bottom (meaning no blowing air at your hands), somehow the heat system never makes anywhere you're touching anything but pleasurabley luke-warm, etc. And did I mention it looks good?

Keyboard/Touchpad:
Responsive keys and touchpad. The keyboard for some reason gets a little warm. Not enough to be uncomfortable though. The touchpad has 2 buttons and a scroll button.
Quibbling: The Function key is at the bottom left of the keyboard, where I'm used to the control key. So I always hit Fn + C and Fn + V instead of copy and paste. Then I wonder why it isn't working... Something I'll have to get used to.


Screen: One of the things I was looking for when buying a lappy was a non-widescreen screen. I hate widescreen anything. And I wasn't disappointed. The screen is very good, beautiful on games. Not glossy though. Horizontal viewing angles are very good. Veritical are so-so. But you're not exactly going to be looking down on your laptop at a 45 degree + angle often.
No dead pixels!



Heat: Er... turn it on and it instantly gets warm. But... it never gets hot. The heat has never been enough to say... make me want to take it off my lap. Not that it would be a good idea to place on my lap (most of the fans are on the bottom).

Sound: Good laptop sound. I've never actually heard anyone use their laptop speakers so I can't make a comparison.

Battery life: Haven't really tested it yet. I've run on battery from max charge, it says 2.2 hrs. Which isn't a lot. But I knowingly chose the AMD DTR processor, which sucks battery life like a vampire. I'm guessing battery life will be better with a more mobile processor.

Fan/Noise: Never loud, but not quiet. Fan makes minimal noise, hard disk makes a little noise, CD player makes noise. There's even a warning in the manual that says its expected for the CD player to make noise.
Annoyance: The first 2 days I had it, the fan would pulse for some reason after booting. Putting the lappy to sleep and then waking it up would stop the pulsing. Now, the problem's gone. Was it something I did? I dunno.

Wireless: never tested

CD/DVD: all the features work. Even the one where you can power up only the CD drive and play an audio CD (not sure what the feature is called)

Performance: The first time, Windows loaded fast. As in I turned the comp on, turned around to grab a CD (really quickly) and was staring at my desktop. Ah but who cares about windows load time..
benchmarks:
From the default drivers:
3DMark2001 SE on AC power: around 6800 if I remember correctly
I was a little disappointed with that
3DMark2003 on AC power: 2438
but some strange thing happend when first installed all my programs then switched to battery power
3DMark2001 SE on battery: 7728
that's with the CPU running at 800mhz instead of 2ghz

So I'm thinking I need to re-run it on AC power and see what happens...
I'm not keen on overclocking, though I will install omega drivers.
EDIT: Result of 3DMark2001 SE on AC power: 9753

I was happy with that. And it looked very pretty too.


Other Pics:
Bundled Software:

Glowing:


Duck:


I really like this laptop. If you're looking for an AMD 64 radeon 9700 lappy right now the price and design on this one is dead on. (cost me $1658 US with shipping)

I will edit in results of benchmarks and pics... but right now gonna go move my mp3 collection. EDIT: done

lower resolutions huh?
well firstly I have to say as a second impression that the viewing angles on this screen aren't great. though as a second impression, the speakers are superior to most bundled desktop speakers. as in very excellent.

lemme try some lower resolutions and find out.
k.. supported resolutions range from 800x600 to 1400x1050. Text quality decreases slightly as resolution goes down. Though at 800x600 and 1024x768 text looks good, as opposed to 1280 x768, which looks HORRIBLE (WHY WHY is a widescreen resolution supported on a non-widescreen notebook?). Graphics look good at all resolutions except the aforementioned widescreen resolution. Please also note there are some resolutions that are not supported. If you, say, try to run a fullscreen game on an unsupported resolution, it will instead run in a window of that resolution.
In conclusion, text quality will decrease somewhat at resolutions between 1400x1050 and 1024x768. 1024x768 and 800x600 look good. Graphics are consistent, given their resolutions.

the battery will last 2 hours if you're not exercising it greatly. On "battery saving" mode, I played starcraft (really old game) over the internet for more than 2 hours before it cut. Playing music and browsing with the screen on, 2 hours. Playing music with no screen, more than 4 hours. Ripping CDs and running 3Dmark benchmarks on "game" mode, 45 minutes. I'm thinking it won't play demanding next generation games for longer than half an hour. This would be very different if you had a low voltage AMD processor instead of my DTR processor (an option for this notebook). I would really recommend a low voltage processor.

lol @ duck comment

I've had the ducky since I was about 10. My favourite stuffie.

My first week has been pretty sweet. I've pretty much used my lappy for 1/2 my waking hours. I am quite happy with it performancewise. It still runs burning fast. I unfortunatley don't posess any next games to find out how fast is burning fast.

On the downside, I no longer like the screen as much as I did. Its viewing angles, well, vertically, suck. If you're looking for a really good screen, I wouldn't recommend this laptop.

Oh and a funny thing happened when I tried to install the omega drivers. My fans went balistic, the power brick overheated, and my battery life to scramble to uninstall them was 15 minutes. So I guess I'm sticking to bundled catalyst drivers. But then they work great.

Battery life, when running non-demanding applications is still much better than expected. I like how the laptop can constantly run reliably charging, on battery, charging again, then on battery again in one day.

it'll work fine for you then

btw, where are you planning to buy yours from?

I really never considered gateway. Radeon 9600 would have been fine for me. Widescreen would not have. That is a very good price BTW. Hmm will have to do more shopping around next time.

In theory yes, actually, they should be better as the ferrari has a 4200 rpm hd. I ran them under whatever the default settings were with the default drivers, and I didn't take care what other programs were running. I know I had AVG antivirus running, and I think that's it. I just wanted to get a feel for if the computer would perform decently in games, and I concluded it would, as I feel that achieving 2000 extra 3dmarks (2001) isn't that big of a deal compared to real in-game performance.

(sort of)EDIT: settings were 1024x768, 32bit, no AA...er where do I find filtering?

Now, if I ever reformat this thing and start from new, I'll run 3dmark again and see how I do. Though I have really no idea how to improve the score. But I don't see any point.

I will do research to see if others are experiencing similarilly low scores with this model.

Pics are being added as you view this (or before, depending on when) srry for double post.