Review: SPK -> Asus Z71V Review!!!! - Page 6

I agree..nice find! Worked great for me, even better than the one I had before hehehe

Revised Review

Okay, after over a week of using this and putting it to the "REAL" test, here are my updated comments.

Before the comments, a little background on my usage. I bought this laptop primary as a laptop for me to do photoshop, webdesign, and play games with. I recently had to do a wedding photoshoot so I used the laptop for that purpose...

LCD:
On the LCD piece, there was talk about sparkle screen and such. In the past couple of weeks, I've done some research. In order to understand the LCD you much first understand the LCD technology. There are WSXGA, WSXGA+, XGA, and WUXGA to name a few of the many out there. Each of them have a max resolution it can support. Usually this max resolution is also their native resolution. Meaning the screen will only look crisp, clear, and nice in this resolution. Any other resolution out of it will look a bit blurry and sometime distorred. You have to be aware of this when deciding on a laptop. So if you are getting a 15.4" screen, the WSXGA+ runs at 1680x1050. Which is pretty small fonts and icon. If you get a WUXGA on a 15.4" screen, expect it to be even SMALLER!. So before you go out and get a Laptop, keep in mine just because it say it is UXGA or WSXGA, etc make sure you are able to bare the small size of the resolution. Especially when it is on a laptop with 15" or smaller. If you are getting 15" or smaller, SXGA and XGA is plenty for it. Don't even bother with SXGA+ or higher because you will complain about it being a bit small if you are weak eyes.

Now as for the Asus Z71V LCD. After you understand LCD Technology, I have to say the Asus Z71V LCD is a very good LCD. It is not glossy like Sony or as bright as Toshiba TruBright, but it does hold up on its own weight. The quality is super. Clear, crisp, and no sparkle. Yes you do see a faint rainbow effect against a white background, but after looking through at least a dozen laptops that are non-glossy, non-trubright, non-all those fancy stuff, you have similar screen as this one. So it is not sparkle.

The screen performs very well with Photoshop. I used a Nikon D70 and a Canon 20D over the weekend. The D70 was a 6.xMP and the Canon 20D was a 8.xMP. So both of the files are fairly large and high quality as you can see. Both shown on this LCD very sharp, correct color contrast, and perform beautifully.

Weight:
This laptop was extremely comfortable to lug around. I also bought a nice Swiss Gear laptop from bestbuy to use with it. It was not heavy, but in fact it was extremely portable to use.

Heat / Noise:
This was an important factor. I have several IBM thinkpad and a few Toshiba and Gateway in my time. All of which have this little heat in the palm rest area after long usage, which is annoying. Since I will be doing a lot of photoshop and multimedia design / authoring, it will utilize the system CPU a lot. In this laptop heat wasn't an issue and the palm rest area was not hot one bit. The fan was on, but you have to really listen to it to hear. It is very quiet!!


Others:
The DVD drive performed nicely on this laptop. It burned at 8x fairly fast given I had to do a few SLIDE-SHOW DVD on the fly, which worked out well. I used this laptop to link up on a projector for a few slideshow, it performed nicely as well.

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Those are my updated and revised comments on this laptop. PM me if you have questions on it.

Q: How Do I Install new nVidia Driver?!

A: I found a nice tutorial you could use off laptopvideo2go.com. You could download the latest version of the nvidia driver and download the nice nifty INF file laptopvideo2go.com provided. Extract both of it in the same directory, and follow these steps:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/pages/instructions.htm

Starts with step #7 to install the driver...