Asus N73JN laptop

Product Asus N73JN
Website http://www.asuslaptop.co.uk/
System Specifications Intel Core i5-520M 2.4GHz, 4GB of RAM, 2 320GB hard disks, 1GB Nvidia Geforce GT325M GPU, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, Blu-ray combo drive, 17.3-inch 1600x900 LCD display, Ethernet, WiFi, 1 USB 3.0 port, 2 USB 2.0 ports
Price £1,099 including VAT

THE WORLD HAS been waiting to get its ears on the Asus N73JN ever since it was first turned up to 11 at Computex trade show in Taiwan earlier this year. The reason for this aural trope is because Asus described the laptop with the oxymoron "good laptop audio".

The company said the N73JN was designed in conjunction with Bang & Olufsen, who apparently know a thing or two about bleeding edge audiophilia. In fact, Asus has such faith in the speaker design in the N73JN that it didn't even bung a sub-woofer under the hood.

So is it any good? Well it isn't cheap, but it comes loaded with decent core specifications and is beautifully designed. It also mostly delivers on the promise of good laptop audio, the caveat being that true audiophiles are always going to hook up external speakers where possible because they can't be beat. However, the N73JN certainly offers what might be the best laptop audio we've heard and it makes a good all around multi-media desktop replacement. Don't stay away from a power socket for too long, though.

With a 17.3-inch screen and weighing a back-breaking 3.4kg, the N73JN wasn't designed with portability in mind. Its size denotes its status as a desktop replacement and Asus didn't disappoint us with the design and features on our review model. The desknote comes with a dark metallic gunmetal and blue finish that covers the whole chassis including the touchpad.

Navigation is a mixed bag. The touchpad supports multi-gesture pinch and zoom, which is difficult to use effectively, even on the bigger chassis. It's not Asus' fault that multi-gesture touchpads are all the rage, but it's not an effective technology on a notebook. Aside from that, we found the touchpad to be responsive enough in use.

While the keyboard looks great and is expansive enough to accommodate bigger keys, there's so much flex in the keyboard that it feels cheap. That doesn't affect our typing too much but it doesn't bode well for heavy duty long term use. On the good side, the N73JN has a separate numeric numberpad and over-sized Enter, Ctrl and Shift keys. This makes interacting with fiddly office docs much easier over longer periods.

Asus bundled in a Blu-ray drive on the right, which should be obligatory on anything over £500 anyway. An HDMI output socket is also included, so you can output full HD if you have the display kit rather than rely on the 1600x900 native resolution of the LCD screen. As to video playback, we found the N73JN had enough horsepower to cope with smooth HD playback. It even had no trouble streaming clean HD playback over 802.11 WiFi.

The N73JN also includes eSATA, Ethernet, a VGA port, a multi-format card reader and three USB ports. For some reason the company has only included one USB 3.0 port - the other two are USB 2.0. With USB 3.0 being backwards compatible, it makes no sense to leave two ports reliant on older technology, but it must have saved Asus a couple of dollars.

The 1600x900 screen is decent enough. Asus avoided a high gloss coat on the LED backlit display so we found it easy to use in most light conditions. However, we thought it lacked vibrancy and the colour palette was a little anaemic. We also didn't like the somewhat restrictive viewing angle, but perhaps we are being overly picky.

It's good that Asus went above and beyond the call of duty to get audio to match the visual output. The disparity between audio and visual playback on laptops is a huge divide that the Asus speakers go some way to minimise. The marketing bumpf has it that the Sonic Master speakers provide a new audio certification standard for portable computers. Asus also claimed it fine-tunes the entire system using digital signal processing (DSP) to eliminate any flaws in sound reproduction.

This may sound like a laptop version of THX audio certification, but it really means no more than using best available components and placing them to get the best possible audio output. Whatever, audio technology it uses, if it works, it works. And yes, it works. The speaker bar and grille projects up and out because it takes up nearly the whole length of the laptop at the bottom of the display.

It's not just a case of making the volume louder. The laptop can deliver a wider range of frequencies without stressing audio fidelity. Here we felt the N73JN coped admirably well with a much richer and crisper sound than we'd expected. Movie and music audio were clean. Our only complaint is that we'd like to see Asus build its own audio driver to mach the speakers. Instead, the laptop relies on the simplistic driver from Realtek audio, which we couldn't do much with.

The N73JN comes with solid specifications. It has Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, two big 320GB drives and 4GB of memory. This is backed up by an Intel Core i5 520M CPU running at 2.4GHz and a 1GB Nvidia Geforce GT325M GPU. As this laptop supports Optimus graphics switching, it also has the integrated Intel GPU so it automatically switches graphics depending on what it's being tasked with. Asus has even added a manual on-off GUI on the desktop home page, so we could put the N73JN in power saving mode.

We fired up Crysis Warhead, still one of the most graphically demanding PC games, to see if the Geforce GT325M could keep up. We used the FRAPS app to get a FPS score, and in this case the N73JN can pass as a mid-range gaming laptop. At 1600x900, 16xAA and with all graphics options maxed-out we got only 4 FPS. We tried every option we could to get playable frame-rates at 1600x900, but with no joy. However, it was fine at 1280x1024 on medium graphics settings, which still looks great

The 6-cell battery isn't up to much, though. Using Battery Eater Pro, we got only 58 minutes of life with all settings switched on in performance mode. Switching to the Intel GPU and changing all settings to preserve battery life, it only went up to 186 minutes.

In Short
As an all-rounder multi-media laptop the N73JN is a good but expensive choice. For the money you can get better gaming and movie playback, but you'll be hard pushed to match that killer audio. µ

The Good
Great base specifications, excellent audio, non-gloss display, decent performance, USB 3.0.

The Bad
Flex in keyboard, multi-touchpad, expensive, battery life.

The Ugly
Nothing.

Bartender's Score
7/10