Laptop Review: Asus NX90

Piece of engineering art


Laptop Review: Asus NX90

by Trevor Tan
05:55 AM Oct 08, 2010

ALMOST everyone who walked by my desk in the office the past few days did a double take. Many stopped to talk ... not about me but about the Asus NX90 multimedia laptop ($3,888) on my desk.

Designed by David Lewis, the man behind Bang & Olufsen trademark products, the NX90 is a piece of engineering art. Polished aluminium dominates the top outer shell and palm rest, while dual touchpads flank the keyboard. Speakers are placed alongside a gorgeous 18.4-inch full high-definition (HD) LED backlight display, completing the notebook's minimalist design and helping to warp sound around the user.

But while the polished aluminum surface looks good (and makes an excellent mirror), it is a smudge magnet and you do have to clean it a lot. The dual touchpads feel awkward to use (we would have preferred to use a mouse) and the keyboard layout is unconventional. For example, the Backspace key on the top right-hand side is replaced with the Delete key. Thus, you might hit some wrong keys. Plus, the laptop's hefty size and weight (4.8kg, with battery) means you will likely use the NX90 as a desktop replacement rather than a portable laptop.

Its specifications are better than those of many desktop computers. The review set sports an Intel Core i7-720QM processor (1.6GHz with Turbo Boost up to 2.8GHz), 4GB of DDR3 RAM (8GB in retail), 1GB of video RAM in Nvidia GeForce GT335M, a Blu-Ray DVD combo drive, and 1TB of storage space. It boasts a 2-megapixel webcam and USB 3.0, HDMI and eSATA ports.

The NX90 takes around 68 seconds to boot up and about 18 seconds to shut down. In the PassMark PerformanceTest 7.0 benchmark test, it clocks a score of 1055. This is not bad if you compare it to gaming laptop Dell Alienware M17x's score of 1,288.

With a 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium operating system, you will also find running multi-thread applications such as Photoshop CS5 fast.

Playing movies on the NX90 is awesome. The sharp, glossy display is not too reflective and the speakers are magnificent. Just don't turn the volume too high, as distortion might occur. Trevor Tan

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