Asus F8Va

It may not
be the sexiest notebook in town, but Asus' 14.1-inch laptop is Centrino
2 certified, and sports some excellent multimedia capabilities.

Design

The Asus F8Va is like the prized pig at the fair, it's not winning any
beauty pageants and is better appreciated when served hot on a sandwich
during Christmas dinner. Confusing metaphors aside, the F8Va is hardly
eye-catching — its glossy piano black lid is such a fingerprint magnet
Asus has thrown a soft towel in the box to wipe it clean. However, as
with most laptops, it's what's inside that counts, and it's here that
the F8Va shines.

The F8Va sports a 14.1-inch 1,440x900-pixel resolution display with
an obligatory 1.3-megapixel webcam situated just above. As with the
Asus M51Va, this webcam is swivel mounted and able to rotate to face
towards the user or away. It is also used with Asus' mostly useless
SmartLogon facial recognition security software. We say useless, not
because it doesn't work, but because it is actually significantly
slower to log-in with the webcam than it is to type in a password.

For those who refuse to remember a password and find SmartLogon
cumbersome there is also a fingerprint scanner sitting between the left
and right mousepad buttons. This stainless steel trackpad is large and
easy to use; however, the material isn't as pleasant to use as
soft-touch plastic trackpads, and the selection keys click loudly when
depressed.

Features

For the money, Asus has packed in quite a bit of well performing
hardware. The F8Va runs a 2.53MHz Core 2 Duo 9400 processor with 2GB
DDR2-800MHz RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 video card with 1GB
of dedicated memory. This adds up to some pretty beefy performance that
is more than capable of most day-to-day tasks and is handy as an
entertainment unit as well.

Around the edges of the F8Va we found a whopping five USB ports, an
eSATA port, HDMI and VGA, plus the standard inputs for Ethernet and
phone line cables. Extending its connectivity, the F8Va also sports an
Intel WiFi Link 5100 wireless adapter for connecting to 802.11g and
802.11n wireless access points and Bluetooth for connecting (mostly) to
mobile phones and hands-free headsets. We also noticed the heat vent on
the right-hand side of the F8Va, which means right-handed mouse users
will more than likely get sweaty paws under the processor after burn.

For entertainment the F8Va employs a combo Blu-ray drive and DVD
burner, and the aforementioned hardware is more than sufficient to play
back media effectively. The F8Va also ships with a bundled HDTV tuner
which, coupled with Windows Media Centre, turns this machine into a
fully-fledged portable video recorder capable of recording live TV then
streaming it over a network to a home theatre system, or running a
large flat panel TV into the HDMI port.

If you do plan to record TV you might find the F8Va's 320GB HDD
filling quickly. At HD resolution this storage capacity is equal to
approx 30 hours of recording, and that's if you can dedicate the entire
disk to TV, which will be impractical for most people. This brings us
back to the extra USB ports; serious TV lovers will be looking to
invest in an external drive.

Asus also throws in a couple of extras with the machine: a very handy carry bag, a mouse, and a remote for the TV tuner.

Performance

During our tests, the Asus F8Va gave back a result of 3,807 in 3DMark
benchmarking and 5,915 in PCMark. These figures indicate power enough
to run some older PC games. More importantly, it should handle most
productivity apps with ease and be capable of some basic photo and
video editing.

After turning off all the power-saving features we started a DVD to
test the battery, noting that the F8Va powered down after one hour and
17 minutes. This is about average for a six-cell battery, if a little
below par. Considering this laptop weighs in at 2.6kg, we don't think
you'll be moving it about too much anyway, and will most probably have
it close to a power socket.

It mightn't be the most attractive laptop available, but it has
plenty of grunt to play with and enough multimedia features to please
people introducing themselves to the next generation of couch
potato-ism.

From : http://www.zdnet.com.au/