By Joseph Hanlon, CNET.com.au
07/10/2008
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/notebooks/0,39050488,43949995p,00.htm

The Asus F8Va is like the prize pig at the fair--it's not going to win any beauty pageants and better appreciated when served hot on a sandwich during Christmas dinner. Confusing metaphors aside, the F8Va is hardly eye-catching, and its glossy piano black lid is such a fingerprint magnet Asus has thrown in a soft towel to wipe it clean. However, as with most laptops, it's what's inside that counts. Here's where the F8V shines.

Editors' note : This review is based on tests done by our sister site CNET.com.au. As such, please note that there may be slight differences in the testing procedure and ratings system. For more information on the actual tests conducted on the product, please inquire directly at the site where the article was originally published. References made to some of other products in this review may not be available or applicable in Asia. Please check directly with your local distributor for details.

Design

The F8Va sports a 14.1-inch 1,440 x 900-pixel resolution display with an obligatory 1.3-megapixel Webcam situated just above. As with the Asus M50Vm, this Webcam is swivel-mounted and able to rotate to face toward 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 login 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 S$2,698, Asus has packed in quite a bit of well-performing hardware. The F8Va runs a 2.53MHz Core 2 Duo T9400 processor with 4GB RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD3650 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, VGA and the standard inputs for Ethernet and phone line cables. Extending its connectivity, the F8Va also sports an Intel Wi-Fi Link 5100 wireless adapter for connecting to 802.11g and 802.11n wireless access points and Bluetooth for (mostly) mobile phones and handsfree headsets. We also noticed that the heat vent is on the right side of the F8Va, which means right-handed mouse users will likely get sweaty paws when the processor is on afterburn.

For entertainment, the F8Va employs a Blu-ray combo drive which plays HD media. The F8Va also ships with a bundled HDTV tuner which, coupled with Windows Media Center, turns this machine into a fully fledged portable video recorder capable of recording live TV. This can later be streamed over a network to a home theater system or running a large flat-panel TV via 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 approximately 30 hours of recording 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, mouse, and remote for the TV tuner.

Performance And Battery Life

During our tests, the Asus F8Va gave back a result of 3,807 in 3DMark06 and 5,915 in PCMark05. These figures indicate enough power to run some older PC games and newer low resource-chugging titles like EA's Spore. 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. The F8Va powered down after 1 hour 17 minutes. This is a little below par for a six-cell battery. Considering that this laptop weighs in at 2.6kg, we don't think you'll be moving it about much and will most probably have it close to a power socket.

It may not 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.

Service And Support

Asus offers a two-year limited global warranty with all its notebooks. Should a problem occur with the unit, you can send it to any Asus service center around the world for the first two years and get it repaired using the warranty card. Issues during the third year of coverage can be resolved only in Singapore service centers. For users who travel overseas often, having a global warranty is important. However, the Asus service overseas centers should be checked for accessibility. Asus Web site provides software support and updates as well as a telephone hotline number.