
ASUS N73Jn - a balanced solution
Probably, many are already tired of all these laptops - indeed, everyone has had them for a long time, and someone even has two. And every time to attract attention, having come up with something original, it is difficult enough. Moreover, this monopoly of glossy screens ...

But today I tried to write more lively and spent only a couple of hours on the design of the post) Yes, and the laptop is very good for this business - it may and has flaws, but overall it definitely deserves attention.
This article will focus on the ASUS N73Jn laptop - a model whose heart is the Intel® Core ™ i5 processor . This laptop completes the range of notebooks multimedia series "N" ( New generation), which I, in principle, already talked about. The number "7" in the name of the model means that a 17-inch display is installed inside - more only in more expensive models.

In general, there are 4 versions of the ASUS N73 laptop, these are:
N73Jn - the model from this review, built on Core i3 / i5 and GT335M. This laptop came out first in the series - the rest will appear in Q3 and Q4 2010.
N73Jf - model on Core i3 / i5 + GT425M (1GB VRAM)
N73Jg - model on Core i3 / i5 + GT415M (1GB VRAM)
N73Jf - model on Core i7 + GT425M (1GB VRAM)

There will be other differences, such as body color, frameless screen and higher resolution, color and type of coating - it’s easier to look at the detailed specs (at the end of the article).

However, some of the versions will not appear on the market immediately, but somewhat later. In any case, whatever the modification, there will still be much in common, so this review may well give an idea of what to expect.
Everything that will please any geek's soul is inherited from previous models - a cool metal cover with a fine grinding texture and exactly the same area around the touchpad; pleasant to the touch (almost soft-touch) material surrounding the keyboard - and the buttons themselves are quite unusual. Well, the very combination of colors looks very presentable.


There are almost all the necessary modern ports for communication with the outside world, ranging from HDMI to USB 3.0. USB ports, by the way, are “only” 4 - two are hidden on the back side (next to a gigabit network connector - a logical solution), and two more are on the right (one port is USB 3.0, and the remaining one is combined with eSATA).

Once again, all ports are on the right, which can be inconvenient during operation if anything is inserted into all the connectors. Since when have laptops been designed for lefties? ) An interesting point is the hardware switch status of the wireless (Wi-Fi) module - a long time ago this did not come across.
On the back there is a large lid of the only system compartment, the screws from which, apparently, are located under the rubber feet. I didn’t open it, but if you wish, you can get access to the disk and RAM (in case you need to increase the memory to 8GB - 2 slots are installed inside).

In addition to the rubber feet, there are battery locks. A battery of 6 cells at 4400mAh is a standard figure for the market, so be that as it may, you should not expect the wonders of autonomy.


The screen meets all the requirements of the modern mocking strategy of the manufacturers :) It is mirror-gloss and has a no less soiled frame. All this is very quickly covered if not with fingerprints, then at least with dust (and we do not forget about glare + reflections, yes). And if the issue with the screen can be solved with a matte film, then for the framework of such serial solutions I have not seen.
Glare is visible for the most part only in dark images - the rest is bearable. Color reproduction is far from, for example, the IPS matrix of an expensive monitor, but when there is nothing to compare, it will suit the user. Really good picture and color reproduction, with good viewing angles.

The only thing that confused was the resolution of 1600x900, which is definitely not enough for a screen with a diagonal of 17.3 ''. The screen is large, but the pixels are almost invisible.
Above the display is the already familiar “curtain” of a 2-megapixel webcam. At maximum resolution, there is a slight delay in the image, but you can get used to it.

In the afternoon, the camera takes good pictures, but in low light strong noises begin. But the camera is able to see the user even in complete darkness, just in the reflected light of the laptop screen.
And everything else, which is worth writing in the section on appearance, is worthy of only the highest praise. Behind the metal mesh of the speakers there is a glass insert in which the power buttons are inconspicuously located (the right one loads into Windows, the second into the miniature Linux Express ASUS Express Gate operating system .

In the same insert there are status LEDs that light up very slightly and this is a nice plus - they won’t be distracting in the dark.A few more LEDs (they are brighter) are located under the touchpad, but they do not interfere.
A little lower is an almost full-size keyboard with a numeric keypad.

At first, I didn’t really like it - during printing, you can notice how the plastic bends a little under the keyboard - this is normal for wide laptops (because the necessary stiffness simply has nowhere to come from). But when I did a good typing ... and for each laptop I tested, I write a fairly large note on the laptop itself (taking notes of everything that happens during testing so as not to forget anything) ... I changed my mind.

The keyboard is primarily unusual in the shape of the buttons - they are square with fairly sharp corners and edges and have a slight bevel at the bottom. Due to the fact that the keys are not of an “island” type (that is, without gaps), the impression is that the buttons are very large. Because of what, printing was somewhat unusual - oil was added to the fire due to the lack of Cyrillic layout on this engineering copy of the laptop. But the most pleasant thing is the material from which the buttons are made - tactilely it is very ... well, very pleasant. Pay attention to the quality of fitting parts.

I will not discuss the layout, because it is clearly foreign - when the laptops come to us, the buttons also change - they will probably lengthen the ciphers and backspace, change the enter and remove the duplicated slash. But otherwise the keyboard is good - the only thing it really lacks is the backlight.
To the left of the keyboard are multimedia buttons - now they are backlit :)

The touchpad without innovation and design experiments - a fairly large panel is surrounded by a stylish metal coating. It is multi-touch and also very finger-friendly - you can control it equally comfortably with both wet and dry fingers.

Below, as always, one solid chrome button with a quiet and elastic click.

The subtotal - everything is great, except for the glossy screen, the frame and the “inaccessible” system compartment — I wanted to stop by to see how the cooling system was organized. Anyway.
The total turn-on time before loading the system is 35 seconds, and in Express Gate - 7. I already wrote about the Express Gate operating system and in this case there is nothing new.

There are a lot of preinstalled software, a good half of which are branded utilities from ASUS - there are so many things in startup that if you correctly approach the issue of cleaning, you can increase productivity and battery life.
Working in normal office mode, the laptop is almost not heated. So, now I’ll check how things are when viewing a multi-gigabyte rip ...

Well, we expect the result - the laptop itself remains cool (well, or barely warm), but from the side the cooler blows out quite warm air. All the time, the power cord lay at the vent, and even in the load it did not melt :) No matter how hard the laptop tries, it works very quietly.
Since we’ve included the film, one can’t help but add a few words about the sound - because in this model the result of cooperation with the Bang & Olufsen audio companyIt is positioned as one of the trump cards. Speaking of the result, it became the SonicMaster audio system, which includes a whole range of solutions - from increased (in size and power) speakers and the use of more expensive amplifiers, to a specially designed housing geometry. Well, the sound is really pleasant, but subjectively it seemed to me not very loud - better than in many other laptops (and without wheezing at the maximum), but the NX90 sound , of course, is still far away. The conclusion is simple - such acoustics are ideal for watching a movie, for filling a room or even a small office with music - too, but hardly anymore. And for the office, all the same, external speakers, even stationary ones, will become more suitable.

A top-end mobile processor Intel® Core ™ i5 -540M is installed on board the laptop , operating at a standard frequency of 2.53 GHz - depending on needs, it can accelerate to 3.06 GHz (in TurboBoost mode) or, on the contrary, slow down to increase battery life .

The status of the processor in real time is displayed by a special widget in the upper right corner of the screen.
More detailed information about the system
The laptop is equipped with two video cards - one is integrated into the processor (Intel® GMA HD) and works when large resources are not required from the laptop ... And the second is a discrete NVIDIA GeForce® GT 335M (with a gigabyte of memory), to which the laptop automatically switches if if the user decided to make a resource-intensive task - to play, watch a movie, etc.


The capabilities of this video card have been discussed more than once - it can solve a very wide range of problems, but if you believe the abstract index of the Windows system, it is it that is the weakest point in the system. And this despite the fact that the "game" score is quite high. It is hoped that Microsoft programmers will someday learn to work correctly with the features of the hybrid system, but for now there is as it is.

As for benchmarks - apparently, they are of little interest to anyone, because few people want to delve into the comparison of numbers between the results of different systems. However, I’ll give you one figure - in the comprehensive synthetic test Futuremark 3DMark06 the laptop scored 7590 points.

Inside installed 2 hard drives, both 640 GB. Strange, but once again I observe the picture when disks from different manufacturers are used in such a system - in this case, Samsung and WD. The performance is similar:
Western Digital 640GB [WD6400BEVT-80A0R] Samsung 640GB [HM641JI]




Battery life leaves from 2 to 2.5 hours, although in Express Gate (apparently due to less consumption of system resources) this figure is 3 hours. Not much, but for a multimedia device with such a large screen, this is the norm.
Specs are given for the laptop from this review - there are both less and more productive configurations.

Processor : Intel® Core ™ i5-540M (2.53-3.06 GHz, 2 cores, 3 MB L2)
Chipset : Intel® HM55 Express
RAM : 4096 MB (DDR3, 1066 MHz). Up to 8GB (2 slots)
Video card : Intel® GMA HD + NVIDIA GeForce® GT 335M (1GB GDDR3)
Hard disk : 2x640GB (2.5 ”, SATA, 5400r / m)
Screen : 17.3 '', glossy (1600x900, 16: 9, LED)
Interfaces : 3xUSB 2.0, 1xUSB 3.0, eSATA (combined with one of USB), VGA, HDMI, Head-Out, Mic-in, RJ45
Audio : Integrated Intel High Definition Audio, stereo speakers Bang & Olufsen
Optical drive: DVD-SuperMulti DL with support for recording dual-layer discs
Card reader : SD / MMC / MS / MSPro / xD
Webcam : 2 megapixels
Wireless : Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, 802.11b / g / n
Battery : Li-Ion (4400mAh, 48Wh , 10.8V, 6 cells)
Battery life : 2-3 hours
Operating system : Microsoft® Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
Dimensions : 287x420x40 mm
Weight : 3.4 kg
Specifications of various models .
Elegant appearance
Practical case materials, high-quality assembly
Tactilely nice multi-touch touchpad
Comfortable keyboard, but it needs getting used to
performance
ASUS Express Gate filling
Good sound
Quiet
Marky glossy screen and the frame around it
Screen resolutions 1600x900 for good movies is not enough
Keyboard slightly bends when printing
Short battery life
Price starts to bite
Inside the 17+ inches of the screen - for me this is an unusually large amount, so from an unaccustomed view the dimensions seemed somewhat large. This subjectively can be considered a minus, but in fact this is a home laptop, which will have to be worn in maximum in different rooms or taken to work on an adjacent chair. By the way, the laptop easily fit in a backpack.
The price starts from 45 thousand rubles and increases depending on the insides.
In fact, after the test there were quite double feelings. On the one hand, as a child you rejoice that there is very little gloss left, and the filling is powerful enough for many tasks ... But on the other hand, you are aware that this is a multimedia laptop, and the screen resolution with a physically large display is only 1600x900 - how something a little non-multimedia, or something ... But this, consider the most “adult” representative in the N-series - only stars are higher and ASUS NX90 is even a little higher . And the sound surprised - it will be better than many other sounds, but nevertheless the mentioned NX90 set a new bar and now I will not be surprised for a long time. But working with Bang & Olufsen has definitely benefited ASUS.

The rest is just a nice laptop - with a practical case (both inside and outside), which is not a shame to put on an adjacent car seat and take with you to work. But still it is more a "domestic animal", which is clearly hinted at by the dimensions and battery life. Fairly well-balanced system, which will be sold at a price of “from 45 thousand” - a quick run through the same laptops of competitors, I dare to assume that the model is more than competitive and there will definitely be demand for it.
Wallpapers [1920x1080] I
remind you of the contest " Rest and entertainment of the future " - you can still have time to compete for valuable prizes!
I accept advice on possible improvement of articles, as well as topics that would be of interest to you. Success / Boomburum


But today I tried to write more lively and spent only a couple of hours on the design of the post) Yes, and the laptop is very good for this business - it may and has flaws, but overall it definitely deserves attention.
This article will focus on the ASUS N73Jn laptop - a model whose heart is the Intel® Core ™ i5 processor . This laptop completes the range of notebooks multimedia series "N" ( New generation), which I, in principle, already talked about. The number "7" in the name of the model means that a 17-inch display is installed inside - more only in more expensive models.

In general, there are 4 versions of the ASUS N73 laptop, these are:
N73Jn - the model from this review, built on Core i3 / i5 and GT335M. This laptop came out first in the series - the rest will appear in Q3 and Q4 2010.
N73Jf - model on Core i3 / i5 + GT425M (1GB VRAM)
N73Jg - model on Core i3 / i5 + GT415M (1GB VRAM)
N73Jf - model on Core i7 + GT425M (1GB VRAM)

There will be other differences, such as body color, frameless screen and higher resolution, color and type of coating - it’s easier to look at the detailed specs (at the end of the article).

However, some of the versions will not appear on the market immediately, but somewhat later. In any case, whatever the modification, there will still be much in common, so this review may well give an idea of what to expect.
Appearance
Everything that will please any geek's soul is inherited from previous models - a cool metal cover with a fine grinding texture and exactly the same area around the touchpad; pleasant to the touch (almost soft-touch) material surrounding the keyboard - and the buttons themselves are quite unusual. Well, the very combination of colors looks very presentable.


There are almost all the necessary modern ports for communication with the outside world, ranging from HDMI to USB 3.0. USB ports, by the way, are “only” 4 - two are hidden on the back side (next to a gigabit network connector - a logical solution), and two more are on the right (one port is USB 3.0, and the remaining one is combined with eSATA).

Once again, all ports are on the right, which can be inconvenient during operation if anything is inserted into all the connectors. Since when have laptops been designed for lefties? ) An interesting point is the hardware switch status of the wireless (Wi-Fi) module - a long time ago this did not come across.
On the back there is a large lid of the only system compartment, the screws from which, apparently, are located under the rubber feet. I didn’t open it, but if you wish, you can get access to the disk and RAM (in case you need to increase the memory to 8GB - 2 slots are installed inside).

In addition to the rubber feet, there are battery locks. A battery of 6 cells at 4400mAh is a standard figure for the market, so be that as it may, you should not expect the wonders of autonomy.


The screen meets all the requirements of the modern mocking strategy of the manufacturers :) It is mirror-gloss and has a no less soiled frame. All this is very quickly covered if not with fingerprints, then at least with dust (and we do not forget about glare + reflections, yes). And if the issue with the screen can be solved with a matte film, then for the framework of such serial solutions I have not seen.
Glare is visible for the most part only in dark images - the rest is bearable. Color reproduction is far from, for example, the IPS matrix of an expensive monitor, but when there is nothing to compare, it will suit the user. Really good picture and color reproduction, with good viewing angles.

The only thing that confused was the resolution of 1600x900, which is definitely not enough for a screen with a diagonal of 17.3 ''. The screen is large, but the pixels are almost invisible.
Above the display is the already familiar “curtain” of a 2-megapixel webcam. At maximum resolution, there is a slight delay in the image, but you can get used to it.

In the afternoon, the camera takes good pictures, but in low light strong noises begin. But the camera is able to see the user even in complete darkness, just in the reflected light of the laptop screen.
And everything else, which is worth writing in the section on appearance, is worthy of only the highest praise. Behind the metal mesh of the speakers there is a glass insert in which the power buttons are inconspicuously located (the right one loads into Windows, the second into the miniature Linux Express ASUS Express Gate operating system .

In the same insert there are status LEDs that light up very slightly and this is a nice plus - they won’t be distracting in the dark.A few more LEDs (they are brighter) are located under the touchpad, but they do not interfere.
A little lower is an almost full-size keyboard with a numeric keypad.

At first, I didn’t really like it - during printing, you can notice how the plastic bends a little under the keyboard - this is normal for wide laptops (because the necessary stiffness simply has nowhere to come from). But when I did a good typing ... and for each laptop I tested, I write a fairly large note on the laptop itself (taking notes of everything that happens during testing so as not to forget anything) ... I changed my mind.

The keyboard is primarily unusual in the shape of the buttons - they are square with fairly sharp corners and edges and have a slight bevel at the bottom. Due to the fact that the keys are not of an “island” type (that is, without gaps), the impression is that the buttons are very large. Because of what, printing was somewhat unusual - oil was added to the fire due to the lack of Cyrillic layout on this engineering copy of the laptop. But the most pleasant thing is the material from which the buttons are made - tactilely it is very ... well, very pleasant. Pay attention to the quality of fitting parts.

I will not discuss the layout, because it is clearly foreign - when the laptops come to us, the buttons also change - they will probably lengthen the ciphers and backspace, change the enter and remove the duplicated slash. But otherwise the keyboard is good - the only thing it really lacks is the backlight.
To the left of the keyboard are multimedia buttons - now they are backlit :)

The touchpad without innovation and design experiments - a fairly large panel is surrounded by a stylish metal coating. It is multi-touch and also very finger-friendly - you can control it equally comfortably with both wet and dry fingers.

Below, as always, one solid chrome button with a quiet and elastic click.

The subtotal - everything is great, except for the glossy screen, the frame and the “inaccessible” system compartment — I wanted to stop by to see how the cooling system was organized. Anyway.
Inclusion and work
The total turn-on time before loading the system is 35 seconds, and in Express Gate - 7. I already wrote about the Express Gate operating system and in this case there is nothing new.

There are a lot of preinstalled software, a good half of which are branded utilities from ASUS - there are so many things in startup that if you correctly approach the issue of cleaning, you can increase productivity and battery life.
Working in normal office mode, the laptop is almost not heated. So, now I’ll check how things are when viewing a multi-gigabyte rip ...

Well, we expect the result - the laptop itself remains cool (well, or barely warm), but from the side the cooler blows out quite warm air. All the time, the power cord lay at the vent, and even in the load it did not melt :) No matter how hard the laptop tries, it works very quietly.


A top-end mobile processor Intel® Core ™ i5 -540M is installed on board the laptop , operating at a standard frequency of 2.53 GHz - depending on needs, it can accelerate to 3.06 GHz (in TurboBoost mode) or, on the contrary, slow down to increase battery life .

The status of the processor in real time is displayed by a special widget in the upper right corner of the screen.

The laptop is equipped with two video cards - one is integrated into the processor (Intel® GMA HD) and works when large resources are not required from the laptop ... And the second is a discrete NVIDIA GeForce® GT 335M (with a gigabyte of memory), to which the laptop automatically switches if if the user decided to make a resource-intensive task - to play, watch a movie, etc.


The capabilities of this video card have been discussed more than once - it can solve a very wide range of problems, but if you believe the abstract index of the Windows system, it is it that is the weakest point in the system. And this despite the fact that the "game" score is quite high. It is hoped that Microsoft programmers will someday learn to work correctly with the features of the hybrid system, but for now there is as it is.

As for benchmarks - apparently, they are of little interest to anyone, because few people want to delve into the comparison of numbers between the results of different systems. However, I’ll give you one figure - in the comprehensive synthetic test Futuremark 3DMark06 the laptop scored 7590 points.

Inside installed 2 hard drives, both 640 GB. Strange, but once again I observe the picture when disks from different manufacturers are used in such a system - in this case, Samsung and WD. The performance is similar:
Western Digital 640GB [WD6400BEVT-80A0R] Samsung 640GB [HM641JI]








Battery life leaves from 2 to 2.5 hours, although in Express Gate (apparently due to less consumption of system resources) this figure is 3 hours. Not much, but for a multimedia device with such a large screen, this is the norm.
Specifications
Specs are given for the laptop from this review - there are both less and more productive configurations.

Processor : Intel® Core ™ i5-540M (2.53-3.06 GHz, 2 cores, 3 MB L2)
Chipset : Intel® HM55 Express
RAM : 4096 MB (DDR3, 1066 MHz). Up to 8GB (2 slots)
Video card : Intel® GMA HD + NVIDIA GeForce® GT 335M (1GB GDDR3)
Hard disk : 2x640GB (2.5 ”, SATA, 5400r / m)
Screen : 17.3 '', glossy (1600x900, 16: 9, LED)
Interfaces : 3xUSB 2.0, 1xUSB 3.0, eSATA (combined with one of USB), VGA, HDMI, Head-Out, Mic-in, RJ45
Audio : Integrated Intel High Definition Audio, stereo speakers Bang & Olufsen
Optical drive: DVD-SuperMulti DL with support for recording dual-layer discs
Card reader : SD / MMC / MS / MSPro / xD
Webcam : 2 megapixels
Wireless : Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, 802.11b / g / n
Battery : Li-Ion (4400mAh, 48Wh , 10.8V, 6 cells)
Battery life : 2-3 hours
Operating system : Microsoft® Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
Dimensions : 287x420x40 mm
Weight : 3.4 kg
Specifications of various models .
Control weighing













Inside the 17+ inches of the screen - for me this is an unusually large amount, so from an unaccustomed view the dimensions seemed somewhat large. This subjectively can be considered a minus, but in fact this is a home laptop, which will have to be worn in maximum in different rooms or taken to work on an adjacent chair. By the way, the laptop easily fit in a backpack.

The end
In fact, after the test there were quite double feelings. On the one hand, as a child you rejoice that there is very little gloss left, and the filling is powerful enough for many tasks ... But on the other hand, you are aware that this is a multimedia laptop, and the screen resolution with a physically large display is only 1600x900 - how something a little non-multimedia, or something ... But this, consider the most “adult” representative in the N-series - only stars are higher and ASUS NX90 is even a little higher . And the sound surprised - it will be better than many other sounds, but nevertheless the mentioned NX90 set a new bar and now I will not be surprised for a long time. But working with Bang & Olufsen has definitely benefited ASUS.

The rest is just a nice laptop - with a practical case (both inside and outside), which is not a shame to put on an adjacent car seat and take with you to work. But still it is more a "domestic animal", which is clearly hinted at by the dimensions and battery life. Fairly well-balanced system, which will be sold at a price of “from 45 thousand” - a quick run through the same laptops of competitors, I dare to assume that the model is more than competitive and there will definitely be demand for it.



