MWC hype is in full swing, and ASUS has just released the coolest teaser we’ve seen so far. It depicts a shiny spaceship landing on the Sagrada Família in Barcelona (Spain), shot from the perspective of baffled onlookers. We’re just as perplexed, and have only got the phrases “ultimate craftsmanship” and “the metallic miracle” to dwell on. Will we see some form of chromed-out device later this month, or is ASUS planning world domination with some extraterrestrial allies? Let’s hope it’s the former, but we’ll just have to hide wait and see. Check the 30-second teaser vid below — Will Smith’s on standby.
ASUS has introduced their latest motherboard, the TUF Sabertooth 990FX/GEN3 R2.0. Based on AMD 990FX/SB950 chipset, the board supports for AM3+ processors and features four DDR3 DIMM memory slots (up to 32GB RAM), three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, one PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slot and one PCI slot. In terms of connectivity ports, it has eight SATA 6.0 Gbps, six USB 3.0, twelve USB 2.0 and Gigabit Ethernet. The TUF Sabertooth 990FX/GEN3 R2.0 will start shipping from the middle of March for unannounced price yet. [ASUS]
This week we’re having a look at the real-deal final release iteration of the ASUS VivoBook U38N with full touchscreen capabilities, Windows 8, and AMD innards. This machine is sleek, keeps with the fantastic ASUS style language we’ve been loving since the ASUS Transformer Prime stole our hears back in 2011, and provides a rather rare look at this sort of amalgamation of bits with AMD under the hood. It all starts with 5-point capacitive touch on a Full HD 1920 x 1080 panel with a rather nice “frameless” design up front.
Hardware
With an ASUS piece of hardware you know you’re getting a machine whose creators spent some time perfecting its casings, and here we’ve got a design that’s been perfected several times over. This notebook will not look unique to you if you’ve worked with an ASUS laptop in the last few years. It’s certainly thin at between 6-19mm from its thinnest to its fattest, and it’s light enough to fit in your standard backpack at just 1.55Kg.
The panel you’re looking at is 13.3-inches of Full HD IPS LCD at a 16:9 aspect ratio. The front-facing camera you’re working with is HD 720p for video chat and you’ve got a standard integrated microphone so you can chat without additional accessories. If you do want to plug in, on the other hand, you’ve got 3x USB 3.0 ports, a Mini VGA port, full-sized HDMI-out, and an SD card reader so you can rock and roll.
The keyboard here is a really standard ASUS setup – working with a bit more breathing room than we’ve seen on the slightly smaller Transformer tablet units over the past couple of years with a touchpad that’s also had some usability improvements. Of course if you continue to compare an Android tablet user experience to a Windows user experience here with full Windows 8, you’re going to feel that this device is rocking and rolling in the hardware department – it does have a bit to do with the fact that Windows 8 is made for a desktop environment, of course.
Inside you’ve got a choice between 2.5῀ 7mm 500 GB HDD and 2.5῀ 7mm SSD 128GB as well as DDR3 1600MHz 2GB (on board) with either 2GB or 4GB Slot DIMM. It all depends on what you need to keep you kicking. You’ve also got a choice between AMD Radeon HD7600G and AMD Radeon HD7620G graphics on either AMD A8-4555M or A10-4655M Quad-Core APU processors. All this magic comes clean with the AMD A70M Hub Controller – your only choice for chipset.
You’ll also find that you’ve got a built-in Bang & Olufsen ICE Power audio system that’ll make dorm room video watching a successful venture without a doubt. Each speaker is 2.5 W and you’ve got the guarantee that Bang & Olufsen worked with the ASUSA special Golden Ear team for an “exclusive” SonicMaster Technology experience. In short: this laptop sounds very, very nice.
Software & Performance
With Windows 8 you’ve got a fully touch-friendly experience ahead of you from start to finish, and with the 5-finger touch functionality of the ASUS U38N series, you’ll be tapping all day long. To keep you running strong, you’ve got AMD to keep you warmed up nice and toasty, complete with several AMD-exclusive features. Have a peek here first at a system readout for this unit:
System – ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. U38N
Manufacturer
Asus
Product Type
Notebook
Operating System
Microsoft Windows 8 Pro (64-bit)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. U38N
Processor
AMD A10-4655M APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics
Processor ID
AuthenticAMD Family 21 Model 16 Stepping 1
Processor Frequency
2.00 GHz
Processors
1
Threads
4
Cores
4
L1 Instruction Cache
64.0 KB
L1 Data Cache
16.0 KB
L2 Cache
2.00 MB
L3 Cache
0.00 B
Memory
3.45 GB DDR3 SDRAM 675MHz
FSB
202 MHz
BIOS
American Megatrends Inc. U38N.TPM.ALS.0x20
With this build of Windows 8 you’ll be seeing a fairly clean design with not one whole heck of a lot of extra software pushed by ASUS. That said, there are some interesting additions you’re going to want to see in our hands-on with the system coming up next. Note while you’re watching how sleek the system is and how well touch is responded to right here with this basic out-of-box build.
Finally have a peek at our basic benchmark result from Geekbench. This notebook is certainly not the most powerful we’ve come across, but it definitely gets the job done for your everyday computing needs. If you’re looking for some notebooks to compare to, feel free to head down into our Laptop Reviews tag portal for machines from each of the finest manufacturers on the market. AMD does seem to be holding its own against some of the more visible names in the public today!
Benchmark Score – ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. U38N
Section
Description
Score
Total Score
Windows x86 (64-bit) – Microsoft Windows 8 Pro (64-bit)
Integer
Processor integer performance
3270
3578
Floating Point
Processor floating point performance
4806
Memory
Memory performance
2245
Stream
Memory bandwidth performance
3025
Wrap-Up
With the ASUS VivoBook U38N you’ve got a rather well-rounded solution for your school or everyday home use. With the high-quality audio system and the Full HD picture right in front of your face, you’ll also do well to work with this machine as a home entertainment blaster, especially if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t use a giant TV. If you DO use a giant TV, you’ve also got the option to output via HDMI as well – easy as pie!
This is easily one of ASUS’ finest efforts to date, and with AMD under the hood you know you’ll have a unique solution that your best buddy will be interested in fiddling around with. ASUS also works with a collection of their own accessories that work with this notebook, and the manufacturer continues to support their ever-growing line of products with both hardware and software upgrades into the future. Let us know if you’re onboard!
The first Intel-powered tablet manufactured by Asus is well on its way, where it will be known as the Asus Fonepad. The Asus Fonepad is not new to news channels, but at least another leaf of confirmation has dropped from the grapevine thanks to the Global Certification Forum, meaning it will really be known as the Asus Fonepad when it finally hits the market. The thing is, the Global Certification Forum has also named it the ME371MG if model numbers are your cup of tea, where it will boast of 3G connectivity to boot. For folks who have had their hopes up for LTE, you can forget about it, at least in this particular model that was examined by the GCF.
The Asus Fonepad will be powered by a version of Android Jelly Bean, with a 1.2GHz Intel processor and PowerVR SGX540 graphics chipset, keeping the 7-inch IPS display at 1280 x 800 resolution company, in addition to a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera, a 3-megapixel shooter at the back, 1GB RAM, a microSD memory card slot, and a choice of 8GB, 16GB or 32GB of internal memory.
ASUS’ Transformer Pad Infinity’s awkwardly timed announcement sent a fair few Transformer Prime buyers into fits of apoplexy — after all, it was just a few weeks after the Prime went on sale. Fortunately, the company didn’t release the Infinity for some time, but was it worth the wait? Our reviewer felt that its delayed journey to the market meant everyone else had a chance to get beyond it, meaning that the discounted Transformer Prime was enough for anyone who didn’t mind the odd GPS brownout. But what about if you bought one? Do you feel the same way? Settle down on the sofa and play armchair gadget designer for a moment, and tell us what you would change.
ASUS is set to launch a new graphics card for the Japanese market, the GTX670-DC2OG-2GD5. Specs-wise, the card sports 1344 CUDA Cores, a 256-bit memory interface, a core clock of 980MHz (1058MHz Boost Clock) and a 2GB of GDDR5 memory set @ 6008MHz, and features 1x DVI-I, 1x DVI-D, 1x HDMI and 1x DisplayPort outputs. The GTX670-DC2OG-2GD5 will hit the Japanese market on February 16th for around 46,000 Yen (about $495) and will come bundled with the Diablo III mouse pad. [ASUS]
We’ve seen our fair share of convertible notebooks and shape-shifting hybrids over the last several months, but one particular offering from ASUS stood out. In the latest issue of our tablet mag, we spend some quality time getting to know both faces of the TAICHI 21. Brad Molen goes in-depth with his first week back to BlackBerry while Sean Buckley discusses Nintendo’s digital content issues in Forum. Eyes-On gets modular with rucksacks, Recommended Reading recalls Monster’s loss of Beats by Dre and Turquoise Jeep’s Flynt Flossy dances through the Q&A. That’s just a few pages of another jam-packed edition, so pull up a cozy seat and download your copy via that weekly link of choice.
NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 690 currently wears the world’s-fastest-graphics crown, unless you count the limited edition Ares II, by cramming two Kepler GPUs onto one mainstream board. When it comes to improving on that, some leaked European retailer listings suggest NVIDIA might not wait on a completely next-gen architecture, but may instead try to deliver similar performance through a less power-hungry single GPU design. The listings, gathered together by TechPowerUp and VideoCardz, point towards a pricey new flagship, the GeForce GTX Titan, that would be a graphics-focused adaptation of the beefy Tesla K20 computing card. It’d pack 2,688 shader units, a 384-bit memory bus and 6GB of RAM, all with one chip — for reference, the GTX 690 needs two GPUs to offer 3,072 shader units and has 4GB of RAM. There’s no confirmed unveiling date, and the primary leak on a Danish site has actually been pulled, but ASUS and EVGA are rumored to be launching their own GTX Titan variants as soon as next week, possibly in the $1,000 to $1,200 ball park. That’s a short wait for what could deliver a serious boost to game performance, not to mention bragging rights.
ASUS is gearing up to launch another all-in-one desktop PC namely the ET2012AUTB. This space-saving system will feature a 20-inch 1600 x 900 LED-backlight multi-touch TFT LCD display, a 1.70GHz AMD E2-1800 APU dual-core processor, an AMD Radeon HD 7340 graphics card, a 4GB DDR3 RAM, a 500GB hard drive, a DVD Super Multi Drive, a card reader, WiFi and run on either Windows 7 Professional 32-bit or 7 Home Premium 32-bit OS. The ET2012AUTB will start shipping from mid-February for unannounced price yet. [ASUS]
There is a disturbing trend in the gadget world, and it’s that laptop, tablet and phone makers aren’t taking battery life seriously enough. Yes, having touch on a Windows 8 notebook is great, but not if the computer lasts an hour and a half less than one without that capability. And what good is a smartphone with an HD display and superfast processor if you have to plug it in around lunchtime? We run our homemade battery test, which involves continuous Web surfing at 40 percent brightness, on every device we review. And if the endurance isn’t good enough, regardless of the gadget’s other features, we simply won’t recommend it. More »
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The first Intel-powered tablet manufactured by Asus is well on its way, where it will be known as the Asus Fonepad. The Asus Fonepad is not new to news channels, but at least another leaf of confirmation has dropped from the grapevine thanks to the Global Certification Forum, meaning it will really be known as the Asus Fonepad when it finally hits the market. The thing is, the Global Certification Forum has also named it the ME371MG if model numbers are your cup of tea, where it will boast of 3G connectivity to boot. For folks who have had their hopes up for LTE, you can forget about it, at least in this particular model that was examined by the GCF.
