ASUS N43SL Jay Chou Special Edition, Review PART 2

Since Jay Chou is a well-known singer and songwriter, it’s no wonder that this special edition of the Asus N43SL is doing very well in the audio department where we find the top-facing speaker which has enough power to fill a small room. The audio is enhanced by the Bang and Olufsen ICEpower and the SonicMaster technology. We should mention that the laptop boots up with a short piano tune that was composed by Jay Chou himself. In addition, the notebook comes bundled with several songs written by Chou that were selected by the artist.

On the left side of the laptop you are going to find two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI port, Ethernet jack, as well as the usual headphone and microphone jacks. On the right spine Asus has installed another USB 2.0 port, a USB 3.0 port, along with the Blu-ray optical drive. On the back of this special N43SL laptop is the VGA port as well as the power. On the front right side sits the SD card slot. There’s also a two megapixel webcam of below average quality which takes mostly blurry and grainy shots while the colors are washed out.

At the heart of the Asus N43SL Jay Chou Special Edition is a second-gen Intel Core i5-2430M processor running at 2.40 GHz. It is configured with 6GB of DDR3 memory which allows the laptop to score a little over 2,000 points in PCMark07 which is less than the average in this segment. For storage it has a large 750GB SATA HDD rotating at a speed of 5,400 rpm which can boot the Home Premium version of Windows 7 in about 1 minute and 20 seconds, a lot more than other similar laptops. For example, HP’s Envy 14 will boot the OS in just 50 seconds while the Dell XPS 14z needs a minute.

Where this Asus laptop is better than other similar models is in the graphics department where it packs the integrated Intel HD 3000 chip and a dedicated Nvidia GeForce GT 540M which has 1GB of VRAM. The notebook comes with Nvidia’s Optimus technology so it can automatically switch from one GPU to the other depending on the demand of the application. Thanks to the dedicated GPU, this special N43SL will score almost 9,000 points in 3DMark06 which is a lot more than the average in this segment.

It has been fitted with a six-cell battery that can provide enough juice for about four and a half hours during the LAPTOP Battery Test that does Internet web surfing from a Wi-Fi network. The laptop is bested by the Envy 14 from HP which lasts for almost 5 hours while the Dell XPS 14z can run the test for almost five and a half hours.

1

Watch tweets on: