Asus F3Sa review

Considering that Asus has just launched a £211 inc VAT laptop, the F3Sa seems expensive at over £1,000. It comes with Windows Vista Ultimate, which accounts for some of the cost and makes the F3Sa suitable for both home and business use.

It isn't ideal for gamers, though; the Radeon HD 2600 graphics could manage only 18.7fps in our Call of Duty 2 test. However, disabling anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering is all you need to do to achieve a playable frame rate.

The 15.4in widescreen is glossy and evenly lit, producing nice, solid colours across the screen. Our only complaints were minimal banding in our greyscale test and, like Medion's MD96480, we noticed that the 1,280x800 screen is marginally lighter at the bottom of the screen than the top.

The chassis is sturdily built, and the screen barely flexes under pressure. The keyboard is responsive and doesn't flex when you're typing. However, the letters printed on the keys look oversized, making the keyboard seem crowded. The touch pad and buttons are also responsive, and a fingerprint reader sits neatly between the buttons. The internal speakers sound reasonable, but as with most notebook speakers, they lack bass. They provide plenty of volume, though.

Battery life is average at two-and-a-half hours, and it takes the same amount of time to charge. At 3kg, it's quite heavy to carry around for long periods. There are lighter 15.4in notebooks on the market if portability is a priority.

It has a single eSATA port, a mini FireWire port and three USB2 ports, including one on the front for easy connection of flash drives. There's also an ExpressCard/54 slot and an SD media card reader. There are two monitor outputs, DVI-D and D-sub, but at this price an HDMI output would have been nice.

Inside, there's a 200GB hard disk, a speedy Core 2 Duo T7500 processor and 2GB of RAM. These enabled the F3Sa to perform well in all our benchmark tests, and it particularly excelled in our video-encoding test, where it achieved a score of 234. However, it still can't compete with PC Nextday's £999 Zoostorm 85-6713 (reviewed in Labs, Shopper December 2007), which scored a whopping 276.

Although Asus has tried to cover all the bases, £1,006 is a lot to pay for a notebook that is outperformed by cheaper models (including some in this month's Labs). It feels very sturdy and built to last, but the performance and features don't warrant the high price.

Author: Matt Smith