AsusN53JG review

Asus has seen fit to include a dedicated Nvidia graphics card, a GeForce 415M. This scored 17.8fps in our Call of Duty 4 benchmark, which isn’t particularly impressive by today’s standards. With game settings turned down, you should be able to play older titles or less graphically-intensive games, but games enthusiasts should look elsewhere. CUDA support means supported applications will see performance boosts in certain operations, but as yet there’s not a lot of software that takes advantage of this technology.

There seems little point in including this dedicated card, when the Core i3’s integrated chip can handle HD video decoding and even some older games. While the N53’s design is striking, there’s nothing else that really stands out. It looks decidedly mediocre when placed next to the new Dell XPS L502X, which has a better keyboard and screen and is significantly faster in Windows applications. Although you’ll need to reconfigure it with Dell to drop the Blu-ray drive and top-end graphics chip to get near this price.