Well. The N10 “netbook” from Asus.

If history has taught us anything over the thousands of years besides you should never accept a giant wooden horse for a gift or remake a horror film more than once, it’s that making something completely pointless is still pointless even if the said thing is good. Things like the ‘charge while you play’ adapters for the wireless xbox 360 controllers, yes lets take a wireless device and give it a wire to make use of… well yes you get my point. Stupid.

The point I’m getting at is the whole “netbook” idea in general. I see no real need for them; they are a needlessly small version of a normal laptop which runs Vista more slowly than the average laptop anyway (or PC since Vista is a POS!). I awoke to the delivering of the N10 one morning with the hope of being able to try some games on it. While this was possible, it was somewhat undesirable. I played through the first couple of levels of Condemned criminal origins on medium settings and the laptop chugged along reasonably well, but fell flat on its face when the screen had more than 1 character on it; which sadly meant 90% of the game. At this point I got bored and passed the N10 to my loving girlfriend who proceeded to play through Indigo Prophecy on it in ONE SITTING. Anyone who says girls don’t game, you are wrong.

On to the main features of the netbook, the overall look is nice. It has a stylish, neat and tidy exterior and some sexy looking blue lights which contrast the black interior keyboard + screen very nicely. Brownie points here Asus, your designer knows what he’s doing. As for features, there’s a TON of software included with the N10. Mostly though, it’s stuff that the average person would never ever use such as fingerprint recognition (seriously). All of which just seem to make Vista run even slower than normal. (more than 3 minutes to startup and be on the desktop without the egg timer icon.) The processor inside is somewhat underpowered for everything that is going on. Windows Vista sucks the life from the poor old 1.60GHz cpu like a gigahertz vampire.

There really isn’t much to say about the N10. It’s a small, underpowered netbook with a heck of a lot of pointless software included, that would have benefitted a lot more from running XP. The half-decent graphics card included is a good idea, but falls short because the rest of the specs are low-end. And for the price of around £500 you may aswel save a few more 0’s and get a macbook or a proper gaming laptop.

We will start this review very differently from normal, by talking about the sheet size and weight of this machine. Having owned a 17 inch laptop I had been prepared to expect a slightly bigger machine, but nothing could prepare for what i saw upon opening the X780’s box. This machine has the same sort of footprint as a standard 17 inch machines, but it is incredibly tall. You are talking almost 2 inches here, and for a laptop that is a lot. I can assure you, ‘behemoth’ and ‘powerhouse’ are definitely apt ways of describing it (especially with the unit’s weight of ~4kg). It is a very good-looking machine. With a brushed metal lid, and what looks like carbon fibre bordering the keyboard, it looks smart.

It is obvious that all of this space is for the components, and the cooling they need, that make this laptop a state of the art quad core gaming machine, with some quite impressive specs.

• Intel Q9000 2.0Ghz Quad Core Processor
• NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS 512Mb DDR3
• 2GB DDR3 1066Mhz RAM
• 250GB 7200rpm SATA HDD
• 8x Dual Layer +/- DVD-RW
• Windows Vista Home Premium
• 17” 1920x1200px Glass Screen

You can see the power just bulging out of the machine.

‘rock are selling this machine as a ‘budget’ quad core gaming machine, but we are yet to see the ‘budget’ side of a £1699.00 price tag. Of course with spec like this we have to put the X780 through some benchmarks to test this power.
3DMark Vantage:  3768 Points
SuperPi Calculate 1million (19 iterations): 31.485 seconds

We also were able to play some games on this machine, such as Crysis and Red Alert 3. We have to say that Red Alert 3 was a dream to play, with no lagging or slowing. But we could ‘only’ play Crysis on medium, above this and it became unplayable. Even though, playing Crysis on Medium is no mean feat for a laptop.
At the time of writing rock are giving each buyer of an eXtreme series laptop a copy of ‘Assassins Creed’, something we did not receive with the review sample,; as well as a 30 day trial of the MMORPG Eve Online. These games will run very well on this machine, and should be a good baseline for seeing what it can do.

To go with this spec, we have a wide array of Inputs and Outputs:

• 4 x USB 2.0 + 1 x E-SATA
• 7-in-1 Card Reader
• 34mm Express Card Slot
• 1 x mini IEEE 1394 (Firewire) port
• HDMI Output
• DVI Output
• Headphone, Microphone, S/PDIF Output Jack
• 10/100/1000 Lan, 56k Modem, 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi

This plethora of ports will ensure you will be able to use pretty much any device with this machine without worrying. Moreover, for those of you who prefer your current monitor, there is a DVI to VGA adaptor in the box.
But with all this power and good, has to come some bad. And unfortunately there is quite a bit of it on the eXtreme 780. First is the weight. The sheer mass of this machine makes it very uncomfortable to use it on your lap for any period. Whilst recording this week’s bitcast, Andy was unable to keep the laptop on his lap for very long. This is not helped by the amount of heat generated by the powerful components in this machine.

Whilst looking very nice, the X780 does unfortunately dissappoint in some areas.

Second is the touchpad, which at times was almost unusable. It took a good few scrolls of the pad to get the cursor from one side of the screen to the other, and even then, it often did not respond to some strokes or scroll actions. When this is mixed with the painfully long, at times, boot time; it became almost painful to have to turn the machine on and launch a program.
So, we come to the matter of the price: £1,699 :O. This is a very expensive machine, with most similar machines either being Macs or a slightly better spec. Although there is no doubt that the components themselves make up the bulk of this price; once they have been combined they leave you with a product that does not seem to us to be truly worth the price. Unfortunately, it could just be that the unit we have received has faults (as I have seen before on many laptops); which have hindered our enjoyment of the product.

In conclusion I cannot give the X780 more than 3.5/5 due to some rather intrusive problems with the final product.