Asus F6Ve-B1 mobile desktop replacement

Asus F6Ve-B1 mobile desktop replacement Review

Today we bring you a review of Asus’ F6Ve, hot off the Laptop Logic test bench. The F6Ve comes equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9550 CPU running at 2.66GHz, 4GB DDR2-800 RAM, and a 320GB hard drive. Will all this nice hardware be enough to make the Asus shine? Let’s find out.

Case look and feel

Looking at the exterior of the F6Ve, you’re greeted with a shiny, gloss black lid, with a slight “Libera” swirl design if you look really closely. If you’re anything like me, the first thing that comes to mind when you see it is “fingerprint magnet”, and sure enough, you’ll want to keep a rag handy to wipe down the smears from time to time (luckily for you, Asus includes a cloth to clean the LCD and lid). It sure does look good, though.

Opening the lid, the dark theme extends inside, with black keys and touchpad, a matte black bezel surrounding the LCD, and dark gray palm rest. Visually, it’s a very handsome unit.

Size & Weight

The F6Ve measures 12.28” wide x 9.13” deep x 1.26-1.39” high and weighs 4.39 pounds, making it very portable. It was light enough to hold with one hand, and its 13.3-inch display is my personal sweet spot when it comes to portable computing.

Keyboard & Mouse

One interesting feature included by Asus in the F6Ve is a “perfumed” keyboard. Yes, you read that right. Perfumed. From Asus’ product page:

”Complementing this is the F6Ve’s ‘perfumed’ keyboard which is available in 2 scents, namely ‘Musky Black’ for the F6Ve-1I, and ‘Morning Dew’ for the F6Ve-1J. Once turned on, the scent is released to provide a soothingly calm atmosphere for day to day computing anytime, anywhere.”

Sure enough, when you turn the laptop on and it gets warmed up, you can definitely smell a scent. At first I thought my wife had left a basket of clean clothes nearby, as it smelled kind of like a dryer sheet. Certainly a weird feature, but still kind of cool and is definitely not something you see every day.

Scents aside, I felt the keyboard was lacking in the F6Ve. It was kind of mushy during use, and visibly flexed when keys at the top left side were depressed, most notably the first few function keys and numbers 1-4. I’ve been reared on ThinkPads since an early age, so to me this was a big turn-off. Despite Asus’ claim that the F6Ve features a “full size” keyboard, I found some keys (PgUp, PgDn, End, and Home) to be a little too small and found myself fat fingering when attempting to use them. The key travel distance was pretty decent, however.

The mouse also was a big letdown. The scrollpad wasn’t the most responsive unit I’ve used, and the buttons were very stiff. I found myself having to press harder than normal to get clicks to register. In addition, scrolling itself was kind of weak. Sometimes the scrollpad didn’t realize that my finger was swiping over it and I had to redo the same motion once or twice to get the cursor moving.

I would say out of everything on the Asus F6Ve, this was the area that could use the most improvement.

Display Quality

Which brings us to one of the F6Ve’s biggest strengths- its display. Despite only being 1280x800, the 13.3-inch glossy screen is sharp and vibrant, with nice popping colors. The viewing angle was above average and glare and reflection seemed slightly less than many other glossy screens out on the market. I was able to watch a DVD with my wife and both of us, despite not being directly in front of the screen, were able to see it just fine. In fact, my wife made a comment about it looking great on the screen, and this is coming from someone who normally hates glossy screens and avoids them like the plague.

Connectivity

On the left side, you will find 2x USB 2.0 ports, Wi-Fi enable/disable switch, 1x e-SATA, Express card, 8-in-1 card reader (SD, MMC, MS, MS-Pro, mini SD w/ adapter, MS-Duo, MS-Pro Duo via adapter), 1x HDMI, and AC input. One thing to note was that I didn’t really care for the placement of the AC input; I prefer them on the back side, as the F6Ve’s dug into my left leg on occasion.

On the rear, you will find the modem, RJ-45, and VGA ports, flanking the protruding 3-cell battery.

The right side of the F6Ve contains the DVD-RW drive, headphone and mic jacks, 1x USB 2.0 port, and Kensington lock.

All in all, a very nice selection of ports. I was glad to see HDMI as well as VGA.

Features

The F6Ve has you well covered on the wireless front. Featuring Bluetooth 2.1 and Intel Wireless WiFi Link 5100 ABGN, you should have no problems getting connected to your network or teaming your phone, mouse or other Bluetooth peripherals to the laptop.

The F6Ve features a pretty standard 1.3MP webcam, but what makes it kind of neat is the included software that adds silly stuff to the pictures like big glasses, a cowboy hat, etc. My two year old loved this particular feature when I took some pictures of him while he was in his high chair, even though it doesn’t hold a candle to the iSight suite included with Apple MacBooks.

The hinges found on the F6Ve were pretty good. Despite being plastic, they felt pretty strong and durable. Wedged in between the mouse buttons, you will find a biometric fingerprint scanner, which we found to work just as it was intended. Slightly off to the right, set in the palm rest, is a small pinpoint hole for the microphone. An interesting location for one, but it seemed to work out okay.

Inside the product box, Asus was kind enough to include a Targus laptop bag. I thought this was a nice touch on Asus’ part, since it will save you a few bucks down the road.

Another neat feature included with the F6Ve is the Express Gate application suite. There’s a dedicated button on the left side above the keyboard that when pressed, boots the laptop directly into the Express Gate menu without first booting into Windows. It only takes a few seconds to load a barebones OS that allows you to play online games of several varieties; view your photo gallery; play music; access chat apps like AIM, load a web browser, or even load up a Skype app to make calls over the internet. I’ve always thought a pre-boot OS like this is a cool thing to have, especially if you just want to check something fast without waiting for Vista to boot up.

Performance

So, looking at the F6Ve on paper reveals that this packs a lot of hardware in a relatively small package. A 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo T9550 CPU, 4GB DDR2-800 RAM, 512MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD4570… sounds like a winner. So why Asus included a 32-bit version of Vista Home Premium is anybody’s guess. By not including a 64-bit version of Windows, only 3.25GB of RAM is seen by the OS, due to 32-bit memory addressing limitations. 750MB of RAM is just – poof – gone.

But, despite that, based on the included hardware specs, we did expect the F6Ve to do pretty well in the benchmark tests.

For a full explanation of how we test our laptops, see here: http://www.laptoplogic.com/about/test/.

Windows Vista Experience Score

Overall	4.2
Processor	5.5
Memory	5.9
Graphics	4.2
Gaming Graphics	4.8
Primary Hard Disk	5.4

The F6Ve comes in strong in the processor category, memory, and gaming graphics. No real surprises here.

PC Mark05

Total Score	5518
CPU Score	6764
Memory Score	5531
Graphics Score	4119
HDD Score	5288

Lenovo ThinkPad T400s	7502
Alienware M17	6545
Asus F6Ve-B1	5518
Lenovo ThinkPad T400	4810
HP 6930s	4599

Again, the F6Ve shows well here in the CPU and memory scores, and a surprisingly strong showing in the HDD category as well. In the comparison testing, the Asus did very respectably against the gamut of business laptops, but ultimately the SSD in Lenovo's ThinkPad T400s propelled its score far above the rest.

3D Mark06

Alienware M17	10628
Asus F6Ve-B1	3184
Lenovo ThinkPad T400s	984

I was a bit disappointed with the score here. While the Asus is definitely more of a gaming machine than other laptops its size, it still isn't up to snuff with the latest technologies. 3DMark06 is a relatively old benchmark and it is still only so-so. As you can see, the Alienware M17's ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 X2 dual GPU setup blew away the Asus and while dual GPU's might be a bit overkill for most, something closer to the 3870 is needed to make for a reasonable gaming experience these days. We did run the Crysis demo benchmark, but it was a slideshow.

Battery Performance

Asus gives you the option to purchase the F6Ve with your choice of 3-, 6-, or 9-cell battery configuration. Our test unit shipped with the 3-cell battery. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY spend the extra bucks to get the upgraded battery. Battery life in the F6Ve was a joke, and a bad one at that. Even when sitting idle, it never came close to breaking two-and-a-half hours. I’ve seen Alienware SLI gaming laptops with similar battery life, which is just inexcusable, unless all you use your laptop for is a quick email check and then you plug it back in.

We ran the F6Ve through several battery tests in an attempt to best simulate “average” use. The software used to accomplish this was Battery Eater 05.

Battery Performance – “Classic” Test

This is kind of akin to a “minimum” test, i.e. this test should give you the lowest battery time of the bunch. In this one, a 3D spinning AA battery is rendered continuously until the battery runs out. In this “classic” test, the F6Ve managed only a stunning 1 hour and 19 minute runtime. I had to run this one over again to make sure it was right, and sadly, it was.

Battery – “Text” Test

The last battery test I ran utilizing Battery Eater was their “Text” benchmark. You specify a text file for the program to “read”, and then it scrolls through the file in slightly faster than real-time reading speed. I grabbed Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” from Project Gutenberg and loaded the benchmark up. Maybe it’s because the book is so boring, but the F6Ve only mustered 2 hours and 13 minutes before shutting down.

Battery Performance - DVD Playback

This final test was run to see how long the F6Ve would last while a user watched a DVD. I loaded up Michael Mann’s masterpiece “Heat” and set about seeing what happened.

Well, I was let down here too. The F6Ve lasted all of 1 hour and 41 minutes into the nearly three hour movie. I wasn’t even able to see the killer bank robbery shootout scene between De Niro and crew vs. the LAPD. For shame.

Real-life usage

Noise-wise, the F6Ve was pretty exceptional. I rarely heard the fans kick on for any extended period of time under real world use. In terms of heat output, I’d say it was average, with a decent amount being exhausted out of the vent on the left side. During the Crysis benchmark, the most hot air was pouring out, and the fan was at its noisiest, but that was to be expected.

The F6Ve was portable and easy to carry or fit in a bag. The keyboard was okay to type on for average periods of time, but any long missives you may need to write should be saved for your desktop machine.

I used the F6Ve mostly for web browsing, and watching videos on Hulu and Youtube. For these activities, the F6Ve was a shining star. As mentioned earlier, video looks remarkably good, even at crappy Youtube resolution, and the F6Ve was great for getting my daily fix of gadget blogs. If you notice though, these were all activities that didn’t require a great deal of mouse usage, so I suppose these results may be a bit skewed because they don’t really exploit the laptop’s biggest weakness, which is the touchpad and mouse buttons.

Conclusion

On the whole, the Asus F6Ve was a pretty nice notebook. The Intel Core 2 Duo T9550, 4GB DDR2-800 RAM, and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 made for a nice package, especially considering it currently retails for $1199 at Newegg. That’s a lot of hardware bang for the buck. But, like I mentioned earlier, don’t even think about this laptop without getting the upgraded battery.

There’s one thing that would stop me from unconditionally recommending this laptop… and that is the abysmal mouse/trackpad. It just wasn’t responsive enough, and I found myself more often than not fighting it just to get it to go where I wanted. The mouse buttons were very stiff and non-responsive, and while you could solve the whole problem by plugging in a USB mouse, that negates the notion of a truly “mobile” computer, which is unfortunate, considering everything else this laptop has going for it.