Why You Can Trust CNET Asus F8Va review: Asus F8Va
It may not be the sexiest notebook in town, but Asus' 14.1-inch laptop is Centrino 2 certified, and sports some excellent multimedia capabilities.
Design
The Asus F8Va is like the prized pig at the fair, it's not winning any beauty pageants and is better appreciated when served hot on a sandwich during Christmas dinner. Confusing metaphors aside, the F8Va is hardly eye-catching — its glossy piano black lid is such a fingerprint magnet Asus has thrown a soft towel in the box to wipe it clean. However, as with most laptops, it's what's inside that counts, and it's here that the F8Va shines.
Asus F8Va
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The F8Va sports a 14.1-inch 1,440x900-pixel resolution display with an obligatory 1.3-megapixel webcam situated just above. As with the Asus M51Va, this webcam is swivel mounted and able to rotate to face towards the user or away. It is also used with Asus' mostly useless SmartLogon facial recognition security software. We say useless, not because it doesn't work, but because it is actually significantly slower to log-in with the webcam than it is to type in a password.
For those who refuse to remember a password and find SmartLogon cumbersome there is also a fingerprint scanner sitting between the left and right mousepad buttons. This stainless steel trackpad is large and easy to use; however, the material isn't as pleasant to use as soft-touch plastic trackpads, and the selection keys click loudly when depressed.
Features
For the money, Asus has packed in quite a bit of well performing hardware. The F8Va runs a 2.53MHz Core 2 Duo 9400 processor with 2GB DDR2-800MHz RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 video card with 1GB of dedicated memory. This adds up to some pretty beefy performance that is more than capable of most day-to-day tasks and is handy as an entertainment unit as well.
Around the edges of the F8Va we found a whopping five USB ports, an eSATA port, HDMI and VGA, plus the standard inputs for Ethernet and phone line cables. Extending its connectivity, the F8Va also sports an Intel WiFi Link 5100 wireless adapter for connecting to 802.11g and 802.11n wireless access points and Bluetooth for connecting (mostly) to mobile phones and hands-free headsets. We also noticed the heat vent on the right-hand side of the F8Va, which means right-handed mouse users will more than likely get sweaty paws under the processor after burn.
For entertainment the F8Va employs a combo Blu-ray drive and DVD burner, and the aforementioned hardware is more than sufficient to play back media effectively. The F8Va also ships with a bundled HDTV tuner which, coupled with Windows Media Centre, turns this machine into a fully-fledged portable video recorder capable of recording live TV then streaming it over a network to a home theatre system, or running a large flat panel TV into the HDMI port.
If you do plan to record TV you might find the F8Va's 320GB HDD filling quickly. At HD resolution this storage capacity is equal to approx 30 hours of recording, and that's if you can dedicate the entire disk to TV, which will be impractical for most people. This brings us back to the extra USB ports; serious TV lovers will be looking to invest in an external drive.
Asus also throws in a couple of extras with the machine: a very handy carry bag, a mouse, and a remote for the TV tuner.
Performance
During our tests, the Asus F8Va gave back a result of 3,807 in 3DMark benchmarking and 5,915 in PCMark. These figures indicate power enough to run some older PC games and newer low resource chugging games like EA's Spore. More importantly, it should handle most productivity apps with ease and be capable of some basic photo and video editing.
After turning off all the power-saving features we started a DVD to test the battery, noting that the F8Va powered down after one hour and 17 minutes. This is about average for a six-cell battery, if a little below par. Considering this laptop weighs in at 2.6kg, we don't think you'll be moving it about too much anyway, and will most probably have it close to a power socket.
It mightn't be the most attractive laptop available, but it has plenty of grunt to play with and enough multimedia features to please people introducing themselves to the next generation of couch potato-ism. A single HD tuner is hardly going to replace the likes of a dedicated PVR like TiVo or Foxtel's iQ2, but it is enough to keep up-to-date with the latest episodes of Neighbours.