Asus V1J Santa Rosa review: Asus V1J Santa Rosa

The Asus V1J is one of the first laptops we've seen that uses Intel's next-generation Centrino technology. The underlying technology, codenamed Santa Rosa, will officially be known as Centrino Pro in business laptops such as this. It features a new Core 2 Duo processor, fast 802.11n wireless capability and DirectX 10 graphics.

8.3

Asus V1J Santa Rosa

The Good

Non-glossy display; fast graphics performance.

The Bad

Looks; screen is fiddly to open; slow memory.

The Bottom Line

The V1J doesn't come cheap, but it offers excellent performance in most respects, has a wealth of features and puts most of its older Centrino rivals to shame

Design
The Asus V1J is an unlikely candidate for a design award. It isn't particularly ugly, but the 'John Major grey' finish does it no favours whatsoever. Asus does its best to spruce things up with some silver trim around the edges and a silver Asus logo on the lid, but its designers aren't fooling anyone -- this thing looks as though it emigrated from Dullsville, Tennessee.

The V1J isn't the ideal candidate for road warriors. Its 15.4-inch screen makes it a tad too large to take everywhere, but Asus has kept the weight to a respectable 2.7kg, so it's not too heavy considering its girth.

Opening the lid can be tricky as the screen latch is positioned almost underneath the laptop. It's fiddly enough to open when using two hands, but we wouldn't be surprised if users developed some mild form of repetitive strain injury trying to unfasten it one-handed.

Everything else is arranged logically enough. The USB ports are well spaced -- two on each side -- and the shortcut buttons are discreetly positioned above the main keyboard. The rotating 1.3-megapixel webcam sits at the top of the screen where it should be, and the keyboard and mouse both feel good in use. Usefully, Asus has made the keyboard spill-proof, so it's safe to take on a liquid lunch.

Features
The V1J uses the latest iteration of Intel's Centrino technology. This first appeared towards the end of 2003, marking the arrival of laptops built around Intel's vision of wireless freedom and long battery life. To qualify as a Centrino laptop, PCs had to sport an Intel wireless adaptor, Intel motherboard and the Intel Pentium M CPU.

Last year the Centrino platform was spruced up with dual-core CPUs and given the official title of Centrino Duo. The latest update, codenamed Santa Rosa, keeps the Centrino Duo name, except in business-oriented laptops such as the Asus V1J, where it's known as Centrino Pro.

Being a Centrino Pro laptop, the V1J sports an all-new processor, in this case a 2.2GHz Intel T7500. It's pretty similar to the previous Core 2 Duo processors (codenamed Merom), but instead of a 667MHz front-side bus (FSB), it uses a faster 800MHz FSB, which theoretically speeds up the connection between the CPU and memory subsystem and makes the laptop run faster.

Intel's geeks have been working overtime to ensure the FSB throttles back to a lower frequency in order to help prolong battery life when the V1J isn't being used for CPU-intensive tasks. They've also improved the way the CPU copes with single-threaded applications, ie most games. Centrino no longer lets a game run full-whack on a single core while leaving the remaining core to sit idly by, eating compute cycles and draining battery life. It now shuts off the idle core and ramps up the clock speed of the active core.

The V1J uses 1GB of 667MHz PC2 5300 DDR2 memory, which is something of a surprise -- in more ways than one. Firstly, we'd have preferred 2GB of memory, and secondly, we'd like to have seen memory that runs at 800MHz to match the improved FSB speed. As it stands, the 1GB installed in the V1J is a significant bottleneck when running memory-intensive applications.

One thing we can't grumble about is the laptop's graphics capability. Asus could, quite forgivably, have opted for the X3100 graphics adaptor integrated with the new chipset, but it's gone for a slightly more potent Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT chip. This is fully compliant with DirectX 10, so it'll run future games coded in Microsoft's fancy new application programming interface (API), and, of course, run current 3D games. See the Performance section to see how it fared.

Other graphical niceties include the V1J's ability to pipe 1080p video through its HDMI port. This supports HDCP encryption, so it's perfectly capable of playing hi-def video via your television. Watching video on the laptop itself is also a pleasure. Its 15.4-inch screen runs at a resolution of 1,680x1,050 pixels, which is about par for the course considering its physical dimensions. It looks great and has a matte screen coating to reduce unwanted reflectivity in direct light.

Another cool trick up Intel's Santa Rosa sleeve is the ability to dynamically change the LCD screen's 'refresh rate'. Liquid crystals twist and untwist a certain number of times every second, using up valuable power. The laptop is able to detect when a fast refresh rate isn't important, and can throttle this back slightly to save power.

The V1J's Wi-Fi capabilities are significantly improved. Whereas original Centrino laptops had to settle for 802.11b or 802.11g wireless (11Mbps and 54Mbps respectively), this generation of Centrino laptops get to use the draft 802.11n standard, which has a theoretical maximum of 300Mbps. You'll achieve nowhere near this speed, of course, but under ideal conditions you can expect it to perform in line with a wired 10/100 Ethernet connection. The laptop is also compatible with 802.11b and 802.11g networks, so it will still work at your local Starbucks.

Storage in the V1J is average. Asus supplies a 160GB Hitachi hard drive, which gives you plenty of room to stash your Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. Just don't expect it to cope with anything more than a few dozen DivX movies after you've filled it with boring number-crunching applications. Like the previous V1J, this updated model ships with a Lightscribe-equipped DVD burner, which lets you laser-etch monochrome labels on to compatible discs.

As the V1J is a Centrino Pro business laptop, and not a standard consumer-focused Centrino Duo model, it has extra tricks up its sleeve. It incorporates Intel's vPro technology, so it's possible to remotely manage, diagnose and repair PCs across your enterprise, even when the laptop is switched off, or the OS isn't working. Asus provides a two-year collect and return warranty.

Performance
The V1J clocked up a PCMark 2005 score of 4,400, which is quick, but the laptop doesn't quite reach its full potential. Its performance is shackled because it uses 667MHz memory. Had Asus' engineers supplied 800MHz memory, which runs at the same speed as the laptop's FSB, the V1J would be significantly faster at completing memory-hungry tasks.

Graphics performance was impressive though. The GeForce 8600M GT card helped it run F.E.A.R at 33 frames per second and rack up a 3DMark 2006 tally of 3,741. Asus' own G2P gaming laptop scored just 2,011, so the V1J isn't doing badly at all for a 'business' laptop.

We wouldn't expect a high-performance laptop to have a long battery life, but the V1J fares well here, too. It lasted 77 minutes in our Battery Eater test, which is long enough to watch an average DVD, or to survive a train journey between meetings.

Conclusion
The V1J is an impressive, if slightly flawed, example of a Centrino Pro laptop. It offers a great balance of performance and battery life, but is let down by its uninteresting looks and use of slow memory.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Nick Hide