Asus F3Jc

Asus, the number one brand for motherboards, has been making large strides in the laptop segment recently. Among their most popular offerings is the striking Lamborghini VX1, which along with being heavy on style and performance is heavy on your pocket too. Though, this time around we have something more mainstream, the Asus F3jc. Let’s have a closer look.

__PAGEBREAK__
**Design and Usability

**

The F3jc comes in nice subtle dark gray finish with a black meshed patch near the hinges. The casing feels very solid. The keyboard follows a standard format with normal sized keys that have a good tactile response. The touchpad also has the scrolling functionality. Above the keyboard is a slim metallic strip that houses the power button and five hot keys. The hot keys are assigned as follows:

• Internet explorer
• Screen modes—Soft, Gamma, Vivid, Theatre and Normal.
• Enabling/Disabling the touchpad— A good option as it prevents accidental movement of the mouse while typing. Of course, it’s better to exercise this option when you are using a mouse.
• Performance modes—Game, High Performance, Super Performance, Presentation, and Quiet Office.
• Instant Fun Interface—Basically a media orientated interface that fires Windows applications when selected. For example if you hit the music button, it opens the Windows Media Player, for pictures it opens Windows Picture and Fax Viewer.

The ports are well oriented with two USB ports on the side and the audio ports at the front. There are two additional USB ports at the back. There is also a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth On/Off slider at the front.
__PAGEBREAK__**
Features and Performance**
The F3Jc comes with TPM i.e. Trusted Platform Module. It’s a chip on the motherboard that facilitates all your sensitive data like passwords and transaction details in an encrypted format. You can also encrypt files and folders. Basically, it is a robust security system implemented through hardware and software. Both, the chip and the software are provided by Infineon. This is particularly good for people with very sensitive information onboard. Asus has another security utility called ‘Asus Security Manager’ that takes care of overall security of the system.

Front

Left

Right

Back

__PAGEBREAK__
The machine is powered by Nvidia’s Go 7300 dedicated graphics card with 128 MB of video memory. The card features a DVI-out along with the conventional VGA out. On the gaming front the card is nothing exceptional with a measly score of 679 on 3DMark 06. There is no way you can play the current generation games using this card. Its more apt for smoothly running Aero on Windows Vista. And that brings us on the Operating System. The F3Jc comes bundled with DOS, in other words, nothing. Most of us love this option as it saves the cost of an operating system that can be easily obtained, illegally. Though most of the times its under the pretext of giving the consumer the choice of their operating system. Whatever the case, we only advocate the use of legal software.

Touchpad with Scroll & Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Slider

The F3Jc is equipped with a 1.6 GHz Intel Core Duo processor with 2MB of L2 cache and 1GB of DDR2 memory running at 667 MHz. One single stick of 1GB RAM is used leaving behind an empty slot for future upgrade. The board used is based on Intel’s 945 chipset. Overall the system performance is good and we obtained a PCMark score of 3259. The F3Jc comes with 15.4-inch glossy wide-screen LCD. The color reproduction is good if not best with not the smoothest of gradient transitions. The gloss screen makes colors look more vibrant and is good for watching movies. The in-built speakers are above average. We found the Altec-Lansing in-built speakers on HP and Compaq laptops to be louder.
__PAGEBREAK__
For battery life testing, we have used and application called Battery EaterPro v2.60. In our very own customization we keep the Wi-Fi and the Bluetooth module switched on for the first hour of battery run down. The screen brightness is set to maximum, screensaver is disabled and all the other battery saving parameters like ‘Turn Off Monitor’ , ‘Turn off hard drive’ and ‘‘System Stand-By’ after a particular period of inactivity is also disabled.

Using the above mentioned methodology, the battery lasted us 2 hours and 33 minutes. The benchmark is kind of intensive and to balance the mix of regular usage and intensive work we give it an additional grace of