ASUS UL80Vt and G51J: Going for the Gold
by Jarred Walton on December 15, 2009 1:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Testing Overview
We're going to separate the performance results of the UL80Vt and G51J as they're not competing laptops. For the UL80Vt, we'll be comparing it against similarly priced notebooks (and a couple netbooks), which you can read about in our previous Studio 14z review. As for the G51J, we'll compare it with high-end offerings, some of which cost over three times as much! You can find the test configurations for the high-end notebooks in our High-End (Clevo) Roundup. Here are the test configurations for the two ASUS notebooks.
| ASUS UL80Vt-A1 Test System | |
| Processor | Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 (2x1.3GHz, 45nm, 3MB L2, 800FSB, 10W) Turbo33 @ 1.73GHz/1066FSB |
| Memory | 2x2GB DDR3-1066 (Max 2x4GB) |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce G210M 512MB Driver Version: 186.88 Intel GMA 4500MHD IGP |
| Display | 14.0" LED Glossy 16:9 768p (1366x768) |
| Hard Drive(s) | 320GB 5400RPM HDD |
| Optical Drive | 8x DVDR SuperMulti |
| Battery | 8-Cell, 15V, 5600mAh, 84Wh |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit |
| ASUS G51J Test System | |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-720QM (4x1.6GHz+ HTT, 45nm, 4x256KB L2, 6MB L3, 2.5GT/s QPI, 45W) Overclock @ 1680MHz (base speed) |
| Memory | 2x2GB DDR3-1066 (Max 2x4GB) |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M Driver Version: 195.62 |
| Display | 15.6" Glossy Full HD 1080p (1920x1080) |
| Hard Drive(s) | 2 x 320GB 7200RPM 16MB HDD (Non-RAID) |
| Optical Drive | 8x DVDR SuperMulti |
| Battery | 6-Cell, 11.1V DC, 4800mAh, 53.28Wh |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit |
Our tests will use standardized application benchmark suites like PCMark along with individual application results. Our in-house application tests place more weight on CPU performance, as we look at video encoding and 3D rendering performance. We'll provide any additional commentary related to application performance concerns if necessary. We will provide results from the UL80Vt with and without Turbo33 enabled. On the G51J, we only enabled the maximum overclock for heavily threaded workloads, as otherwise it didn't provide any noteworthy boost and often resulted in lower performance. Unlike the UL80Vt, the overclocking modes on the G51J can be enabled/disabled on-the-fly.
For gaming, our high-end tests standardize on performance at 1680x1050 with maximum detail settings (sans 4xAA) in a variety of games. Since the native resolution of the G51J is 1080p, we will also provide 1080p results. For the UL80Vt, nearly all of the competing notebooks use 1366x768 LCD panels, but many of the laptops are unable to run most games at that resolution, even at minimum detail settings, so we standardize on 800x600 minimum detail performance. With the G210M enabled, the UL80Vt doesn't have any difficulties at those settings, so we will also look at performance at 1366x768 with low, medium, and in a few instances high detail - basically, we'll show where the G210M runs out of steam at the native resolution. We did not perform gaming tests on the UL80Vt with the IGP enabled - why use a candle when you already have a flashlight?
Battery life testing will follow the same pattern, with both laptops set to "ideal" settings for improving battery life. With the launch of Windows 7 we have decided to showcase the best that laptops are able to offer in terms of mobility. If you run using a "Balanced" profile instead of "Power Saver", you can expect 5-15% less battery life, depending on the laptop. We tested the UL80Vt in several configurations: without Turbo33 and running IGP and G210M, and with Turbo33 with IGP and G210M.
Finally, we will combine the results for Windows power on/off and LCD quality, as the differences aren't as large for those tests. We'll also include power requirements on the combined results page.
We'll begin with the UL80Vt results, and we'll try not to get into too much detail on the following pages unless there's something truly noteworthy. By and large the tables tell the performance tale.
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JarredWalton - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link
I'm curious to see how it works as well. I'm thinking CULV + 9400M would have accomplished much the same thing, but perhaps not. Stay tuned....yacoub - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link
Here's hoping it comes with a quality display! ;)JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - link
One word: NOPE!Okay, more than one word: When you boot up a laptop for the first time and the black background of the Windows loading screen looks more like dark gray, you know the contrast ratio is crap. Bleh.
Ditiris - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link
I finally switched my HTPC over to Windows 7 and noticed that it had a mind of its own with regard to power settings.power settings, change plan settings, change advanced power settings, expand Sleep and Allow wake timers, Disable any that are there
That fixed all my issues, even though I didn't have any sleep/wake timers, but disabling the ability seems to be important.
I haven't had any issues with my Vista machines (FWIW I'm using High Performance and I specifically went into the Advanced screen and disabled all sleep options).
JarredWalton - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link
The wake events are already disabled, unfortunately. Some laptops exhibit the problem less than others (driver related perhaps), but my best guess is that somewhere there's a rogue line of code that gets invoked on occasion. I've actually fooled around hacking the registry on my personal laptop in order to keep the problem from reoccurring, but that was neither fun nor recommended for the faint of heart!mczak - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link
Again I have to wonder what the point of the OC CULV chip is. There's a ~10W difference (at full cpu load) between OC and non-OC, which means it is almost certainly also overvolted, but more importantly, that difference is larger than the TDP difference between CULV parts and (slightly faster) LV parts.Looks to me like using a LV part instead of OC CULV would be both a bit faster plus actually offer slightly more battery life (unless, of course, you use stock setting of the CULV).
JarredWalton - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link
It's pretty much giving users the ability to run with long battery life and when desired get better performance. If it were an on-the-fly setting, it would be a lot better. Anyway, even overclocked the SU7300 in the UL80Vt idles at what appears to be 2W, where something like the P8600 appears to idle at close to twice that (4-5W). It would be interesting to see some of the LV CPUs in a similar system, certainly... SL9600 anyone? Or maybe ASUS should grab an SL9380 and enable the same Turbo33 functionality. 1.8GHz stock and 2.4GHz overclocked. That would be the equivalent of P8600 (with 6MB cache) but hopefully allow lower power at idle.kagey - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link
BTW - Nice reviews!I may have missed this so slap me if I did but It would be helpful including some sort of standard about these two in the evaluation of a laptop. I feel these two points are just as important as performance and battery life.
Both are subjective but should be able to be measured while web surfing, gaming, and full load.
Noise factor of the fans. I hate it when you start doing something on the laptop and all of sudden the fans kick in and sound like a jet taking off. It would be nice if you could come up with some standards in the way of noise.
Heat - the palm rest when typing, touchpad / mouse area, underneath i.e. (keeping your legs nice and warm - yeah I know not the most optimal position for a laptop), and exhaust areas.
Thanks for listening.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link
I didn't mention either, but I did think about them during the review process. For the record, the UL80Vt is very quiet and cool running. When the fans kick up to higher speeds, it still remains a lot quieter than most laptops... maybe around 37-40 dB max, and it doesn't happen unless you put a heavy load (100% CPU or running games) on the system.The G51J gets louder, but it's not as bad as the W870CU. For most tasks it will stay under ~35dB, but gaming will bump it up to around 39-41dB. Heat was not an issue on the G51J in my experience; the palm rest gets warm, perhaps up to 90F, and the bottom is the same except for the top-right corner (directly under the CPU/GPU "circle") which gets over 100F for sure.
Wesleyrpg - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - link
hey guys, love the asus g51j, had one for a few days myself!only problem is the mic on my one makes me sound like im in a subway (tried all the settings i could think of!).....have you guys had a chance to test your mic on livemessenger/ventrilo???