Asus UX50V-RX05 and Sony Vaio VGN-NW125J/T Laptops
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For the final installment of our fall campus edition laptop review, we will take a look at the Asus UX50V-RX05 and the Sony Vaio VGN-NW125J/T laptops. They are both larger and mainstream in size compared to the other four laptops we have previously discussed.
Asus UX50V-RX05
If you were to judge a book by its cover, you would think, after taking a quick glance at the Asus UX50V-RX05, that you have a powerful, top notch laptop at your disposal. While it is definitely a good-looking piece of machinery, with its glossy, jet black finish, the Asus UX50V-RX05 is lacking in the performance department, mostly due to its single-core CPU. Its underwhelming CPU churns out a performance you would expect from a much more portable laptop, not one with a 15.6 inch screen such as the Asus UX50V-RX05.
While it is not a processing powerhouse, the UX50V-RX05 does come with a 16:9 wide screen display and an honorable graphics engine. That being said, if you are in need of a multitasking juggernaut, stop reading now. Otherwise, if you are a casual gamer and like to pop a DVD into your laptop from time to time, the UX50V-RX05 may be the right choice for you.
The laptop is on sale now for a suggested retail price of $749. To protect your investment, the UX50V-RX05 comes with a standard one year warranty on parts and labor as well as telephone and online support.
As stated in the introduction, its processor is where the UX50V-RX05 falls a bit flat. It comes with a 1.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Solo processor and 4 GB of DDR2 SDRAM, much unlike others in its class which use dual-core processors. The result of this choice by Asus is an overall multitasking performance that is, in a word, sluggish, and lags behind the competition. This is especially true considering the Asus UX50V-RX05’s price and size. Asus claims that the Intel Core 2 Solo processor is energy efficient and helps extend battery life, but you will have to decide if the frustration of slow processing is worth that trade.
The UX50V-RX05 also has a plentiful 500GB SATA 5,400 rpm hard drive. More impressive than its less-than-desirable CPU is the UX50V-RX05’s 512 MB NVIDIA GeForce 105M graphics processing unit, which allows you to play some 3D games on the laptop without too many hiccups.
The integrated speakers are small and somewhat weak. Keeping with its energy efficient theme, you have the choice to toggle between the more powerful GeForce graphics to the less demanding Intel integrated graphics if you want to save your battery for common tasks other than gaming.
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