Asus N56DP-DH11 - personal review/first impression from an average user

[Apach3]

There’s a reason why many of us recommend Microcenter to those of us who are privileged enough to live near one. I am one of those fortunate people, as I live only 20 minutes away from the one in St. Louis. The only reason why I was able to get this laptop is because of Microcenter, who sold it to me for just under $660, after taxes. You are only able to get this particular laptop through Microcenter if you do in-store pickup, which is how I managed to snag it at its listed $600 price tag.

It’s been a while since I last had a laptop, and this would be my first-ever written review of anything… so, I decided ‘What the hell? Why not write a review?’ Please, bear in mind I do not claim to be a professional reviewer, and I realize my testing ethics may not exactly be the most ideal. I’m just working with what I got. If I can, I'll try to have pictures up, but I can't guarantee that as the best camera I personally have is a 2.0MP phone camera.

That being said, let me speak my mind.

***Description***

Let’s start with the basics. On the outside, the N56DP-DH11 has a brushed aluminum look to the lid with an illuminated logo on the back. Opening up the laptop reveals an aluminum keyboard shell and a key layout with a dedicated numerical keypad, which gives the laptop considerable rigidity. The screen is bright, LED-backlit, 1080p (so full 1920x1080 resolution), and is only 15.6” diagonal. On the left are two USB3 ports, an HDMI port, an Ethernet jack somewhat hidden behind a plastic flap, a generous exhaust grille, a VGA adapter, and what looks to be a 2.5mm speaker adapter, which is for the external subwoofer Asus includes with the laptop. On the right side are two 3.5mm audio plugs (one line-in for a microphone and one line-out to headphones), two more USB3 ports, the DVD drive, the power plug, and a Kensington lock port.

On the inside, there is an AMD A10-4600M quad-core processor based off of the Piledriver core architecture, and also includes a Radeon HD7660G integrated GPU. Paired with the processor is a discrete-class Radeon HD7730M (which, according to Notebookcheck.net, uses the same GCN-powered chip as the HD7750 but clocked much lower and only has a PCI-E 2.0 interface), with a dedicated 2GB of VRAM – more than enough for any need. There are 8GB of general-use DDR3-1600 RAM, along with a 1TB 5400RPM hard drive. The laptop also features the standard Wireless-N adapter as well as Bluetooth 4.0.

On the bottom are two compartments – one for the battery, and the other for the add-on components. To access the other compartment, you’ll need to lift up a rubber screw cap using a small flathead screwdriver; the screw underneath is a Phillips-head, so nothing proprietary like what Apple does. Once inside, I found a 1TB hard drive supplied by Samsung (which, if you’ll recall, had its hard-drive division bought by Seagate), a pair of 4GB sticks of DDR3-1600 RAM supplied by Hynix, and a WiFi/Bluetooth card supplied by AzureWave. The DVD drive, removable from another Phillips-head screwdriver underneath a screwcap, is supplied by Lite-On/Phillips. Unfortunately, there is no mSATA slot, so an SSD would have to replace the 1TB hard drive.

Upon first bootup, it took a while for Windows 8 to get settled into the slow hard drive, but when it got to the Metro interface the laptop was responsive. The touchpad felt metallic with a textured feel, and the mouse pointer moved at just the right sensitivity for my tastes… no need for me to stumble through Windows 8’s settings in order to find out what controls the touchpad sensitivity. I found out early on that the dual-touch mousepad made navigating the Start screen much more fluid than simply mousing over to the other side, but that’s getting more into a review of Windows 8 than the laptop itself, and I’ll go over my initial gripes about Windows 8 a little bit later.

On an off-note, however, Ninite was my best friend this time around. I googled the Ninite install script, selected my programs (I think I had at least fifteen programs in all), and let the script run. The installation was very streamlined, requiring very little input from me other than to tell it to run, and all was well after about an hour of installation.

Restarting the laptop after uninstalling a small handful of first- and third-party bloatware took quite a bit of time, but that’s likely because of the 5400RPM drive. I would like to add a beefy SSD sometime in the future; for now, though, it will have to do.

***Features***

The laptop comes pre-installed with Windows 8, which will begin my mini-review and first impression of the new OS from Microsoft. Normally, I wouldn’t be so up in arms over a newer OS, but the Metro interface felt awkward using only a touchpad; had I been using a tablet, I’d say otherwise. Add in the fact that other functions have been either re-named or moved to other categories, and it leaves one who is familiar with earlier Windows platforms scratching their heads in frustration – including, of course, the absence of the all-too-familiar Start button. Installing a shell like Classic Shell brings it back, which makes it much more bearable. But then you have various files linked to Windows’ own ‘apps’ (for instance, music files default to the ‘Music’ app), and one wrong click will open the ‘app’ instead of the ‘desktop program’. Changing the default program will fix it, but I feel I shouldn’t have to do that. A couple of hours of changing a few settings later, and I now have it down to at least the basic feel of the familiar Windows 7 environment.

One minor thing I do like about Windows 8, though, is the file transfer progress bar. It now features a line graph that shows file transfer speed over time as well as the overall progress and the current speed. Using the laptops USB ports, I found I largely had a sustained read/write speed of about 30 MB/s using a USB 2.0 external drive, which is about a 20 percent gain over the USB 2.0 interface using my desktop.

Long story short, Windows 8 felt too much like a tablet OS than a true desktop/laptop OS.

Anyways, back to the good stuff about the laptop.

Asus was kind enough to include a programmable button on the chassis called Instant Key. The utility that uses this can be programmed for several different functions, including calling up a Splendid preset or lock the touchpad; for now, I have it starting Firefox whenever I press it. Nifty, yes, but I don’t think I’ll be using it often.

Sound is surprisingly powerful; the Windows chimes gave me a preview of the Bang & Olufsen integrated speakers. Playing a few songs in Winamp confirmed the quality, and I was able to squeeze a bit more bass out of the speakers by playing around in the Waves MaxxAudio suite found inside the Realtek drivers. Really; if you’re looking for great on-board sound, look no further. The addition of an external subwoofer is really the icing on an otherwise perfectly-baked cake, but subwoofer or not the overall experience is nothing short of fantastic.

Video playback is to be expected from a 1080p laptop. It includes an Asus branded version of Cyberlink PowerDVD (aptly named AsusDVD), and it had no troubles playing an everyday DVD, namely Sherlock Holmes. This particular model does not have a Blu-Ray player, or else I would’ve tried the Blu-Ray version of the movie. I tried a .mkv 1080p video file of Inception and found that the CPU usage was up to 70 percent for the first few minutes, likely due to hard-drive accessing, and dropped down to 35 percent after the hard drive began to idle. A smaller and less-demanding video file of Iron Man 2 only peaked at around 10 percent CPU utilization after the hard drive stopped flipping out. Also, I didn’t notice much distortion around the screen when viewing it from the sides, but it was quite bad viewing it from the top or bottom. Asus advertises the screen to have 150-degree horizontal and 120-degree vertical viewing angles, and I’m inclined to believe that.

I’m actually quite impressed by the video editing capabilities of this laptop. I heard that the A10-4600M was barely competitive with Sandy Bridge Core i3 processors, but I was pleasantly surprised that, using no GPU acceleration (PowerDirector wouldn’t let me :( ), I managed to render a video in almost half the video playtime. Granted, I tested it with a three-minute video with random video effects slapped on, but my assumption is that with longer videos comes a linear relationship. With 8GB of RAM, that should be enough for everyday needs.

Unfortunately, I do not have wireless internet at home, but I do have Bluetooth-enabled devices. The N56DP-DH11 comes with Bluetooth 4.0 built-in, however the highest revision of my peripherals is only 2.0. Thankfully, it picks up and pairs with my HTC Magic quicker and easier than what I had to go through on my Windows 7-enabled desktop, which is equipped with a Bluetooth 2.0 connector.

Gaming is also a very surprising aspect this laptop tends to do decently well in. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the N56DP-DH11 can, in fact, play Crysis – Crysis 2, to be precise – and fairly well might I add. The settings I used were the High preset (DirectX 11 minimum) and a resolution of 1280x720, with the DirectX 11 and the High-Resolution Texture patches also installed. Whether I used Dual Graphics or let the HD7730M handle all the heavy lifting, the game played at an average of roughly 40 fps. Even the integrated HD7660G held on with a playable 30fps average (my threshold is the normal console-speed 24fps). However, Saints Row 3 won’t allow for a steady framerate over 24 fps in regular situations; strangely enough, even Ultra quality rarely brought it down below 18fps, which leads me to assume it’s a CPU bottleneck. This is ironic, as Crysis 2 has Intel and Nvidia’s name plastered all over it, yet Saints Row 3 has AMD’s branding on the intro screens. All games were played using the latest Catalyst 13.4 WHQL drivers (the original drivers had bad framing issues while looking around in Crysis 2, but that appears to have been fixed with the newer drivers).

My only other two gripes thus far are the fingerprint-prone lid and that the laptop is fairly warm even while idling. I don’t have the equipment to test what exactly the temperature was, but on my lap it was enough to put something in between. A review I checked out through Notebookcheck.net claimed idle temps at around 46C and load temps of 67C.

Switching from outlet to battery is quick and responsive. Using the included Power4Gear High Performance power plan through Win8 (also preset by the laptop), the laptop expects about 2 hours 30 minutes of battery life; switching to Balanced ups that figure by about 40 minutes. For its relatively high performance, this isn’t too shabby in my opinion, though with some people claiming upwards of 4 hours it may be a bit underwhelming.

***Summary***

Pros:

--Phenominal integrated sound by Bang & Olufsen ICEpower, includes an external subwoofer.

--Bright LED-backlit 1080p screen with exceptional viewing angles.

--Communications devices pair up with devices that would normally have trouble on my desktop.

--Respectable gaming performance in graphically-intensive games, which is something I was expecting to do on this laptop.

--Quiet in any situation, from web-browsing to gaming.

--Quality construction makes it feel much more valuable.

--Ridiculous price for what you get.

Cons:

--Windows 8 just isn’t the OS for me, but after installing Classic Shell it was bearable.

--The CPU just isn’t enough to back some games, even at minimum settings.

--Fairly warm even while idling.

--The lid is quite fingerprint-prone.

Final Word: Within my first 36 hours of using the Asus N56DP-DH11, this thing gives the impression of a laptop twice its $600 pricetag. For my particular needs, it does not disappoint. I highly recommend this laptop to anyone who, like me, is looking for something to at least do minimal gaming while doing ‘just fine’ for other everyday tasks like video and audio.