The Asus U46SV is a bit heavy, but it's slim enough to slide into a bag and will be right at home in your office space. It's got enough power to chew through your work and will even tackle some games when you're finished. Sturdy construction and Excellent gaming performance
It's a portable machine, packing powerful components that are just itching to tackle all your office work. With a dedicated graphics card, it will happily take a stab at 3D gaming too. The U46SV-WX044X model is available now for around £700.
The Design
Most people prefer slimmer and light laptop for working on the go and if that is you then you should seriously eyeing up an ultrabook like the Asus Zenbook UX21. If you're on a more modest budget and you want a machine that will sit firmly at a desk throughout the working day, the Asus U46SV is a great compromise.
The Laptop weigh over 2kg, but it's easily light enough to carry around for a while without feeling too much strain on your shoulders. At around 25mm in thickness, it's nowhere near as slim as the razor-sharp Zenbook, but you'll have no problem sliding it into most cases and bags and carting it off to your exciting destination.
On the underside of the machine, the battery sticks out by about 10mm, some people might find this annoying. Typing is comfortable on the slightly sloped keyboard. Therefore this makes the U46SV is perhaps best suited to business tasks at an office desk. This makes more sense as it's been bundled with Windows 7 Professional, rather than the Home edition.
The laptop have aluminium encased lid, that's been given a rough circlular texture that we're keen on. We can't agree on whether we like textures normally, but the general consensus was that this one was rather attractive.
The metal shell makes the whole body feel very secure. We prodded and poked like it was going out of style and were pleased to find very little flex in either the shell or the hinge when we opened the lid. Rest assured then that when you take this thing off on your adventures, it will put up with a whole heap of abuse.
The lid's hinge is set slightly forward from the rear of the machine. This means that there's extra body space at the back. It feels more sturdy when you're opening it and it provides a secure footing when sat on a desk.
The keyboard uses square, isolated keys that are very easy to press, without feeling flimsy. The keys sadly aren't backlit so if you're wanting to work at night or simply stalk your friends on Facebook you're going to have to make the ultimate effort to get up and turn a light on.
The trackpad is a decent size and it's very responsive. Fast clicking around a web page is no hassle. The buttons beneath feel a little too flimsy for our liking but at least they're big and easy to press.
The Display
The Laptop packs a 14-inch screen with a resolution of 1,366x768 pixels, unlike Asus' own Zenbook UX31 packs 1,600x900 pixels into a 13.3-inch screen so a similar effort here would have been better.
The screen is very bright although colours are sometimes a little washed out due to the strong backlighting. Small text and icons are sharp and it's not at all uncomfortable to stare at for long periods of time. Its glossy coating does result in reflections, especially under bright light so consider wearing a mask if you can't stand looking at your own face all day.
Power Engine
Packed with Intel Core i5-2410M processor running at 2.3GHz, teamed up with 4GB of RAM. Their are pretty decent but not mind-blowing specs for a portable machine.
It didn't quite match the feats of the Acer Aspire Ethos 5951G, which returned 8,103 on the same test, although the latter packs double the RAM.
The boot-up times were quick and programs were able to load without much delay. Although it has only 4GB of RAM which is very average for machines of this price, it handled multi-tasking well. It didn't show any signs of slowing down when we opened up numerous video streaming tabs in our web browser.
Gaming performance you also get an Nvidia GeForce GT 540M with 1GB of VRAM to tackle the polygons in fancy 3D games. At full screen, the U46SV could maintain 40 frames per second on average but this number climbed up to around 50fps in certain areas. The U46SV's gaming ability is impressive, especially considering it isn't a dedicated gaming machine.
Battery Life
After disconned from the main, the Asus kept running for around 2 hours and 15 minutes, which is pretty good.
If you don't make heavy use of wireless networks and video playback, you should be able to get most of a working day out of it. If you only have to do a spot of word processing, you won't need to worry much about plugs and cables.
Conclusion
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