Asus U46SV | Surprisingly bulky, but with impressive performance

Asus U46SV
Surprisingly bulky, but with impressive performance

 As much as we loved the Asus U36JC (a powerful ultraportable reviewed in Issue 149), we can’t say the same for the U46SV (£699 inc. VAT). It may be the spiritual successor to the U36JC, but we were surprised by the chunky build and rather uninspired design.

The chassis is 38mm thick, which is rather bulky for a laptop this size. It also weighs a lot more than the U36JC at 2.3kg. The U46SV won’t exactly weigh you down, but we expected something a lot slimmer and lighter. Compared to the likes of the Sony Vaio S and Samsung 9003X, this is a boxy beast.

We also aren’t massive fans of the U46SV’s aluminium build, which feels strangely plasticky. The lid is especially weak, bending in the centre under light pressure, and looks rather low-rent, with a basic circular design. Still, we can’t complain when it comes to the keyboard. The popular isolation style design means keys are well spaced, which makes it perfect for touch-typists. The keys are a great size, with no tiny Shift or Return; even the arrows get plenty of space.

Isolation style - A popular keyboard design of late, isolation- style keyboards feature keys that protrude through individual holes cut in the laptop's chassis. This increases the space between each key, making them easier to access, while reducing the amount of dust and dirt that can settle beneath them.

For some reason Asus built this with a jutting lip at the rear, which prevents the lid from tilting back more than 45° from vertical. This makes it tricky to get a good view of the screen when sat on your lap. Thankfully, the display has decent viewing angles and is impressively bright, although images are occasionally washed-out.

The isolation-style keys mean this laptop is comfortable to type on,

 and Asus hasn't skimped on the size of the Shift or Return keys

However, we still enjoyed watching high-definition movies and browsing our photo collection. Speaking of which, you can carry a large chunk of media around on the 500GB hard drive - more than 100 HD films, or 100,000 songs or photos. A 5-in-l memory card reader can be used to boost storage space, or quickly copy your holiday snaps onto your laptop.

Asus has also stuck an extra power button above the keyboard, for booting into its Express Gate OS. This gives you quick access to your media and the web, booting up in seconds. However, we aren’t massive fans of the stripped-down UI and limited functions and would rather wait the extra 20 seconds it takes to boot into Windows.

Strong performance

While we’re less than impressed by the overall design, we can’t deny this laptop is stuffed with power. One of Intel’s latest Core i5 Sandy Bridge chips is backed up by 4GB of memory, providing good enough performance to run any number of applications simultaneously. This sort of bulletproof spec should mean that most users won’t have to upgrade for years.

This laptop also caters to movie and music editors with its Nvidia GeForce GT 540M graphics card. You can run dedicated editing software without any kind of stuttering, and even have a blast on most modern games. If you’re more into watching movies than fiddling with them, you can enjoy HD video with impressively smooth playback.

Despite excellent performance and graphics, this laptop also boasts fantastic battery life. Most portables manage less than three hours on our tests before dying, but the U46SV lasted almost double that before the screen went black. It’s a shame the body isn’t slimmer and lighter, or this would be one of the most powerful portable laptops we’ve used in a long time.

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