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With copious amounts of brushed aluminium, the N53J is a fantastic-looking that has plenty of multimedia features. It has a firm entertainment focus thanks to an Blu-ray optical drive and speakers from audio specialists Bang & Olufsen.
Continuing the theme is an Nvidia GeForce GT 425M graphics card which is capable of decoding HD video, either on the 15.6in screen or on an external display via HDMI. Gaming performance is also good: with 1GB of dedicated memory it sped through our Call of Duty 4 test at 29fps. Newer games should also be playable without too many detail changes.
An Intel Core i5-460M processor runs at 2.53GHz. Turbo boost increases this to 2.8GHz for extra power, and Hyper-threading helps speed up multi-threaded applications. This, along with 4GB of memory, helped the N53J achieve an impressive 99 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, which is almost as fast as a desktop PC.
Although it’s not Full HD, the 15.6in screen will still highlight the difference between standard definition video and Blu-ray movies. The 1,366×768 resolution meant details looked sharp, and black levels were excellent with very little bleed from the backlight. A piano black finish on the screen bezel matches the glossy panel, although reflections were an issue under bright light. Colours weren’t always accurately reproduced, with subtle shade differences often merging together. The screen has a decent amount of tilt, but viewing angles are fairly limited.
We expected the Bang & Olufsen speakers to sound better than other laptop speakers and we weren’t disappointed. The speaker bar above the keyboard produced solid audio, with clear mid-range and high notes. There was even a recognisable bass note, although it was less pronounced than some laptops we’ve seen with a separate woofer underneath.
The keyboard has large, flat keys that are comfortable to use. The number pad has been squeezed in and uses slightly smaller keys, but is still a useful inclusion. There’s a small amount of flex in the keyboard tray, but typing was easy thanks to great tactile feedback from each key. The touchpad was smooth and very responsive, recognising multi-touch gestures very quickly. The ‘see-saw’ touchpad buttons have a reasonably large dead spot in its centre, but it wasn’t a major issue.
Connectivity includes a single USB3 port, a shared eSATA/USB port, two dedicated USB ports and a multi-format card reader. There’s also a large 640GB hard disk. Even with Nvidia’s Optimus switching off the graphics card, the N53J lasted just under four hours in our light-use battery test. While it’s an improvement over desktop replacement laptops with similar components, it’s not the ideal travelling companion, especially given it weighs 2.7kg.
The N53J has great potential as a multimedia laptop thanks to a Blu-ray optical drive, although there’s no need to spend this much for Blu-ray alone. It’s a seriously powerful laptop in 2D applications, but the Dell XPS 17 has better gaming performance and a larger screen.
