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With a brushed aluminium lid and a stylish design, the Asus N53 really stands out – even though the sculpted curve of the lid near the hinge borrows heavily from Dell XPS and Sony Vaio designs. This is no bad thing, and the N53 feels solidly-built.
The striking design continues when opening the lid to reveal the large metal speaker grille above the keyboard. The sound system was designed in conjunction with Scandinavian hi-fi makers Bang & Olufsen, and the sound quality is certainly a cut above the normal laptop quality. It’s loud but it still sounds a bit brash and the bass notes aren’t convincing.
Below the speakers is a cramped and ugly keyboard. Asus has squeezed a numberpad in on the right side, and although the keys are large enough, there’s little space between them making it easy to hit two at once. Their flat tops and matt finish also make them a bit slippery. They have a light action, though, and there’s enough bite in the stroke to provide adequate feedback for touch-typists. The touchpad is large and responsive, but it uses a single, stiff seesaw button that has little travel.
An LED backlight provides an even and bright glow across the screen, but it has a blue cast that dulls flesh tones. As with most consumer laptops, there’s a glossy finish that adds punch to colours but it can also reflect overhead lights. Vertical viewing angles are a bit tight as well, so you’ll need to adjust the tilt of the screen carefully. Overall image quality is good, with strong colours and good contrast.
We’re pleased to see four USB ports – one more than usual – one of which doubles as an eSATA port. A small switch toggles wireless networking on and off. The headphone socket doubles as an S/PDIF output, which is handy if you have older AV equipment that doesn’t support HDMI.
The Intel Core i3-370M processor runs at 2.4GHz, and the 4GB of RAM will suit those who like to leave lots of applications running. The N53JG scored 86 overall in our benchmarks, and 98 in the single-threaded image-editing test, so it’s almost as powerful as our reference desktop PC when running a single task. Battery life is disappointing, though, lasting under four hours.
Asus has seen fit to include a dedicated Nvidia graphics card, a GeForce 415M. This scored 17.8fps in our Call of Duty 4 benchmark, which isn’t particularly impressive by today’s standards. With game settings turned down, you should be able to play older titles or less graphically-intensive games, but games enthusiasts should look elsewhere. CUDA support means supported applications will see performance boosts in certain operations, but as yet there’s not a lot of software that takes advantage of this technology.
There seems little point in including this dedicated card, when the Core i3’s integrated chip can handle HD video decoding and even some older games. While the N53’s design is striking, there’s nothing else that really stands out. It looks decidedly mediocre when placed next to the new Dell XPS L502X, which has a better keyboard and screen and is significantly faster in Windows applications. Although you’ll need to reconfigure it with Dell to drop the Blu-ray drive and top-end graphics chip to get near this price.
