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Most laptops include speakers almost as an afterthought – they tend to be small, tinny and rarely sound very good. The same can’t be said of the N56VM – Asus bundles an external subwoofer to pair with the integrated Bang & Olufsen speakers, hopefully saving you the extra expense of a pair of dedicated speakers. With a quad-core processor and discrete graphics, it’s no performance slouch either.
A stylish combination of black brushed metal lid and matt silver body gives a luxurious first impression. The laptop’s also not too thick at only 33mm, which is impressive considering the powerful specification that includes an integrated Blu-ray drive and a 1080p display. As you would expect from a 15in laptop, connectivity is excellent with four USB ports, Ethernet, 3.5mm audio in and outputs, a multi-format card reader and both HDMI and VGA video outputs. All four USB ports support the faster USB3 standard.
The attractive looks continue once you lift the lid, with patterned speaker grilles expanding out towards the Chiclet-style keyboard tray. The keyboard itself uses full-size QWERTY keys, but the numeric keypad has to make do with half-width keys to make room. We didn’t find this too troublesome in general use, although larger hands may need to take a little more care when entering data. With the exception of the spacebar, all the keys have plenty of bounce to make typing as comfortable as possible.
We normally prefer physical touchpad buttons, but the all-in-one touchpad used here is excellent. It has no discernible dead zone between the left and right buttons, meaning you don’t have to worry about your clicks not registering, and it’s more than responsive enough to span the entire desktop with a single swipe.
Working on the 15.6in, 1,920×1,080 display was a mixed experience – horizontal viewing angles are excellent, even if vertical ones aren’t quite so impressive, and the matt finish helps diffuse light reflections, but it also mutes colours quite significantly. Limited brightness could still make it difficult to use in direct sunlight. Even so, everything looks very sharp at the Full HD resolution.
We could watch Blu-ray films at their native 1080p thanks to the screen and integrated optical drive, but we still weren’t blown away by the N56VM’s sound quality. The upward-firing speakers sound best when you’re sat directly over the laptop – as soon as you move back much of the treble disappears. Even so, the external subwoofer adds noticeable bass to music tracks, making it a welcome step up from most laptop speakers. If you frequently use your laptop at a desk, there’s no reason not to keep it plugged in constantly.
All that screen space would be wasted if the N56VM wasn’t able to run applications to make the most of it, but thankfully it more than delivers. The laptop’s Intel Ivy Bridge Core i7-3610QM runs each of its four cores at 2.3GHz, but can use Turbo Boost to reach a rapid 3.3GHz in certain applications. Paired with 6GB of RAM, the N56VM achieved a desktop-bothering 95 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, meaning you should be able to run any program without worrying about performance.
Gamers are equally well catered for. Although the laptop has one of Nvidia’s more entry level mobile graphics cards, the GeForce GT 630M is still more than capable of playing the latest games at 720p. Our Dirt 3 test produced a smooth 49.1fps, and we could even play at 1080p once we’d turned off anti-aliasing – 33.9fps is easily enough for smooth gameplay at High detail settings.
With Nvidia’s Optimus graphics switching, you shouldn’t have to worry about the GPU draining your battery when on the move, either. In our light use test, the N56VM managed a respectable five hours away from the mains – far behind ultra-portable laptops, Ultrabooks and MacBooks, but still a fantastic performance for a quad-core laptop.
At £900, the N56VM looks like good value. Hardcore gamers will probably want a more powerful graphics card, and the laptop’s battery life isn’t quite enough for all-day computing, but performance rivals that of a desktop PC and the high-resolution screen provides plenty of room to work with. Intel’s dual-core i5 processors may offer better value when they arrive in the next month or so, but right now the N56VM is a great all-rounder.
