Asus F6 review

Asus F6 Review

Reviewed by: Rory Reid

Reviewed on: 18 November 2008

The F6V ships with Windows Vista Home Premium edition as its primary operating system. It also comes with the fantastic Express Gate software by Splashtop. Hit the alternative power button to the top left of the keyboard and you'll be presented with a cut-down alternative to Windows, which boots in less than 10 seconds. From here, you can access the Web, your music files, play online games, view photos and use the Pidgin instant messaging client and Skype.

The F6 has a capacious 320GB hard drive and a DVD rewriter drive to back up to dual-layer DVDs

Performance
The F6 offers balanced performance. It's certainly no speed demon, but it's a solid all-rounder that isn't lacking in any particular area. It felt quick and stable in everyday use, and the 2GHz CPU helped it jog to a PCMark 2005 score of 4,120, which is very respectable.

The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 graphics card plays its part, too. It helped the machine clock up 1,952 in 3DMark 2006, which is a good deal more than you'd get with an Intel integrated graphics solution. Expect it to play 3D games, albeit at modest detail settings.

Battery life wasn't fantastic, unfortunately. The F6V lacks the power-saving improvements found in Centrino 2, so it's not surprising it lasted a mere 1 hour 42 minutes in our Battery Eater test.

Conclusion
The F6V is a very good laptop, but don't believe the hype about the smell. Unless you're a dog, you can hardly smell anything. Thankfully, it's very good-looking, fairly quick and quite affordable. Laptops such as the Dell XPS M1330 give it a good run for its money, but if you're after something slightly different, it's definitely worthy of consideration.

Edited by Cristina Psomadakis