The ASUS N61Jv is a looker. It has an exterior that screams “macho” and “elegant,” thanks to its nice curves and modern design. The patterned, glossy lid also adds a tinge of sophistication to the overall look. The speakers, like other notebooks’, are placed above the good-sized keyboard, and the rubberized panel would remind you of the carbon-fiber look of sports cars. There’s no shortage of lights here, with the huge power button owning the show with its white backlight.

From the onset, the N61Jv has that ASUS look – the curvy lid with the sheeny pattern-printed surface, the chiclet keyboard, the minimalist trackpad and screen frame, and that bulky body for standard sized notebooks. Opening the notebook reveals a minimalist design featuring a full keyboard with the numerical pad intact, a multi-touch trackpad, and the noticeably bulging silver grill with ASUS shortcuts on one side – performance mode, mute, volume up, volume down, and play/pause – and the unusually large (but cool) power button on the other. There are two LED slits on both sides of this that acts as both a unique design element and as an indicator of which GPU is being used. Four indicator lights – battery, HDD, Wi-Fi, and Numerical Lock – are positioned at the edge of the notebook, just below the trackpad. While the screen bezel side is of glossy black plastic, the bottom portion, with the exception of the top grill has a soft rubberized finish. This doesn’t extend to the bottom of the notebook, however, and we can still see the usual plastic finish here.

There’s also plenty of curved corners and edges with this notebook, something that’s still very much in vogue today. The notebook also uses a two-hinge design to hold the LCD display, just like other ASUS notebook models. And just like other ASUS designs, most of the interfaces are kept on the left and right profiles, leaving only a card reader at the front and a battery slot at the rear. Again, what’s notable about the notebook is despite its bulk, it feels lighter than it looks.

The ASUS ENGTX465 is a card that looks like it has been scaled to fit right into a specific performance target. This target is right between the HD 5850 and HD 5830 from ATI. When it comes to a comparison between the GTX 465 and the HD 5850, the green offering is behind in most categories. but does at times step up the performance when the game or benchmark plays to its strengths. A fine example of this is the Unigine 2.0 benchmark in which the tessellation performance of the GF100 architecture carries the 465 ahead of the 5850. Overclocking this card helps narrow the performance gap between it and the HD 5850 in many of the games tested, not enough to beat it at every test, but to at least make it interesting.

ASUS has thought of the enthusiast community with the ENGTX465 by including its Smart Doctor software to allow the end user to reach the highest possible overclock they can by using all of the tools that are available. The phrase on the box shouts loudly that you can go up to 50% faster by using the voltage tweaking options. I did not get to 50%, but at 33%, I was close. This 33% increase is a bump of 214MHz on the 352 CUDA cores. Not shabby by any stretch. The memory on the other hand did not benefit from any voltage tweaking and was a bit stingier when it came time to push the clock speeds, only garnering a 17.5% increase or 141MHz. Both of these clock speed increases help drive performance higher. This means just about every game in the benchmark suite is playable with high end settings. Of course Crysis and Metro 2033 are notable exceptions at 2560×1600. However the pricing and market that this card is targeting most people will be running at 1920×1200.

The packaging of the ENGTX465 from ASUS looks much like that which housed the ENGTX285 TOP card I looked at a while back,with a medieval knight perched upon a large stallion on a stormy night. The green background of course subliminally lets you know this is an Nvidia-based card. The front panel highlights some of the features of this card such as the 1GB of GDDR5 memory, Direct X 11 support, Nvidia PhysX capabilities and that this card is ready for overclocking via Voltage Tweak technology. The rear panel lists the features of this card, recommended system requirements and the inclusion of several Nvidia specific applications, Design Garage and the Supersonic Sled demo.

VIDIA’s latest member of their DirectX 11 lineup is the GeForce GTX 460. It is based on the all new 40 nm GF104 GPU which is based on the Fermi architecture introduced earlier this year. The GTX 460 is positioned at the lower end of the mid-range performance segment around the $200 price bracket. NVIDIA offers two variants of the GeForce GTX 460, one with 768 MB of GDDR5 memory and one with 1 GB. Due to the GPU architecture this change in memory size not only affects the actual memory but also other performance relevant figures.

The reduction of memory size is achieved by installing less memory chips  on the card which reduces the bus width of the GPU from 256-bit to 192-bit on the 768 MB version. Since the ROPs are coupled to the memory interface this also results in less ROP units. Combined all those changes reduce the fillrates and memory performance of the card by 25%.

The card that we are looking at today is the ASUS ENGTX460 DirectCU TOP/2DI/768MD5 video card! What makes this card special is the fact that it uses a custom designed PCB and GPU cooler, plus it comes factory overclocked for an extra performance boost. The ENGTX460 Top has been sorted to ensure the card can operate flawlessly at above 700MHz and that is critical for those that want to be ensured their card can overclock. To help overclockers even more ASUS uses a DirectCU GPU cooler that has two 8mm flattened copper heat-pipes that make direct contact with the GPU that helps improve cooling by 20% when compared to the NVIDIA reference design. If that isn’t enough, ASUS also includes their SmartDoctor utility with VoltageTweak. This means you can bump up the GPU core voltage in just a few mouse clicks if needed.

When it comes to accessories, you are going to be getting a 2 x 4pin molex to PCI-E power adapter, a DVI to D-Sub dongle, DVI to HDMI dongle, a CD wallet, as well as the installation documentation. There were no drivers CD included in the package. This is because by the time that you purchase the card and get it to your doorstep, there will usually be updated versions of the drivers that you will have to download anyways.

Asus’ N61 range consists of multimedia machines featuring powerful components and the latest features, including Asus’ own SonicMaster technology standards.

This is also one of the first laptops we’ve seen to feature USB 3.0, the next generation of USB technology. The N61J is a powerful machine for the multimedia user, but there are a few issues here as well. One of the laptop’s key selling points is the aforementioned SonicMaster standards.

We found that while the stereo effect was impressive, sound wasn’t as good across the full audio spectrum, and tracks generally lacked bass and depth. Although better than most laptops, we still wouldn’t use this machine as a replacement for desktop speakers.

In our experience with the N61J, the technology worked as advertised. When running our gaming benchmarks, the discrete card kicked in without any effort on our part. Unfortunately, Optimus couldn’t elevate the N61J’s gaming performance beyond middling. The notebook’s GeForce GT 325M might be based on a new GPU architecture using a smaller 40nm process, but the mainstream card is still an amateur compared to the older GTX 260M in our zero-point notebook. Moderately demanding games like Far Cry 2 are playable, to be sure, but only when run at the notebook’s native 1366×768 resolution with quality set at medium, which yielded 36.75fps.

The N61J is more impressive at productivity chores. Its 2.26GHz Core i5-430M is part of Intel’s new Arrandale family of mobile processors. It’s built on the same 32nm process as Intel’s Clarkdale desktop procs, which include an integrated graphics chip in the CPU. There are numerous other improvements the Core i5 chips offer over the Core 2 Duo, with integrated memory controller, better power management, and HyperThreading among the most noteworthy. So, despite its 800MHz clock disadvantage, the Core i5-430M performed slightly better than our zero-point’s 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo Mobile T9900 CPU in all the content creation benchmarks that are multithread-friendly. Photoshop shows no such bias, leaving the older Core 2 Duo out front.

The ASUS RT-N13U Wireless N Router with All-in-One Printer Server has been added to the Router and Wireless Charts.

The RT-N13U is a step below the RT-N16 and based on Ralink’s RT3052F 2T2R single chip AP/router SoC. This single device contains the processor, BB/MAC, radio, 10/100 Ethernet WAN and four port 10/100 LAN switch. 32 MB of RAM and 4 MB of flash complete the compact design.

The RT-N13U also has a single USB port that can share a printer or have a USB drive attached. Like the RT-N16, the attached drive can be used with the HTTP, FTP, BT (BitTorrent) download client and to serve files via FTP. But unlike the RT-N16, SMB file sharing isn’t supported. There is also uplink-only priority-based QoS on the router, and WDS bridging / repeating is also supported.

Routing throughput measured 93 Mbps WAN to LAN and LAN to WAN. But total simultaneous throughput measured around 143 Mbps, indicating that up and downloads speeds are being limited by the 10/100 Mbps ports. The RT-N13U had no problem with the maximum simultaneous session test, hitting our test limit of 200 on the first try.

This was the only router we tested that was capable of sharing a USB printer, and while Asus claims it can support multifunction devices, it guarantees compatibility only with the ones the company has tested. We plugged in an Epson Stylus NX515 and could print documents, but we couldn’t get the scanner function to work.

Several of the routers we examined had firmware that enabled them to be configured as wireless access points, but the RT-N13U was the only one that could also be converted into a wireless repeater. In this mode, the router operates like a wireless bridge, but one that can serve wireless clients. Repeaters send and receive at half speed, however; only a masochist would use the slug-slow RT-N13U in repeater mode.

Key Features

• Wireless N , connectivity upto 300M
• 2 x internal antenna’s , 2.4~2.5 GHz transmission ,Antenna Gain in 3 dBi
• Auto detect your internet connection type and manual free setup
• Download Master: 24 hours downloading even PC is shut down
• USB port for FTP/All-in-One Printer sharing
• Universal repeater mode : extend your wireless signal coverage only by 3 steps
• 4 x RJ45 for 10/100 BaseT lan ports