Asus A7J 17-inch Core Duo Notebook Review

DVD Ripping and Networking

DVD Ripping

To test DVD performance we use DVD Decrypter to make a back-up of the first disk of the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

Incredible, the Asus A7J manages to beat the time set by the Asus A5F by a whopping 10 minutes! The DVD-RW drive on the A7J is a Toshiba TS-L532U is clearly much faster than the Panasonic/Matshita UJ-832S despite both being marked as 8x DVD-ROM units.

Wired Networking

Sometimes it’s not enough that a laptop supports all major network interface types, we sometimes need to know how well a particular network adapter will perform. To measure this we use Microsoft’s NTTTCP network bandwidth testing tool. To test the gigabit LAN adapter, we use a Cat 5e cable directly connected to the gigabit adapter of an EPoX EP-9NPA+ nForce 4 SLI motherboard.

Gigabit Difficulties

I had a difficult time testing the gigabit LAN controller on the A7J. If I let Windows auto configure the connection between the server and laptop, the connection would max out at 80MB/s to 90MB/s. In order to get above 100MB/s I had to manually configure the LAN adapters on both the server and A7J to use 1000MB/Full-Duplex and Jumbo Frames/MTU to 4000 bytes. Trying a different server (an Asus P5WD2 Intel 955 motherboard) had similar results. I even used a Cat6 cable just to be sure, and it didn’t make a difference.

I suspect the problem lies in the odd MTU options for the A7J. The A7J only supports MTU up to 7000 bytes, which is less than the 9000 byte MTU recommended for Gigabit networking. Even if the MTU is set to 7000 bytes, none of the other Gigabit adapters I have support it which means that the laptop won’t be able to communicate with anyone else.

So in the end, the Asus A7J may have a gigabit adapter, but performs much slower because of compatibility issues. So if you’re thinking of getting the A7J and expecting to plug in the laptop into your fast GigE network, you may be in for a surprise.

Wireless Networking

Using NTTTCP again, we test the wireless adapter performance of the A7J. We perform two tests: one from 2″ from the antenna to reduce the effects of interference; and another test 28′ away which is more susceptable to interference and broadcast problems (i.e. transmission through walls). The first test at 2″ is more accurate and repeatable, whereas the test at 28′ is more erratic and should only be used as a general comparison.

At 2″, the Asus A7J performs about the same as the other laptops, but the big difference is the CPU usage. Perhaps the faster RAM subsystem is helping keep the CPU overhead down? It’s hard to tell.

With the laptop further away performance gets a bit more erratic and more susceptable to interference. So the poor result of 8 MB/s on the A7J should not surprise you.