Performance
Although we were able to take a look at a MSI GT680 laptop powered by a Sandy Bridge mobile processor just after the SATA bug hit, we weren’t able to give that laptop a full evaluation precisely because of the bug – MSI decided they’d rather have the laptop back than go forward with a review of a product that was being recalled. This makes the ASUS N53 the first mobile Sandy Bridge powered laptop we’ve given a full review.

The ASUS N53’s processor is the Core i7-2630QM, which is precisely the same processor at the heart of the MSI GT680 we used for our Sandy Bridge mobile performance preview. This means we’d expect it to offer very similar performance. Let’s take a look at the processor with SiSoft Sandra and see if our expectations are met.

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The N53 does more or less match the performance from the MSI GT680 in these tests, although it does fall behind somewhat in the processor arithmetic tests. This was a little unusual, so I repeated the test several times to make sure the results I received were accurate. The only possible explanation is the power-management software; both the MSI laptop and the ASUS N53 have custom solutions installed, and the ASUS variant may have stepped in the way somehow during the processor arithmetic benchmark.

In any case, the story here is simple; Sandy Bridge is fast, and absolutely crushes every other laptop processor we’ve tested. Let’s move on to the more general benchmarks to see if the rest of the N53’s components can keep up with the CPU.

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The N53’s armor remains without any apparent weak spot, as it scores extremely well in all of our benchmarks and manages the highest scores we’ve ever received from the 7-Zip and Peacekeeper benchmarks.

While the Sandy Bridge processor is no doubt a big part of this equation, it isn’t solely responsible for these outstanding results. The Nvidia GT 540M is obviously no slouch and the 750GB hard drive is a 7200 RPM model provided by Seagate. These quick components make it possible for the N53 to return exceptional results across the board.

The ASUS N53 isn’t a gaming laptop but rather a general multi-media laptop. This means it comes equipped with the Nvidia GT 540M with Optimus enabled. The GT 540M is one of Nvidia’s latest mainstream parts, and is essentially an upgrade of the Nvidia GT 435M. The GPU in the ASUS N53 was paired with 1GB of memory, which will likely be standard among laptops with this particular part.

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There is a lot to like here. Although the N53 obviously trailed the ASUS G53 and its beefy GTX 460, it still provided substantially quicker than most of the laptops we’ve tested. This laptop is more than capable of playing demanding games like Just Cause 2 at the native display resolution of 1366×768. The 3DMark 06 and 3DMark Vantage results echoed this.

In fact, I used the N53 as my primary gaming computer for an entire week because I wasn’t able to access my desktop and I desperately wanted to play Rift, a new MMO, during its head start week. I was surprised to find that I could set this new game to high detail settings at the N53’s native resolution. After some tweaking, I was able to play with most of the game’s details turned on with a framerate between 30 and 50 FPS (as according to FRAPS).

Let’s wrap this section up by looking at the boot and resume times.

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ASUS laptops have traditionally been poor performers in this benchmark, and the N53 does nothing to change that. Although the 42 second boot time and 26 second resume times are reasonable, remember that this is in many benchmarks the quickest laptop we’ve ever tested. I expect that we’ll see most Sandy Bridge laptops booting in just over 30 seconds (the MSI GT680 booted in just under 32). Although boot times are not an absolutely critical performance benchmark, they are something that even a user who cares nothing about hardware performance is likely to notice. ASUS does itself no favors by repeatedly doing so poorly in this benchmark.

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