| Asus Z80K Athlon 64 Laptop Review Posted |
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| Written by Chris Tom | |
| Monday, 29 August 2005 15:35 | |
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I've posted my review of the Asus Z80K Athlon 64 laptop. I compare it to my trusty eMachines M6805. Enjoy!
Long a powerhouse in motherboard development Asus has diversified adding graphics cards, DVD drives, LCDs, networking equipment, barebone systems, and laptops to their repertoire. That laptop you are using now could be Asus made. This year they have set their sites on the US portable market, and we were lucky enough to test the Z8000 Series Z80K desktop replacement model based on the Athlon 64 3200+ Mobile, the nForce 3 Go, and the Radeon 9700 Mobile. Before we get cracking lets look at the specifications for the Z80K. Specifications Processor & Cache Memory AMD Mobile Athlon 64 Processor up to
3400 (62 Watt maximum) Pictures
Asus has gone with a sleek silver top for the Z80K with a built on Asus logo.
Opened up we see a 15" SXGA screen which handles up to a 1400X1050 resolution. The screen is lit up by the ATI 9700 Mobile part with 128MB of memory. A standard laptop keyboard is used which is large enough to use comfortably.
Hot keys placed above the keyboard are linked to launching mail, internet, the My Documents folder, and
The touchpad includes a left and right click button, and along with the middle button used to scroll up and down.
The hinge is a single sliding design, and below it we find additional function buttons for playing CDs through the Audio DJ feature. It allows you to play CDs without entering Windows.
LEDs on the left edge of the laptop indicated when the unit is on, when the battery is charging, when e-mail is available, and when it is connected to the wireless connection.
Here we see the typical latches used to keep the laptop shut.
Here is a shot at the DVD Burner side of the laptop. There are several options including a plan CDRW as well.
To the right of the drive is one USB 2.0 port, and a 3 in 1 memory reader that handles SD/MMC/MS/MS Pro.
To the left are two additional USB 2.0 ports.
The back includes your normal ports including two more USB 2.0 ports, the Marvel Gigabit Ethernet and modem connector, and the printer, VGA out, and S-video connector.
A closer shot shows a peek at the copper heatpipe used to cool the Athlon 64 mobile.
The power connector side also includes the PCMCIA slot.
Here is a closer shot at both. You can also see the outline of the hard drive compartment.
Towards the front we see three audio connectors, and a mini Firewire port.
Flipping the laptop over we see the access cover for the CPU, where to pull out the hard drive, and the long rectangular shaped battery at the bottom. They also include a business card slot in case your laptop goes astray.
Unscrewing a couple of of spots by the drive allows it to slide out. In this case our test unit was equipped with an 80gb Hitachi Travelstar which is a model we know well. Any standard IDE drive can be used, and many sizes are optional.
The CPU was pretty easily accessible, and knowing Asus and their frequent BIOS updates you might have an upgrade in your future perhaps even to a Turion. The heatpipe stretches to the back of the unit which we pointed out earlier.
To remove the battery you have a couple of sliding connectors to manipulate.
The battery easily pops out. In our case we just had a 4 cell battery, but an 8 cell is optional.
A 90 watt power brick is included by Asus. It is manufactured by Delta Electronics. BIOS
The system overview screen shows the BIOS version as well as the CPU type and amount of system memory.
The advanced section leads to the IDE configuration, and allows enabling and disabling of the touchpad, numeric padlock, and wake-up on LAN.
From the boot display setting you can choose to use the LCD screen, an attached screen, or both.
Security settings allows for passwords to be set for the BIOS, and allows you to enable drive security.
If you are worried about security, and someone grabbing data from your laptop, you can enter the IO interface for security and lock every possible way to move data too and from the Z80K.
You can also set a supervisor or user BIOS password, and enable security for your hard drive.
The power section allows for LCD and CPU power saving, and PowerNow! can be enabled here. You can also calibrate your battery from here.
Boot settings allows you to select the boot priority, to check out the drive and CDRom, and to enable the onboard LAN boot ROM. CPUZ Reports Next lets look and see what CPUZ tells us about the Z80K.
The CPU is a mobile Athlon 64 3200+ based on the Clawhammer core running at 1.45V. It operates at 2GHz, and has a full 1MB of L2 cache.
We see CPU-Z sees this as a model A2K which is quite similar to the Z80K. It of course uses the nVidia nForce 3 150 chipset, or the nForce 3 Go. A full 128MB of graphics memory is recognized.
The unit only supports up to 333MHz DDR up to 1GB if two sticks are used as is in our case. Single channel only is supported as it is a Socket 754 CPU. We would love to see full DDR400 support, but with the latest BIOS update that is not the case. Software and Utilities Now we move to the utilities that Asus includes with the Z80K.
We see Asus GameFace which is a VOIP communication utility for gamers. The Mobile Manager is used to help configure and activate the various communication methods. Also included is the handy Live Update utility that will save you plenty of time when looking for updates to drivers, applications, and the BIOS. Lastly we have the utility for the included 802.11g wireless. It allows you to survey for APs, configure them, and save the settings. Benchmarks Next we move to benchmarks as we compare the Z80K with our trusty eMachines M6805. The M6805 comes with the Athlon 64 3000+ running at 1.8GHz with 1MB of L2 cache, and 512MB of DDR333 memory, and the Radeon 9600 Mobile with 64 MB of memory. It also utilizes the VIA K8T800 mobile chipset, and we test with a slow 5400RPM drive, and a 7200RPM Deskstar model of the same family as the Asus drive. In fact you can check out the difference that extra rotational speed makes on performance here. First up we have Worldbench 5 which will help us test 1GB versus 512MB as well as the performance differences of the extra 200MHz for the CPU, and the better chipset with the nForce 3 versus the K8T800.
Worldench 5 is a comprehensive test of many different programs and multitasking. Here we see that the extra 512mb of memory helps out the Asus versus the eMachines, and also you can see where the 7200RPM drives come in handy. The 200MHz bump up in clock for the Asus also helps a bit. Overall the Asus scores an 82 versus a 74 or 67 for the M6805 depending on drive speed.
Doom 3 shows a clear advantage for the Radeon 9700. Doubling the memory certainly has helped boost performance in addition to the architecture changes.
Half Life 2 also enjoys quite a big advantage, but not as much as with Doom 3.
We finish up with PCMark 2005 and 3DMark2005. Here the eMachines drive actually beats out the Asus, but everywhere else the Asus wins. Battery Life We have seen the features and performance of the Asus Z80K, but next we turn to battery life. Our test unit had only a 4 cell battery, and using Battery Eater version 2.60 got about 37 minutes of battery life. With a normal 8 cell battery you would get double that. Yes, that sounds pretty extreme, but we were running in classic mode which is the worst case scenario as CPU, hard drive, and graphics are all being pushed to the limit. Support and Warranty Asus is widely known for good support particularly when it comes to BIOS updates. Now if you buy this system barebone then you may or may not deal with Asus for primary support. Of course if you buy a fully configured system online your system seller is your primary support. Either way it is nice to have a company like Asus that will be around in case there are problems, and you will have 1 year worth of warranty coverage. With frequent BIOS updates like the most recent one to fully support 64 bit Windows the chances you can upgrade to current Turion 64 CPUs is enhanced. You can find BIOS files, manuals, utilities, and drivers all here. Pricing We found the Asus Z80K here for $885 in barebone configuration. You may be able to find it for a lower price. Remember that price is a barebone setup, and you will need to supply memory, a hard drive, and a CPU. Conclusion We must say we are happy to see Asus more aggressively push their laptop lineup in the US market. It is nice to have a trusted name for barebone laptops. What is disappointing however is to see only one new AMD model, the A6U based on the Turion or Semrpon. We are dying for a Turion 64 or Athlon 64 based model with dual channel DDR400 memory, a nice large screen, and an Radeon X800 or GeForce 6800. We would love to see such a model from Asus, and help take enthusiast desktop computing to laptops. Hopefully Asus will heed our word, but in any case if you can find a Z80K then it is a solid desktop replacement and gaming laptop that held up favorably to our eMachines M6805. Stay tuned as we look to a Turion upgrade.
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