Notebook Trio: ASUS A8JS and G2P and ABS Mayhem Z5

ABS Mayhem Z5 - Internals and Usage

The ABS Mayhem Z5 is slightly thicker than the ASUS G2P, particularly towards the rear of the unit. This appears to be a design decision to help accommodate the power-hungry GeForce Go 7900 GTX GPU. Flipping the laptop over and taking a look at the bottom, it's interesting to see that ABS has decided to provide access to all of the internals through one large panel. This can make things easier if you're looking to upgrade several components at the same time, but it does require the removal of more screws if you're just looking at doing a simple hard drive upgrade compared to other designs.

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Accessing the battery is pretty simple: press the release latch and out comes the battery.

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ABS also uses an 8-cell battery, but it is a lower powered model than the G2P battery. Both ASUS laptops shipped with a 4800 mAHr rating (though the A8JS is only a 6-cell design), but ABS provides a 4400 mAHr 14.8V battery (65 WHr). The voltage is the same as the G2P, but the total battery capacity is lower, and looking at the components it's pretty obvious that the ABS Mayhem Z5 is usually going to draw more power. Naturally, that means it's also going to have less battery life. While it would be nice to get a laptop that can provide both long battery life for typical computing tasks that could also accommodate all of your gaming desires, we have yet to see such a laptop. Some laptop manufacturers also provide the option to purchase an extended life battery (usually a 12-cell design that offers 50% more battery power), but unfortunately none of these laptops seem to have higher capacity batteries available, or in the case of the A8JS the 53 WHr is the higher capacity battery.

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Eleven screws secure the main access panel on the bottom of the laptop, and removing them provides access to the interior. The RAM, hard drives, WiFi adapter, mini-PCI slot (occupied by a TV tuner here), CPU, and GPU are all located in this area. If you actually want to pull out the CPU/GPU heatsink, however, you will need to remove the remainder of the bottom shell. The other items could be easily upgraded at any time.

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Considering all of the other high-end components that go into the ABS Mayhem Z5, the hard drive included on our model is something of a misfit. Capacity wise, the Hitachi 100GB hard drive matches that of the ASUS A8JS. However, where ASUS chose to include a 7200 RPM model, ABS uses a 5400 RPM model. The performance is still acceptable - again, having 2GB of memory helps to minimize the impact of hard drive performance in many instances - but on a laptop costing close to $3000 we would prefer to see either more storage capacity via a 160GB model or else a 7200 RPM drive. Of course the good news is that you can choose to put whatever hard drive you want into your ABS laptop, as it is custom-built to your specifications.

With the high-end parts that are used, it's hardly surprising that the Z5 offers great performance. There are very few applications that would have any difficulties running on the Mayhem Z5. The drawback to all of this performance, of course, is that battery life suffers. Both ASUS laptops are able to provide at least two hours of battery life for most usage scenarios, but even in the least strenuous battery rundown tests the Mayhem Z5 is not able to reach two hours. As long as you plan on using the laptop when it's plugged in, or only for short periods on battery power, this shouldn't be a problem. If you really need mobility away from wall power, however, you definitely won't want to get this type of laptop without investing in an extra battery (or two).

Gaming performance is obviously the highlight of the Mayhem Z5, and it can handle most current games at maximum detail settings. Frame rates are relatively similar to the Dell XPS M1710 we reviewed a while ago, although with a Core 2 Duo processor and some driver updates it does benchmark somewhat faster. The XPS M1710 has also been updated since we last reviewed it, however, and offers most of the same functionality present in the Mayhem Z5. The primary difference thus comes down to pricing, features, appearance, and support. The price of a similarly equipped Dell XPS laptop is about the same as what ABS offers, and the only major difference in terms of features that we are aware of is the extra two audio ports on the rear of the Mayhem Z5. Outward appearances are really up to the individual to decide what looks best, so some people might be swayed one way or another by that aspect. The support options are the one area where we found ABS is a bit lacking - the customer support was quite good, but the online configuration utility does not allow the selection of more than the standard one-year warranty, and it appears that ABS does not sell warranty extensions. That is definitely a concern, as a lot of people looking at spending ~$3000 on a laptop would like the ability to guarantee everything will continue to function properly for at least three years.

During testing, we did encounter a few minor hiccups. We have already mentioned a couple of these: the lack of Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys was a bit of an irritation, and even with four audio jacks we found the placement of these jacks to be less than ideal if you actually want to connect most 5.1 speaker systems. The last issue is one that came up one time during testing, and we aren't entirely sure what caused it. Attempts to re-create the problem were unsuccessful, so for now we consider this something of a random glitch. Basically, what happened is that while playing Neverwinter Nights 2, the system shut off without warning. At the time this occurred, various locations on the bottom of the laptop were very warm, but the hottest spot by far happened to be the battery. The system was plugged in, but after booting into Windows XP we discovered that the battery was only showing a 5% charge. It could be that we partially dislodged the power adapter, or the battery might not have been securely installed. Throughout the remainder of more than a month of testing, this was the only glitch that occurred so we aren't too concerned about stability. ABS did offer to replace the battery or send us a new laptop when we called tech support, so even if you do encounter a problem they appear ready to quickly help out.

As an entire package, the ABS Mayhem Z5 is very good and deserves consideration along with other top-end notebooks. We would like to see the ability to select a three-year extended warranty, and even with the large keyboard we still had some complaints in that area. Battery life is quite lacking, although that is a problem common to gaming laptops in general. It should have been possible to add a larger battery pack as an upgrade to such a large notebook, which could have improved battery life, but for now that is not an option. Beyond those relatively minor issues, the system performed very well, running all of the games we tried at high detail settings. The Z5 comes with a good-looking 17" widescreen display and the necessary graphics card to drive the display at its native 1920x1200 resolution during gaming sessions. If you're in the market for a powerful but somewhat expensive gaming notebook, the ABS Mayhem Z5 definitely warrants a look. It doesn't have as much bling as some of the competing products, but it will still run about as fast and it won't cost nearly as much as some of the "exotic" notebooks that are available.