ASUS W90Vp: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870... with CrossFire

Closing Thoughts

After extensive testing, the ASUS W90Vp leaves us with a lot of mixed emotions. Some aspects of the design we absolutely love, others are fine, and a few things we really dislike. When it comes to the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870, it's not too surprising that we have similar emotions. Let's start with a discussion of the laptop.

On the good side, we really like the LCD. If you're going to purchase a large desktop replacement system, getting an LCD that can actually compete with desktop displays is a definite plus. The size and native resolution even compete well with desktop systems; only users of 30" LCDs will have to give up anything in the resolution department. ASUS also includes some nice extras, like the Razer mouse and large backpack. Perhaps most impressive is that you can get all this for "only" $2400 -- or $2200 if you purchase the W90Vp-X2 and skip out on the second hard drive. That's still a lot of money, but we need to put that in perspective. The cheapest quad-core Q9000 notebook we can find comes from HP and starts at around $1400. Needless to say, you don't get anywhere near the same level of graphics performance in that system. On the subject of performance, this W90Vp trades blows with a Clevo D901C using 8800M GTX SLI. A current version of the D901C should surpass the W90Vp in the majority of benchmarks, but such systems start at over $3000 for 9800M GTX SLI, puts them in a different price category. Throw in the free overclocking, and ASUS W90Vp is actually one of the better values when it comes to high-end mobile gaming -- provided you want to lug around a 15 pound "laptop leviathan".

Overall performance is generally good, but the driver situation gives us pause. If ASUS or ATI could provide some guarantee of regular driver updates, we would be far more willing to recommend the W90Vp. As it stands, with the beta drivers ATI sent us performance is about where expected in most titles, but at least two games that we tested (Riddick: Dark Athena and FEAR 2: Project Origin) do not have currently functional CrossFire profiles. Come December, we expect the number of games that lack CrossFire profiles to increase rapidly. This is an area we plan to keep an eye on, and if we hear of any improvements or changes will make sure to keep you updated.

Besides the driver situation, we encountered a few other oddities during testing of the W90Vp. First, the fingerprint scanner tended to be a little schizophrenic, particularly when resuming from hibernation or sleep mode. Sometimes it would take a few minutes before the scanner would start working, sometimes it wouldn't ever start working, and other times it worked fine. Most of the time, we would just type in our password manually, but that sort of defeats the purpose of the fingerprint scanner. The other major gripe we have is with the touch sensitive multimedia buttons. We lost track of the number of times we accidentally brushed the volume control area to the left of the keyboard while playing a game. Having the volume suddenly jump to ear splitting levels is not something we enjoy, and there didn't appear to be any good way to disable this feature short of uninstalling/disabling the ASUS keyboard control utility -- which provides, among other things, the on-screen indicators for brightness, volume, and other functions (not a huge loss, but still...). We also had several occasions where we must have inadvertently bumped one of the keys across the top of the keyboard, resulting in the ASUS media center loading and taking control away from whatever we happen to be doing. In short, while touch sensitive keys might look cool, we actually dislike them. If you want to include extra keys, give us keys that require you to actually press them instead of just brush over them.

Overall, the ASUS W90Vp is a good package, and if you want a high-end gaming notebook without dropping $3000 or more, it's definitely worth a closer look. It's very likely you will encounter driver issues during the life of your system, but that's been the case with most gaming laptops up until NVIDIA's latest mobile driver updates. It's good to see some competition in the mobile GPU sector again, and it looks like ATI is ready to offer good performance at substantially lower prices -- just like they've been doing on the desktop. However, if ATI wants to be taken seriously in the mobile gaming sector, they will need to address the driver shortcomings.

In the meantime, hopefully ASUS will do a good job of providing at least quarterly driver updates for any of their CrossFire notebooks. So far, all of the ATI notebook drivers on the ASUS website failed to support the W90Vp, but then it's only been available for a couple months. Even if worse comes to worst and you don't get updated drivers, the W90Vp can still function as a decent portable workstation or multimedia device. Just don't forget the power brick!