ASUS W90Vp: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870... with CrossFire
by Jarred Walton on May 29, 2009 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Design and Appearance
If we were to summarize the ASUS W90Vp in a few short words: it's big, it's bad, and it's beautiful. And we really do mean big! The Clevo D901C is one of the largest notebooks we've ever tested, and the W90Vp dwarfs it. However, despite the size disadvantage, power requirements are actually quite similar in the two notebooks are relatively close to the same 11.5 pound weight. You can see a few comparison shots between the Clevo D901C (Sager NP9262) in the ASUS W90Vp below.
As a bonus, ASUS also includes a large carrying case for the W90Vp. This is not your standard notebook bag, but is instead a rather large backpack. If you ever had to load this thing around, say for instance at a LAN party, we actually think the backpack will prove far more convenient. It's also large enough to carry the gigantic power brick, the included Razer mouse (another nice bonus), and there's still plenty of room for any other accessories you might want to bring along.
The design and appearance of the W90Vp is very attractive, assuming you go for the "giant laptop" look. It has a brushed aluminum cover with the ASUS logo, a reasonable selection of expansion options, a great LCD (relative to other notebooks), Blu-ray support, and an HDMI port to highlight a few areas. We really only have two complaints with the design. First, there's no latching mechanism on the LCD panel, relying instead on magnets to hold the display closed. They seem to work well enough, but some users might prefer actual latches instead. The other issue also involves the top panel. As you might expect, it's heavy, and after several past experiences with notebooks we have to wonder about the ability of the hinges to hold up over the long haul. It's not something we can review directly, as any problems in that area will likely take months or longer to manifest, and they appear relatively durable. However, we recommend users exercise some care when they open or close any laptop display, and that goes double for large 17" and 18.4" notebooks.
If you want to access the internal components on the W90Vp, the only thing you should need to remove is the bottom cover. ASUS uses one large cover instead of several smaller covers, secured surprisingly by just four small screws. After removing the screws, the whole bottom panel slides towards the rear of the system, at which point you can lift it away. Numerous plastic prongs help hold the cover in place, but these small prongs are also somewhat fragile so exercise caution if you ever remove/replace the cover.
Inside you can see the two large GPU heatsinks/heatpipes, another HSF/heatpipe for the CPU, the three fans, and other components. You can see that one of the screws on the GPU heatsinks is missing its spring, but a bigger concern for many users is going to be the "warranty void if removed" sticker on the CPU heatsink. Yes, like several other vendors we looked at, ASUS doesn't want you to upgrade your CPU. We've heard that it's technically not something they can enforce, but nevertheless it's not something we enjoy seeing. Make sure you're willing to live with that limitation before purchasing a W90 with the intent to upgrade the CPU.
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nubie - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Well. . .If there was a PCI-e standard for mobile, then maybe you could choose your graphics and the laptops would have to work properly with standard drivers?
What if you used DisplayPort for the interface to the display? Then you could plug in any graphics chip and it would work with the standard drivers.
You would of course need "thermal" stages, where you had a cap on the amount of power that it could dissipate, but if you wanted to set your PC on a fan and cut out a vent you could move up.
I think that a standard needs to be set already. There is no excuse for making a handful of extra or different pins, or form factors off by a few millimeters just so that you can't build your own system or upgrade it.
I would hope that as time progresses you could put a faster chip on a smaller more advanced process into an older laptop, or just choose the exact graphics you want (IE less powerful) in a system with the processing power you need.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Unfortunately, the biggest reason for a lack of unified mobile GPU standards is that OEMs along with ATI and NVIDIA like to compete in a variety of ways. Look at Apple and imagine trying to tell them they their laptops need to conform to a standard layout.It *could* happen, and for higher performance laptops with discrete GPUs like the W90Vp, that would be ideal. In fact, the GPU modules in the W90 look very similar to the GPU modules from NVIDIA. The problem is, no one wants to do the work to make sure upgraded GPUs would work -- plus you need to worry about having not just a standardized form factor, but standardized heatsinks/fans.
Ultimately, a standardized notebook form factor would probably lose more customers than it would gain. Everyone would complain about the "boring design and aesthetics", and the number of new bugs/problems we'd see would probably skyrocket. But hey, maybe someone will prove me wrong on this and make the idea work....
Goty - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Wait, NVIDIA managed to release drivers on all platforms simultaneously ONCE and suddenly they have a unified driver model? I'd have to wait and see if that trend continues down the road, but I'm not holding my breath.There's also the issue that a large number of notebooks simply won't accept the drivers directly from NVIDIA.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
NVIDIA previously had a mobile driver program where they committed to quarterly updates, and they delivered on that three times (though the first wasn't quite "quarterly"). The drivers started out several months behind the desktop releases, and now we have drivers released on all platforms twice (185.81 and then the final 185.85) - though granted they're mostly the same thing.As far as laptops where the NVIDIA drivers won't work, are they in the "unsupported" list? They've worked on every laptop I've tried, which ranged from 8600M to 9500M to 8800M SLI to 9800M. What laptops specifically don't work or have problems? Or are these problems caused by old and cluttered Windows installs where malware or something else gets in the way?
If NVIDIA doesn't continue to release unified drivers, we'll certainly point it out, but at the same time they've already strongly committed to minimum quarterly updates. That's more than anyone else has done for mobile graphics.
rbfowler9lfc - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Really impressive battery life. You can watch a 1080p movie on the road, as long as it doesn't last longer than 1h. Bah!