A decent 15.6in screen notebook with CPU overclocking, but grainy display and high price tag could put off some buyers
The UL50vs falls under the superior mobility series in Asustek’s range of 15in notebooks.
The casing of the notebook is fairly attractive if you happen to like black, with its brushed black aluminium lid and black plastic shell, keyboard and palm rest. For a larger screened laptop its size and weight has been kept down. The UL50 is 386mm wide, 259mm deep and 264mm thick, and weighs 2.1kg. It’s no Macbook Air, but it’s closer in screen size and overall dimensions to a Macbook Pro, which is 364mm wide, 249mm deep and 241mm thick and weighs 2.49kg.
Overclocking The UL50 has an Intel Core Duo 2 SU7300 1.3Ghz processor, which isn’t all that fast although it is a low power chip. Asus has added technology it calls Turbo 33, and we’ll just call it overclocking. Apparently it’s possible to overclock this chip to get a little more out of it, and Asus claims a 33 per cent overall performance gain but we didn’t see that level of improvement.
The UL50 has power settings that are separate from Windows 7, known as Power4Gear, and that’s where overclocking can be set to add three per cent CPU speed. In the BIOS we were manually able to set the UL50vs to the maximum five per cent overclock, and that was stable enough to use.
The Asus UL50 uses the GS45 chipset, with graphical abilities based around the accompanying Intel Graphics Media Accelerator GPU X4500. This GPU isn’t particularly well known for its amazing ability, but Asus has added the discrete Nvidia GeForce G210M GPU, with 512MB of GDDR3 Video RAM to the mix. This is switchable back and forth from Intel to Nvidia graphics, much like the settings on the MSI X600, which is based around the rival ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4300. As expected, HD media struggled under the basic settings, but worked well with the Nvidia G210M when it was engaged.
