ASUS UL80Vt-A1 Thin and Light Notebook Review

Final Thoughts

The ASUS UL80VT Notebook was easy to use and comfortable. I really enjoyed using a “normal” keyboard. I was frustrated with the difficulty I had to open the optical drive, but that was about it. The touchpad is unique, and as I said before I am indifferent. It was easy to use, and I enjoyed knowing exactly where the touchpad was by feel alone.

My only real complaint was that I was unable to toggle graphics modes while playing a movie or running a program that was the slightest bit graphics intensive. I had to close everything out to the desktop, then switch the graphics mode. That being said, I did enjoy the fact that I could switch for better graphics or better power, and I also had the option of having the computer switch automatically. When I toggled between my options, the screen briefly went blank. I could hardly call that an inconvenience.

The UL80VT had incredible power savings, which translates to more money in your pocket. With that being said, performance was not sacrificed! PCMark showed the overall system performance of the ASUS UL80VT to be above and beyond that of the MSI X340 and all of the power-saving netbooks in our testing suite. The NVIDIA GeForce G210M graphics card more than doubled the overall 3DMark06 score of the NVIDIA GeForce 9300M Graphics card in the N10Jc-A1! The only disappointment here was the hard drive performance. We would have liked to hav seen better numbers here.

The whole point of the UL series of notebooks was to provide low power consumption in a full size notebook, and the UL80VT did not disappoint! I have to admit that I was shocked to see that the idle battery test exceeded my expectations – rarely do we get a notebook that does better than marketing claims! The ASUS UL80VT certainly rivals other notebooks and most netbooks out there for battery life and power consumption.

As for price, the ASUS UL80VT almost doubles the cost of netbooks, coming in at $805 at the time of this writing. That is a fairly moderate price tag, and I think that you certainly get your money’s worth with this one. With incredible battery life, low power consumption and excellent numbers in most of our benchmarks, this laptop should definitely be on your short list.

Legit Bottom Line: The ASUS UL80VT goes above and beyond when it comes to decreasing power consumption and improving battery life!