Group test: Asus A6Rp-AP026H

The cumbersomely named Asus A6Rp-AP026H is something of a mixed bag, performing well in some areas while letting itself down in others.

We liked the overall build quality of the laptop – it’s very solid and robust – and it looks slimmer and more elegant than some of its rivals, even though its weight and dimensions are in line with all the other machines in this group.

The 15.4in widescreen display also looks a little larger, perhaps because the bevel surrounding the display is very narrow, so that it seems to fill the entire width of the unit. It definitely looks good when playing DVD films. This is also the only laptop in this group to provide a two-year collect and return warranty, providing added peace of mind.

The marketing people who festooned the keyboard with a gaudy display of stickers (bearing the logos of companies such as Intel and ATI) deserve a clip round the ear, but at least you can peel these off when you get the machine home.

There’s also a small webcam built into the unit, just above the screen – a feature only found in one other machine in this group, the Acer Aspire – so you’ve immediately got all you need to get started with audio/video chat on the internet. The A6Rp-AP026H also has wireless networking built in, so you can easily get onto the internet using any wireless hotspot that you might come across while travelling.

So far, so good. However, there are other areas where the A6Rp-AP026H has clearly compromised to keep its price down. It is based on an Intel Celeron M 420 processor running at just 1.6GHz, and is one of the poorer performers in this group.

To be fair, it is still more than adequate – as are all these systems – for handling ordinary computing tasks such as word processing or spreadsheets, and surfing the internet. However, it might start to struggle a bit when it comes to more demanding resource-hungry work such as photo editing or video transcoding. That’s especially the case as a 128MB chunk of its 512MB system memory is shared with the Radeon Xpress X200 graphics processor, leaving just 384MB available for running Windows and your other applications.

Even then, that still isn’t enough memory for the Radeon to run our Far Cry tests properly. It does perform relatively well in our 3Dmark05 test, so you may be able to get decent performance from older 3D games that don’t need too much video memory. Just don’t expect to play the latest 3D action games at high-quality settings.

The one real weakness, though, is the machine’s battery life. With barely one hour, 20 minutes worth of DVD playback the A6Rp-AP026H isn’t going to be the best choice if you want to play some DVDs on a long train ride. Mobilemark productivity performance is a bit better, but even here you’ll only get about an hour and a half in total.

The poor battery life is disappointing, as we found the rest of the machine’s design and features quite attractive. It’s still a decent option if you know you’re going to be working in places, such as a home study or hotel room, where you’ve got access to a mains power supply. However, regular travellers who want to work on trains and planes will prefer a laptop with much better battery life.

This article is part of a group test of laptops.
See also:

Introduction
Acer Aspire 5101 AWLMi
Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505
Hi-grade Notino W5600
MSI Megabook M670
Toshiba Satellite Pro A120
Graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf downlaods above.

Group test: Hi-grade Notino W5600

The Hi-grade is a good all-round performer but the processor lets it down  22 Dec 2006

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