When we first unboxed the ASUS W90, a behemoth that weighs 13.4 pounds, it was quickly dubbed The Beast for very obvious reasons. However, the 18.4-inch desktop replacement’s physicality isn’t the only reason the notebook earns that moniker; the Intel quad-core CPU, dual ATI Crossfire graphics cards, and 6GB of RAM enabled the machine to steamroll through every benchmark we could throw at it. Add in Blu-ray, a premium design, booming speakers, and a beautiful Full HD display, and the $2,499 ASUS W90 stands as one of the premier gaming and multimedia notebooks available today.
High-End Design
The first thing you’ll notice about the ASUS W90, besides its massive 17.7 x 13.2 x 2.5-inch girth, is the slick aesthetic; ASUS has taken great care to make certain that the PC screams high quality. The W90 features a gray brushed-metal lid (highlighted by ASUS’ logo), a black brushed-aluminum base (which picks up lots of fingerprints and smudges), a glossy bezel surrounding the keyboard, and leather touches near the hinges. As with many premium notebooks, the W90 features an edge-to-edge display, which is a first for any ASUS notebook.
At more than 13 pounds, we can’t imagine the W90 being lugged around very often (especially with its 2.6-pound power brick, which weighs more than some netbooks). Still, ASUS is prepared for that eventuality, shipping the W90 with a backpack. Good thing, too, since the notebook is too big to fit into most laptop cases.
Keyboard and Buttons
The wide base provides plenty of room for comfortable touch-typing. The keyboard itself has some unfortunate flex, but not so much that it’s a major issue. In addition, we would’ve preferred the keys to be covered in a glossy coating to match the eye-popping appeal of the rest of the system; the matte keys felt fine, however. A large, trapezoid-shaped touchpad allowed us to navigate the cursor around the desktop with ease, and the mouse buttons were responsive but a bit stiff.
Above the keyboard is a glossy strip that houses a number of responsive, touch-sensitive keys for muting audio, disabling the touchpad, and adjusting the screen brightness and color. Also counted among these keys is a zoom button (that gives users a 3X zoom into the desktop or Web page), a 2-megapixel webcam launcher, and a power-setting button that lets users toggle between Standard, Power Savings, and Overclocking modes. On the far left is a button for booting into the ASUS Express Gate instant-on operating system.
The ASUS AI TouchMedia control panel (a touchstrip located left of the keyboard), let us raise and lower the sound with ease, as well as skip DVD chapters. All in all, the touchkeys were responsive, but the forward skip button is located too closely to the volume strip; attempting to raise the audio resulted in several instances of jumping to the next chapter.
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