Asus C90

Has ASUS conquered the heights of mobile gaming? David Hollingworth isn’t quite convinced

It’s a pretty established trend cum fact that if you see the word ‘gaming’ as part of a product’s name or description, you can expect to pay a premium for it. Gaming mice, gaming keyboards, gaming headsets all seem far more expensive than their mortal counterparts. Part of that is that gaming hardware is often more performance focused, and comes with more bells and whistles; another part is that if something’s ‘cool’, it’ll always cost you more. Laptops are of course no exception, and given the scale, gaming laptops can set you back a pretty penny, given they need to combine high end performance with cutting edge portability.

How then, we wonder, does the ASUS C90 – which ASUS does tout as a gaming machine – cut the mustard while still being nearly half the cost of the Toshiba Satellite over the page?

It certainly doesn’t cut corners on the design. The C90 features a piano-gloss finish with an inset swirly pattern that is reminiscent of a warped vinyl record. It’s attractive, but very understated; certainly not the bold statement that the Dell M1730 makes. The display/lid opens up without need of fiddling with any catches or locks, and reveals a silvered interior with black inset keyboard.

This is where you can start to see where some corners have been, if not cut, then certainly scaled back. The keyboard, while very solid and responsive, is of the standard notebook size, albeit with full-size keys. Nor do you find the plethora of multimedia keys and similar jigger-pokery you’ll find in more expensive performance machines. There’s little lighting bling, too, with just a blue underlight to the power switch, and blue status LEDs. The speakers are not obvious, and rightly so; they’re not bad, but most gamers or music lovers will prefer to plug in headphones rather than suffer the watery and bass-light sounds on offer.

Similarly, while the monitor is certainly bright enough, it’s a space-saving 15.4in widescreen capable of 1280 x 800 resolution. Connectivity has also taken bit of a hit; there’s a card reader, at least, but only a single USB port on top of eSATA, HDMI, Firewire and networking ports. There is, however, a TV antenna jack, as the C90 is bundled with an external TV tuner. It’s certainly a thoughtful inclusion, and just one of many hints that this is not so much a gaming laptop as a low-end multimedia machine.

Performance is the ultimate arbiter of a machine’s gaming and entertainment potential, however, so of course we benched the living daylights out the C90. Or, more accurately, we tried to.

We started off with 3DMark06. We couldn’t run it at our usual 1280 x 1024, obviously, but we figured we’d at least get an idea of how the machine compares. Neither its CPU or its graphics are anything close to top end, so we were not expecting much. This was a good thing, as we didn’t get much – our first run achieved a meagre 3244 3DMarks. Not… ideal. The C90 did have a trick up its sleeve, in the shape of ‘Overclocking Turbo Gear’, a software solution to fiddle with the processor’s FSB while also setting the big-arse fan unit that sits behind and underneath the screen to power up and down accordingly. We chose the gaming setting – which boosts performance by 10 per cent – and ran 3DMark06 again. We managed to top 3400 this time, which is not a huge improvement. There’s a top setting, which promises a 15 to 20 per cent overclock, but… well, the display drivers kind of shat themselves at that point and the we very nearly blistered the paint of our testing bench.

Crysis was... sub-optimal. Let’s just leave it at that.

We’ve mixed feelings about the C90. On the one hand, it’s so very stripped back compared to other gaming laptops. You’ve simply got to admit that you’ll never be playing modern games on this machine, or just look elsewhere if that’s what you want a laptop achieve. But that said, at this price point any comparison between, say, the C90 and Dell’s XPS laptops seems unfair at best. The C90 is very much a machine that you will compute on first, and might be able to game on a distant second. It’s got some great media extras, and comes at an excellent price, but don’t expect anything like ‘gaming’-level performance.