Asus U33Jc: Much Ado About Bamboo
by Vivek Gowri on July 29, 2010 9:01 AM ESTASUS U33Jc - Application Performance
I’ll start off with a complaint: ASUS loads waaay too much bloatware on their systems. This came up in the U30Jc review too, but I’ll just reiterate my displeasure here. I really don’t need links to The New York Times, or Amazon’s Kindle Store, or eBay, or any of that other nonsense on my desktop, thanks. It’s not as bad as Sony used to be, but it’s getting there. Some of ASUS’ built in utilities are quite nice, like Power4Gear and the Notebook Hardware Control, but all of the third-party preinstalled software is stuff that needs to be removed immediately. As we showed in our U30 review, it can really kill performance and battery life if left on the system.
Now onto the benchmarks. After our review, ASUS upgraded the processor in the U30Jc to the 2.4GHz Core i3-370M, and the U33 carries that over, along with the Intel HD/Nvidia G310M plus Optimus combo. The U33Jc get’s a larger 500GB hard drive, while the U30 makes do with a 320GB drive, though both are 5400RPM units. Both have 4GB of DDR3 1066. With nearly identical specs, we should expect similar performance from the two.
And similar it is. The U33 has slightly better overall processing performance than the U30 test unit we had, which can be attributed to the faster CPU in the U33 (our U30Jc unit was an older SKU that used a 2.26GHz i3-350M). We had some issues with the hard drive tests in PCMark05, but the PCMark Vantage score was a fair bit higher than the U30. We’ll update this section later on with the PCMark05 results, but for right now, the rest of the benchmarks indicate performance on par or slightly better than the U30, which makes the U33Jc the best performing sub-4 pound system right now.
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Kegetys - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
Disapointing to have such a nice "premium" quality machine be ruined by a poor quality display once again. I would have expected Asus to pair it with a better screen. Or maybe they want me to just stare at the bamboo paneling instead of the display...VivekGowri - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
Hey, I'd be down for that - the bamboo paneling looks really nice.hybrid2d4x4 - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
Thanks for the review and continuing to harp about bad displays. I've been holding out for the UL30Jt myself, but based on the trend from the U30 and this laptop, I'm guessing the new UL30 is also garbage...I guess I'll never buy a laptop then.
chrnochime - Friday, July 30, 2010 - link
Then don't buy one. Simple as that.Pirks - Friday, August 6, 2010 - link
Or buy a Macbook Prosynaesthetic - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
Maybe if enough people complain, we'll see good displays on laptops again? I noticed HP seems to be doing something about that--the Envy 14 has a quite nice display.Dell's taken the 16" RGBLED option off the SXPS 16 again...
I miss the days of high-resolution 4:3 and 16:10 panels on all laptops...
aebiv - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
I'm glad I got my SXPS 16 when I did. That RGBLED screen truly is marvelous to look at.I think they have it on the precision laptops now though as well.
Full Ctrl - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
I'm planning to buy my wife a U35Jc in about a month, I would definitely spend the extra $100 to get a high quality display. I would probably even spend $150 extra if it was also higher resolution, I'm not too thrilled about the 1366x768 resolution.Vivek: are you guys really doing a U35 review as well, considering how similar they are so similar to the U33?
notext - Friday, July 30, 2010 - link
It is even more disappointing because it is Asus and they did such a nice job with the g73jh-a1/a2 screen. I was hoping they would be putting that effort into all of their higher end laptops in the different screen sizes.crimson117 - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - link
How does MacBook give a good display under $1200?It skimps on other internals, like CPU and hard drive. Also, $1200 is 20% more expensive than U33Jc.
I'd love to see a $200 LCD upgrade option, though. But perhaps not enough people are willing to pay for display quality to make it worth developing.