Asus N80Vc notebook PC

Hard on the heels of the most stylish netbook on the planet, the S101, Asus brings us the N80Vc.

It's a very stylish 14.1in notebook aimed at the business user, although it would look equally at home in the living room.

Describing the N80Vc’s colour is a bit of a challenge: in some lighting the lid is black, at other times it’s more of a dark chocolate brown, while in others it has a distinctive purple hue.

But whatever the colour, it has a high-gloss finish with an inlaid pattern of silver dots and dashes, which is continued on the wrist pad.

At the heart of our review sample N80Vc was an Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 processor, which has a core clock of 2GHz, backed up by 3GB of 800MHz DDR2 memory, close to the 4GB maximum supported by the motherboard.

The performance is pretty much average for this type of notebook, scoring just 2,995 in PCmark Vantage, but in the real world it has enough power to handle the installed Windows Vista Home Premium OS and any everyday applications you might run on it.

Powering the graphics is an Nvidia Geforce 9300M GS card with its own dedicated 512MB of Video Ram, so it won’t trouble any hardcore gamers. As proved by the average frame rate score in World in Conflict of just 3fps (frames per second), no amount of tinkering with the resolution or in-game detailing will give you anywhere near playable frame rates.

The keyboard is comfortable to use, even though the keybed itself shows a degree of flex, and the trackpad has just the right degree of sensitivity. The two mouse buttons have a reassuring click when pressed and there is a fingerprint reader sitting between them for extra security.