Asus N53SN with Intel® Core™ i7 Processor

I finally bought a new laptop during PC Fair 2011 at KLCC Convention Centre!!! I decided to get Asus due to its reliability and excellent built quality whereby I been getting good reviews on Asus laptop products.

I got myself the Asus N53SN with the specification listed below:

Processor: Intel® Core™ i7 2630QM 

Operating System: Windows® 7 Home Premium 

Chipset: Intel® HM65 Express Chipset

Memory: 8GB (This model support up to 16GB)

Display: 15.6" 16:9 HD (1366x768)/Full HD (1920x1080) LED backlit Asus Splendid Video Intelligent Technology

Graphic: NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 550M with 2GB DDR3 VRAM

HDD: 640GB 5400rpm 

Optical Drive: Super-Multi DVD

Card Reader: 3 -in-1 card reader ( SD/ MS/ MMC)

Camera: 2.0 Mega Pixel web camera

Network: Integrated802.11 b/g/n

Interface: 1 x Microphone-in jack, 1 x Line-in Jack, 1 x VGA port/Mini D-sub 15-pin for external monitor, 1 x USB 3.0 port,

3 x USB 2.0 port(s), 1 x RJ45 LAN Jack for LAN insert, 1 x HDMI

Audio: Built-in Speakers And Microphone, Bang & Olufsen ICEpower®, SonicFocus


Also with freebies:

• Asus wired moused
• Asus plastic tumbler
• Asus Umbrella
• Asus sling bag
• Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security (Software)
• Starcraft II: Wing of Liberty (Starter Kit Game)
• Lola laptop bag (Seriously one weird laptop bag)

I also got a '3 days, 2 nights to Beijing, China'. Basically its a free accommodation, breakfast and free tour guide whereby flight to Beijing is not included. It's a very good deal as lots of stuff given and the trip to Beijing is from the so called Wheel of Fortune that I had to spin.

So~ here is all the screen shots:

Yes! I truly made a smart choice =P

The Asus N53SN laptop specification

Burnished aluminium effect with the metallic Asus logo 

Front view of the Asus N53SN and the capability to switch on and off the webcam

Left side view: LAN, Card reader, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0
Not forgetting the awesome Intel Core i7! =D 

Right view: Microphone, earphone , USB 2.0 x 2 and DVD-RW drive 

Strong and solid hinge
Also the wireless on and off switch

Asus Wired mouse
Extra heavy charger (Believe me.. its very heavy)
Mushkin 4GB RAM (Free add-on during PC Fair) 

Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security
Starcraft: Wings of Liberty Starter Kit

Asus laptop sling bag
Lola laptop bag (Looks cool from outside by bright green from inside...)

Freebies: Umbrella, tumbler and car sunscreen

Good built and durable laptop with high specification is what really makes this laptop an award winning powerhouse laptop. Yet it's not much for mobility since it weight a whooping 3kg with battery and not forgetting a near 1kg for its jumbo size charger. To some user, the USB 3.0 is optional but for me it's a must to have when I rely heavily on transferring lots of virtual hard disk and gigabyte size movies. The USB 3.0 port comes great with my Buffalo MiniStation Lite USB3.0 =)

Having the processor to have four cores/eight threads is crucial when needed to run virtual environments and I bet gamers would fully utilize this multi-core processor. Not forgetting this laptop is packed with 8GB RAM and I do love the fact it does support up to 16GB RAM. The hard disk given is a bit disappointing as the speed is 5400rpm which near future I'm sure to upgrade it.

Let me point out another thing, which is the wireless b/g/n. I'm currently using the Linksys WRT610N Simultaneous Dual N Band Wireless Router, and it would be great to have that 300mbps speed to my advantage on this laptop for video streaming out transfer data within my network.

Overall this is one superb product with lots of freebies given when I bought it during PC Fair 2011!

Next I will cover the performance and features once I upgrade the Operating System to Windows 7 Ultimate.

Buffalo MiniStation Lite USB3.0 (HD-PEU3 Series)

Just got myself a Buffalo MiniStation Lite USB3.0!

Check out the specification:

• Support for legacy USB 2.0 and SuperSpeed USB 3.0 
• Preformatted hard drive is ready for immediate use with Windows® and Mac®
• Connect to your computer for additional storage or backup of your music, photo, video and data files
• Perfect comopanion for your laptop or netbook - No external power supply needed
• Enhance the overall perfomance of your PC and increase file transfer rates up to 135% over USB 2.0 hard drives
• Eco minded power management tool regulates power usage, conserving energy and battery consumption 
• Buffalo's Backup Utility for automatic backup of your PCs, and Time Machine® support for continuous backup of your Mac computer

I got this at the Digital Mall Petaling Jaya with the price of RM219 and mainly I will be using this to store all the VPC or Virtual Hard Disk. The key point about this portable hard disk is the transfer rate by using USB 3.0 (Max 3 Gbps) and the utilities bundle together to make the transfer speed even more faster.

 The  USB SuperSpeed portable HDD + USB3.0 Mini Connector + Manuals

USB 3.0 A side Mini Connector and B side connector

The USB 3.0 is like an extension of micro USB B. It's easy to identified the USB 3.0/SuperSpeed cable since the inside plastic is blue and the indicator of 'SS' on the USB sign.

USB 3.0/SuperSpeed is backward compatible with USB 2.0/1.1

I have tried using my micro USB from my HTC Desire HD cable and it fits

LED light indicator

LED emits white light for the Buffalo logo and kinda like greenish/yellow light on the left side when loading data. There is a short blue light emitted when I plug in the cable to my laptop USB port.

Application and Utilities for the Buffalo MiniStation Lite USB3.0

 BuffaloTools - Utilities for better performance

I would mostly use the TurboPC and TurboCopy as it does improve the performance of file transfer. This is done by configuring and managing well on the data caching. At the moment I can't really test the performance as I don't have a USB3.0 port on both my laptop and desktop yet it's good to have it once USB 3.0 is more widely available in the market.

Buffalo TurboCopy

The installed utilities actually improve the User Interface and additional features shown when copy or move files. This actually apply to all file copy or move the the cached being use when transferring file.

I personally like the sleek and compact design of the portable HDD yet this is the MiniStation Lite which lacking Encryption Model available at the HD-PXTU2 Series. Still! The LED emitted light on the Buffalo logo is very solid and bright =P

USB 3.0 was release more than a year but the adaptation for this SuperSpeed for the mainstream consuption is so laggard due to the complication of Intel updating their chipset specification. Right now most USB 3.0 port available in the market is not direct support from the native chipset and Windows 7

Intel basically have their own plan on the development of Light Peak technology.i Rght now, Intel basically change their mind and finally adopt USB 3.0 in the Sandy Bridge chipset. I guess this is due to the overall demand from the mainstream consumer and pressure from AMD to adopt USB 3.0 to their Fuzion chipsets.

2.5 Terabytes For Now

This is four stack of hard disk I have with tons of japanese animation, software, tv series and movies. The past few years price of per Gigabyte constantly drop which getting higher capacity hard disk is more affordable. Till now I have 2.5 Terabyte of SATA external storage space which not added yet on my desktop~

I was more hoping to purchase 32MB cache but as always the demand for that model always ran out of stock yet I'm fine with 16MB cache as I'm more focus on storage capacity and performance is second priority.

Here is a simple list of storage space conversion:
1 Terabyte = 1024 Gigabytes
1 Terabyte = 1048576 Megabytes
1 Terabyte = 1073741824 Kilobytes
1 Terabyte = 1099511627776 Bytes

And here is a conversion which in the near future we might going to reach:
1 Exabyte = 1048576 Terabytes
1 Exabyte = 1024 Petabytes
1 Exabyte = 0.000976563 Zettabytes

To makes things simple:
Byte > Kilobyte > Megabyte > Gigabyte > Terabyte > Petabyte > Exabyte > Zettabyte

Sarotech HardBox FHD-354US2, The box I use to transfer almost all my SATA hard disk which this model is fully advance aluminum for good heat dispersion and eSATA supported for high speed data transfer.

Samsung Pleomax PKB780B

Most user would just normally get a normal and budget wise keyboard which less than RM20 but for me it’s totally not an option whereby it’s one of the most important input device that i have been using every single day. It’s important for me to get the most comfortable keyboard to use since i will be gaming, doing assignment and giving instruction to my system.

So basically here i got a keyboard which Malaysia will never have as my buddy, Ray help me to get it at Taiwan and seriously i was worried that the chinese character will disturb a little but it seem like its cool as maybe one day i might be able to understand how to type chinese character properly hahaha. Oh i didn’t mention that this keyboard has a chinese character printed on almost every keys. The thing i like about this keyboard is that the smoothness when typing and until now i still haven’t try gaming with it but i assume it would be fun to use.

Other than that it’s also very slim and have most of the useful hotkeys function that i need but too bad they don’t have built-in USB port as that would be very useful for me. I would love to have gaming keyboard but i rather wait for the product to be more mature before buying one~

WinFast A7800 GS TDH

The first AGP graphics card with Geforce 7800 series GPU embedded

Well another upgrade on my system which i’m still stuck on AGP architecture but still also how often you see a 7800 series on AGP~!

Overall the performance is great not to mention the 3DMark05 i score was above 4500++. During gaming time everything was set to the maximum while highend game like Doom 3 and Quake 4 i manage to set to a very high setting and didn’t face any lag. Well this is not what i really had in mind as i was planning to save up money to migrate a new system which has AM2 processor, DDR2 ram, PCI-E slot for graphic card, SATA2 enabled and many more~ Still… can’t be so demanding since haven’t work yet so i just enjoy what i have now since i don’t have any problem with any game so far~

Got my new Creative X-Fi

Finally i got the sound card which give me satisfaction on my music and gaming but my actual target was to the the Fitality edition but its quite hard to get due to my casing don’t have the space to put in the front panel and its very expensive. So i ended up with ExtremeMusic edition which its almost the same with Fitality except its not incuded with the remote control, front panel and also additional 64MB of built in RAM. Overall the performance is superb! guess the only thing left is to get a THX sound system which would need at least RM 1,500… For now it doesn’t matter as my current sound system still can blast until few block away hehehe~