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Review: Old 13.3 inch enclosure gets new CPU and GPU

Like many other laptop makers, Asus made sure its lineup is refreshed with latest CPUs and graphics. So, last year’s U30J laptop got a new name, U30S, and some nice juice in Intel’s Sandy Bridge Core i5-2410M and Nvidia GT 520M graphics. This means that the laptop retained the looks, but now packs a meaner punch with a second gen Core i5 CPU and improved Fermi graphics.

The Core i5-2410M runs at up to 2.9GHz in turbo and it complements Nvidia’s GT 520M graphics well (1GB of DDR3). This 13 incher additionally has 8GB of DDR3 and it’s pretty much evident that it will handle office and multimedia more than fine. Of course, we wanted to check whether Nvidia’s slowest offering from the GT 5x series is powerful enough to provide pleasant gaming at the native resolution of 1366x768.

Asus offers U30S devices with a choice of three CPUs - Core i5 2520M, 2410M  or Core i3 2310M.

Asus U30S comes with a 500GB disk. The battery is an 8-cell one but Nvidia’s Optimus is there to help with saving precious battery life. Of course, any longer gaming will require an outlet, but it’s to be expected with such devices.

The Asus U30S configuration we tested is priced at about €900 and you can find it here.

Specification: