We posted a short piece about Asus’ new N-Series laptops yesterday, along with a short video showing the N20 Centrino 2 model. To recap, this is a low-cost range of four models (at the moment) produced by Asus’ laptop division – a totally separate division to the team that produces the Eee PC.

Today we have the base model in the N-Series – the N10. This uses an Intel Atom N270 processor rather than a Core 2 Duo, which means it’s really a netbook rather than a laptop. However, the design is very much along the lines of Asus’ other (and much more expensive) ultra-portables and like the N20, it’s rather stylish.

More impressive is its specification, particularly the graphics chip. In addition to the same so-so Intel 945 graphics found on other netbooks, the N10 also has a discrete nVidia GeForce 9300M graphics chipset – enabled with the flick of a switch (and a reboot). The result? The N10 is the first netbook we’ve seen that’s capable of playing 3D games at reasonable resolutions and frame rates. More info and a video of the N10 in action after the cut.

As you can see in the video, the N10 is larger than both the Eee PC 901 and Eee PC 1000, but it’s still very much an ultra-portable. The keyboard is much more in line with what you’d expect to find on a traditional laptop, although the keys lack a little too much travel for our taste.

It has the usual selection of ports, along with a couple of firsts for a netbook – HDMI and ExpressCard/34. The former obviously complements the nVidia GeForce 9300M graphics chip, although our very early tests indicate that while the N10 can cope with 480p HD video with ease, it struggles a little with 720p. We’ll report back on this in our full review, next week.

The rest of the N10’s specification is equally impressive, though we did look at the top-end model with a 320Gb SATA drive, 802.11a/b/g/n and 2Gb of DDR2 RAM. It also comes with an external USB-powered DVD-writer, though this tray-loader is rather too bulky to carry around all day.

The 10.2in, 1024 x 600 screen is perhaps a little disappointing – not for its clarity (far from it, though it has a glossy coating), but rather for its size and resolution. There’s room in the lid for a larger display and although the N10’s screen doesn’t look quite so mismatched as that on the original Eee PC 4G, its thick bezel is a little incongruous.

Of course a larger, higher-resolution screen will adversely affect battery life, which may have been a consideration for Asus given that the N10 ships with a three-cell battery as standard. but this model will at least ship with a six-cell battery. We can't test battery life yet, though – we're still waiting for a battery from Asus.

When flipped into high-performance graphics mode, the N10 runs surprisingly well. The 1.6GHz N270 processor is hardly a powerhouse, but the GeForce 9300M chipset is still capable of running Call of Duty 4 at the screen’s native 1024 x 600 resolution. We had to drop anti-aliasing down to 2x to keep the frame-rate up, but the game runs very smoothly otherwise. The video shows this in much more detail, but you’ll see that the N10 really is the first netbook that’s suitable for serious gaming.

As mentioned earlier, the N10 feels much more like a traditional ultra-portable than a netbook with the odd cut corner, but this is perhaps no surprise given its laptop (rather than netbook) heritage.

We’re still waiting for confirmation of a UK price, but you can expect it to be on the high side for a netbook. N10 pre-orders in the US are around the $600 mark, which is about the same as the Eee PC 1000. It will also be interesting to see how the N10 stacks up against the Eee PC S101 – Asus’ forthcoming high-end, low-cost ultraportable (if that makes sense...).

We’ll publish a full review of the Asus N10 netbook next week – hope you enjoy the video.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (52)