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Cinebench '10: 9816
3D Mark '06: 8771
Battery Eater: 330 minutes
While we're less than impressed by the build and looks of the Asus U46SV, we can't deny that the laptop is stuffed with power. One of Intel's latest Sandy Bridge chips, the Core i5 2410M, is ably backed up by 4GB of memory and is strong enough to run any number of applications at once.
The Cinebench score of 9,816 isn't one of the best we've seen lately – that award goes to the Toshiba Qosmio X770, which managed a stupendous 17,063. However, we're confident that even demanding users will get years of use from the Asus U46SV.
This laptop also caters to movie and music editors with its Nvidia GeForce GT 540M graphics card. You can run dedicated editing software without any kind of stuttering or issues, and even have a blast on modern games (although you'll need to turn down detail levels on the more complex titles to keep a respectable frame rate).
If you're more into watching movies than fiddling with them, you can enjoy HD video with smooth playback. We recommend plugging in some decent speakers or headphones, though. The Asus U46SV's built-in efforts are tinny and, strangely, the sound seems to come from the right-hand side of the laptop instead of hitting you head-on.
Despite the excellent performance and dedicated GPU, the Asus U46SV somehow pulls off fantastic battery life. We test our laptops by looping an HD video on full brightness, with performance settings turned to max, which gives a good indication of the minimum life to expect. Most portable laptops manage less than three hours before dying, but the Asus U46SV lasted almost double that before the screen went black.
It's a damn shame the body isn't slimmer or lighter, or this would be one of the most portable laptops we've used in a long time.
