Introducing the ASUS X72D/K72DR

The ASUS X72D is an interesting beast and a testament to just how far prices have fallen on Blu-ray capable hardware. It also gives us the opportunity to play with a triple-core mobile AMD chip, something we haven't yet enjoyed on the review bench. While a mobile Phenom II and Mobility Radeon HD 5470 may not be the most exciting pieces of kit in the world, they can be used to buttress an attractive and affordable build able to handle most computing tasks without breaking the bank.

Today we'll be figuring out just how well three AMD cores can compete with two hyper-threaded Intel cores at the entry level, and whether or not the X72D delivers the solid multimedia experience it was intended for. Note that our review model is labeled X72D, but it's the same design as the readily available K72DR--only with Blu-ray and a 7200RPM drive compared to the stock model available at Newegg. We'll refer to the notebook as the X72D throughout this review, but the two names are synonymous--the X72D is just the upgraded model. Here are the specs of our review sample.

Even if it isn't that exciting, the most interesting part in the X72D is the AMD Phenom II N830 at its heart. AMD processors have been somewhat rarefied around here since manufacturers are typically more interested in throwing flashier, more exciting Intel-based units our way, so it's nice to get our hands on one of AMD's faster tri-core mobile chips. The Phenom II N830 runs its three cores at 2.1 GHz and is basically a mobile, power-binned version of the L3 cache-less desktop Athlon II X3. While these cores aren't as fast clock-for-clock as competing Intel chips, they're fast enough, and a healthy jump over AMD's old K8-based mobile chips.

There's still a major stumbling block for AMD in terms of power consumption, though: an AMD-based notebook has to power both a northbridge and a southbridge, while most of this functionality is either handled by integrated hardware in Intel's mobile processors or by the single power friendly HM55/PM55 chip. It's not a case of just having more chips, but when you look at the manufacturing processes in use and the historical data, AMD hasn't done well on getting power use in check. Having to run three of their chips compared to two of Intel's chips is going to be a big hurdle.

The odd choice is the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 dedicated GPU. Given the 17" chassis we would've liked to see at least a Mobility Radeon HD 5650, but what makes the anemic 5470 even more puzzling is how aggressive of an implementation it is. While the chip itself is still the same dismal DX11 rehash of the old 4300/4500 series, plugging along with just 80 stream processors and a paltry 64-bit memory bus, ASUS has opted to clock it at a staggering 750MHz. As has become customary with low-end chips, the 5470 has also been outfitted with 1GB of DDR3—about 512MB more than it could ever use—clocked at a healthy 1.6 GHz effective. This is pretty much as good as the 5470 is going to get, but that isn't saying much. For comparison we have the Dell Studio 14 in our charts, which uses a 5470 at a lower 675MHz core clock.

The remainder of the X72D is fairly healthy. 4GB of DDR3 is clocked at 1333MHz instead of the usual 1066MHz, and ASUS saw fit to equip the unit with a 500GB, 7200 RPM Seagate hard disk. 5400 RPM drives are starting to phase out of the ASUS lineup, and that's a good thing. There's also a combination Blu-ray reader, DVD writer, suggesting the X72D's intended market, but that Blu-ray drive is only going to be pushing a 1600x900 screen—no 1080p for us. What's puzzling is the lack of eSATA, USB 3.0, FireWire, or ExpressCard. Any one of these would be excellent for external storage, but apparently we're stuck with USB 2.0 still. This is even more bizarre when you recall the concerted push ASUS was making to add USB 3.0 to all of their hardware.

Kicking the Tires of the ASUS X72D

It's unfortunate that a journey around the ASUS X72D is going to reveal something that's large for large's sake. Don't misunderstand me: as an owner of a 17.3" notebook I can definitely appreciate the basic benefits inherent in a notebook being simply larger. You'll see that ASUS hasn't taken the best advantage of the space available, though.

Starting where we usually do—with the lid—we find the traditional "black" glossy plastic with a silver ASUS logo in the center. If you look closely you can see a small sort of thatched diamond pattern on a dark brown background that's almost too subtle by half; overall the lid is attractive but not exciting. If they're going to put glossy plastic anywhere it might as well be here, but we still pine for the day when glossy plastic goes the way of the dinosaur.

Unfortunately ASUS continues to employ glossy plastic on the screen bezel, one of the worst places to put it. Glossy screen finishes are already reflection prone, but putting glossy plastic—even if it's black—around the bezel just exacerbates things, and that's ignoring the fact that the bezel is going to be one of the first places to pick up loads of fingerprints. It's not completely unattractive, but it also isn't exactly practical either. A minor gripe, but one we've had to repeat a few too many times.

Mercifully the body of the notebook is devoid of gloss, excepting the black plastic between the keys on the chiclet keyboard. The majority of the inside surface is a textured matte plastic that makes for a comfortable place to rest your wrists. It's brown, an unusual color for a notebook, but the color is very dark and doesn't call attention to itself. As a whole, it's not very exciting looking but not an eyesore either: the surface is functional and gets the job done.

As for the keyboard, I'm a fan of the chiclet style and ASUS has a decent implementation here. There's some flex if you push hard on the center but for basic typing it isn't bad at all. We'd prefer no flex at all, but minimal is adequate. I would like to make a request, though: the ASUS style keyboards with 10-key are too crowded. There's ample room on this chassis to stretch things out and give the number pad a full-sized zero key instead of letting it get cut in half by the right arrow key. This isn't a major gripe, but real estate has been left on the table that could've been better used. As is becoming customary, all of the X72D's shortcuts are Fn key combos, including the media, volume, and wireless controls.

The touchpad, on the other hand, suffers from the same problem I noted in the U35Jc review. While it's not horrible to use, it has the same texture as the rest of the palm rest, just indented, and again ASUS is employing a single mouse button that acts as a rocker switch for the left and right mouse buttons. These are minor issues—the touchpad is plenty functional—but they're still problems that we'd like to see addressed in future designs. Integrating the touchpad into the rest of the surface shell is always going to look and feel incredibly chintzy and cheap, and this is something that could be remedied at minor expense.

When you get to the remainder of the body, you're going to be somewhat disappointed. As I mentioned on the previous page, the port selection is ample but still missing any kind of high speed connection for external storage. Port placement is at least logical, but there's a big chunk on the front of the right side that's just blank plastic, and this is space where additional expansion—say an ExpressCard slot or the media card reader—could have gone. Alternatively, the headphone jacks could also have been moved up. It's minor, but indicative of a feeling that ASUS hasn't made the best use of the space that comes with a notebook in this form factor.

Another disappointment comes when you pop the expansion panel off of the bottom of the X72D. The hard disk bay and memory slots are accounted for, but most of the wireless NIC is covered and inaccessible. An enterprising user might find a way to upgrade the processor through here, but the real disappointment is the lack of a second hard disk bay. There's space in this build for it: the actual processor, northbridge, and GPU are all covered by a single copper heatpipe that exhausts out of the left side of the notebook, resulting in a very compact heat zone. As you'll see later, this cooling design isn't the most efficient one either. Simply stated, ASUS could've done better with the X72D given the size of the chassis.

General Performance with the X72D

This is where things are going to get interesting. With the 5470's 'roided out 750 MHz core clock and a 2.1 GHz triple core AMD processor on tap, the X72D should hopefully perform fairly well in our testing suite.

Unfortunately, while the 500 MHz core clock advantage the AMD Phenom II N830 has is enough for it to beat the Phenom II P920, three 2.1 GHz cores just aren't enough to tackle the pair of hyper-threaded 2.4 GHz cores in the Intel Core i3-370M. Intel's chips have a substantial advantage clock-for-clock, keeping the third core of the Phenom II from making up the lost ground. In order for that third core to really matter, the Phenom II needs to be running at clocks closer to the Intel competition, which unfortunately just doesn't seem to be possible with a 45nm process and Phenom II architecture.

Gaming on the X72D

Given the—let's be generous and say "humble"—ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 the ASUS X72D hands the heavy-lifting off to, we're not expecting miracles and as such have chosen our test suite accordingly. For the 5470 we're using our "Low" preset, but because the X72D is a 17" notebook with a 1600x900 screen, we've tested at that resolution as well. The 750MHz core clock on the 5470 means this is about as fast as this GPU is going to get, but you'll see that's not quite enough for gaming at 1366x768 and nowhere near enough for gaming at 1600x900.

First, our 3DMark benches.

In some cases, the 5470 seems to be limited by the Phenom II; the Studio 14 has a slower core clock on the GPU but a much faster processor, making most of the results a wash.

Well, the 5470 can game, sort of. StarCraft II generally cedes victory to the Radeons at Low assuming no major CPU bottlenecks (like, say, a 1.6 GHz quad core Phenom II), so no surprises there. But keep in mind these settings are pretty much as low as these games can go, and frankly StarCraft II looks horrible at these settings—imagine the original game, in 3D, but with textures from 10 years back and you get the idea. The Mobility Radeon HD 5470 is still miles away from catching up with mainstream class GPUs, though. It picks on the GeForce G 310M pretty liberally, but that's like winning a race with a three-legged horse because the other competitors are dead.

Which raises the same complaints we had when we reviewed the U35Jc and the GeForce G 310M: entry-level GPUs are terrible, offering little value over integrated options. On the X72D, this problem is made more egregious by three things: first, as I've mentioned before, the Radeon HD 5470 is a joke on any platform. Our next generation part has the same number of shaders as its predecessor, and worse, because of DirectX 11 support those shaders are actually slower. So in practice, the difference between the 5470 and last generation's Mobility Radeon HD 4570 is like night and night. But wait, there's more!

The X72D is using AMD's RS880 chipset, which means it already had perfectly serviceable integrated graphics to begin with in the form of the Radeon HD 4290. Since the 5470 just doesn't offer enough gaming performance to merit its inclusion over the IGP (let alone its existence), it's difficult to figure out why it's even here. The 5470 isn't capable of better Blu-ray playback than the 4290—okay, it can bitstream HD audio, but otherwise they're equal—so that's no justification either.

And finally, this is a 17" notebook. In a chassis this size, there's just no reason not to include a Mobility Radeon HD 5650, especially when Acer is happy to offer one in a competing notebook at just $699. The Acer Aspire AS7551G may have one of the worst keyboards on the market and be missing a Blu-ray drive, but in terms of gaming performance it's a far better deal. If Acer can hit that price point, there's no reason ASUS couldn't put a 5650 in the X72D.

Battery, Noise, and Heat

We'll get this out of the way right now: between having to power a 17.3" screen, an AMD Phenom II tri-core processor, an RS880 Northbridge, an SB850 Southbridge, and the Mobility Radeon HD 5470, the anemic six-cell, 48Whr battery included with the ASUS X72D is hopelessly overmatched.

Given that the X72D is so substantial to begin with, it's difficult to imagine too many situations where you'd want to run it unplugged. That's good, because it isn't going to last that long anyhow: even completely idle and with the wireless off the X72D can't eke out three hours of running time. When tasked with media playback, you'll be lucky to finish a movie. This notebook just wasn't made for running off of the battery.

In order to test noise and heat, we ran 3DMark06 in a continuous loop for an hour with HWMonitor running in the background. We recorded the results with HWMonitor.

The thermals aren't very good, but the X72D seems to be tuned to favor silence. Under load the fan would spin faster and was audible, but it was a fairly quiet whooshing sound and wasn't hugely distracting. Temperatures of the computing surface of the unit are actually perfectly fine under load; some heat does radiate off of the top left side of the keyboard (near the exhaust), but overall the unit at least feels cool under load. Still, this is another place where the increased form factor of the 17.3" chassis could have been better used to manage heat: a peak temperature of 91C on the processor cores may be within spec, but it's still high.

Screen Analysis—Not Bad

If the ASUS X72D has a strong point, it has to be the screen. While it's still a TN panel with a mediocre gamut, this isn't a clear loss and it's an improvement over the screens we're used to seeing. Some might take issue with the relatively low 1600x900 resolution, but at least this resolution offers enough vertical space to be useful (as opposed to the utterly poor 1366x768 so common on smaller notebooks.)

It's not consistently placing at the top or bottom of our charts, but the results for the X72D's screen need to be taken in perspective: brightness is still perfectly acceptable, contrast is in line with the better screens we've seen on entry notebooks, and overall color accuracy and gamut is actually pretty decent for a TN panel. Is this screen going to win any awards? No, but it's still notably better than most of the mediocre TN panels that come through here.

Viewing angles aren't bad either, and it's not as hard to find the sweet spot on the X72D as it is on the Dell Studio 17. While we'd still like to see high quality 1080p panels in notebooks, the screen on the X72D at least feels like a step in the right direction, and ASUS does this without breaking the bank.

An Odd Value Proposition

To look at the ASUS X72D, you have to wonder who ASUS was gunning for with this build. The X72D seems aimed at basic users who just want decent all-around performance and an attractive if understated multimedia machine, and on that front we can say it's fairly successful. The Blu-ray reader, fast hard drive, and reasonably good screen are all signs that point to "yes" for this notebook, and with the HDMI port it can legitimately serve double duty as a media center for home users.

The problems start to creep in when performance metrics are taken into account. While it's true the X72D performs at least decently, seeing the Phenom II N830 in action starts to explain why most manufacturers are hesitant to send out AMD-based notebooks for reviews. The N830 isn't terrible, but at some points it even struggles to catch up with Intel's ultra low-voltage chips. At the same time, it draws substantially more power, and the chipset it's paired with only exacerbates things.

This only points to something that's been a continual problem for AMD for years now: they need to seriously step their game up in the mobile market. Intel is competing on power, price, and CPU performance, and with Sandy Bridge on the horizon, AMD's last foothold—integrated graphics performance—is going to disappear. AMD has their Bobcat, Bulldozer, and Llano cores all coming out next year, but for now we've got the old K10.5 designs and they're looking very long in the tooth.

Likewise, the Mobility Radeon HD 5470 just doesn't make sense—in general, and as a dedicated GPU here. The clock speed may be ramped up about as high as it can go, but that doesn't change the fact that the chip is still an underpowered dog incapable of offering a solid gaming experience even at 1366x768. Can you game on it? Yes. But I can push the 380 MHz Radeon HD 3200 in my ThinkPad X100e to deliver playable framerates in some of the games I play, so that's not really the point. The 5470 does not add enough value to justify its inclusion, and this is one point where ASUS could've done a lot better.

Of course, at the end of the day, the big question is price. Can ASUS deliver the X72D at a price point attractive enough to make up for its issues? Well, for starters, our unit is labeled the X72D, but you won't find it anywhere on ASUS's site or in retail (at least not in the US--it looks like the X72D might be a special European model). The K72Dr, on the other hand, is fairly easy to track down, and it's the same model less the Blu-ray and with a 5400 RPM hard drive. At $725 on NewEgg, you can make a fairly convincing case for it as a desktop replacement notebook. For Mom and Pop, I'd definitely choose it over competing Acer notebooks: build quality is better, and unless Mom's planning on fragging noobs in Modern Warfare 2 she's not liable to miss having a faster GPU. Finding the Blu-ray-equipped model is a lot harder, and the best price we've seen of around $950 online is frankly just too much.

And that's really what it's going to boil down to. This is a budget notebook in the performance and features arena, but it's well-built, flexible enough to handle most tasks, and ASUS' standard two-year warranty is still one of the best in the business. If you can find it for a good price—we think about $800 is right, including the BRD Combo drive—then it's definitely worthy of consideration.