Asus L8400B
Price: AU$5,299.
Distributor: Cassa Australia
Ph: 1300 365 047, Fax: 07 5445 2069
www.asus.com.tw
The Asus L8400B is a very conservative notebook. It is quite squarish all over but despite its looks, the L8400B is solid and very robust. There were no complaints about the keyboard. The keyboard was well supported and provided a good feel. The keyboard sits very close to the middle of the base. The reason behind this is the cooling fan and air entry vent located up above the keyboard. Only the Toshiba keyboard sits pretty much in the same position.
The Toshiba notebook, however, has a pair of speakers located in each corner rather than a cooling fan. The other notebooks had their keyboards positioned right next to the bottom of the display. The benefit of this design is that you gain a bit more space to rest your palms.
The Asus L8400B comes with a PIII 750, 128MB of RAM and a 12GB Hitachi hard disk drive. For a 750MHz notebook we were quite surprised that it performed as well as an 850 in some cases. In Business Winstone the Asus was slightly faster than the e@PC which had a PIII 850. In the WinBench CPUMark the Asus scored a bit under the Pioneer and e@PC notebooks. The Asus also scored slightly lower than the Toshiba in CPUMark, which also featured a PIII 750.
The Asus performed quite well in Business Disk and Business Graphics. This is probably why it did so well in Winstone (which tests the notebook's overall performance). It performed a little better than the e@PC notebook in Winstone even though it had a slower processor. The 14.8V 3300mAh Li-Ion battery kept this notebook running for a little under three hours (2 hours and 51 minutes). The battery lifts out from underneath the notebook by sliding a long battery latch followed by a shorter safety latch.
The rear ports are open to the elementsâ€"no protective cover was provided. On the back you will find all the audio connectors (headphone, audio in, and microphone), serial, parallel, docking port, modem/LAN port, VGA, TV out port, PS/2, and two USB ports. These are all the standard I/O ports that you will find pretty much on most other notebooks. A second USB port is not that common and is a nice little extra that will come in handy.
The Asus is not an easy notebook to upgrade. If you wanted to replace the hard drive or DVD drive you would have to remove the entire bottom cover. To increase the memory you must remove the keyboard. Under the keyboard you will find one 144-pin SO-DIMM socket. The Asus shipped to us with 128MB of hard-mounted RAM, so if you wanted to increase memory in your notebook you could purchase for it 16MB, 32MB, 64MB, 128MB or 256MB memory modules.
The Asus L8400B has a clear, vivid display. It was definitely one of the better 14in displays that we had tested. The panel is well supportedâ€"when we applied some pressure to the back of the panel we experienced some rippling but not enough to seriously concern us.
This notebook also proved to be a good companion on the road. It was one of the lightest notebooks we tested. The combination of speed, price and features add up to make the Asus a good deal.
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