Asus ET2400XVT review

We’ve seen laptops and monitors with Nvidia 3D Vision technology before, but the Asus ET2400XVT is the first all-in-one PC we’ve come across with a screen capable of displaying games, movies and pictures in glorious 3D.

The Asus is an all-in-one machine, but Nvidia 3D Vision isn’t integrated as elegantly as we’d like: the transmitter that synchronises the images with the included active shutter glasses isn’t embedded in the chassis, but has to be connected via USB. You get everything you need to get started, though, and the 3D effect works well thanks to the maturity of Nvidia’s drivers – a far cry from when the system was introduced and threw up strange graphical effects on numerous popular games.

We’re less keen on the 24in panel. Detail is good and there’s no backlight bleed, but colours are oversaturated to the point of annoyance; when compared to the clean, accurate colours of the similarly-priced Sony VAIO L21, it’s a poor show that could prove irritating outside the bombastic environments of games and movies.

As usual, a range of touch-specific software is included, but Asus has confined its apps to a dock at the top of the screen instead of an all-encompassing front end. Apps are divided into categories that encompass touch tools, fun apps and more prosaic software, but the offering differs little from other machines: you’ll find typical media playback, note-taking and painting apps. Access to Asus’s @Vibe app store sounds promising, but there’s little to download. It’s slick, but nothing new or innovative.

The Asus is more impressive under the hood. The Intel Core i7-740QM is one of Intel’s most powerful 45nm mobile chips, with its stock speed of 1.73GHz stretched across four Turbo Boosted, Hyper-Threaded cores. Its application benchmark score of 0.64 is fine enough for all but the trickiest of tasks, even if it can’t match the 0.74 scored by the Sony’s Sandy Bridge mobile part.

As befits a system designed for 3D gaming, there’s a relatively powerful graphics chip inside. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 460M is one of the firm’s most potent mobile graphics chips, and it showed in our benchmark: a score of 57fps in our Medium-quality Crysis test – run at 1,600 x 900 – gave way to an impressive 28fps in the High quality test run at 1,920 x 1,080. That’s almost playable, and running the High quality test at 1,600 x 900 produced a smoother score of 36fps.

The rest of the machine includes 6GB of RAM, a 1TB hard disk and a Blu-ray drive – one of the best specifications we’ve seen from an all-in-one. The speakers are loud and bassy, which makes for great gaming, but movie fans will be less pleased by the overblown mid-range. The only notable absence is a TV tuner.

As a gaming and movie system there’s plenty to like about the Asus ET2400XVT. It offers impressive performance, a 24in 3D-capable screen and Blu-ray playback. If the price was a bit lower we'd be raving about it; as it is we're just a tad more enamoured by the excellent Sony VAIO L21.

Author: Mike Jennings