Along with the Samsung it feels exceptionally sturdy and well built, even if it's a little on the heavy side at 3.2kg. Portability is further hindered by the modest battery life scores of two hours 24 minutes in our light use test, and one hour 21 minutes in our intensive test. All in all, it's mid-table in terms of bulk and weight.

Ergonomically it's not bad. The keyboard is a little stiffer compared to the Acer and Samsung equivalents, but it's accurate and comfortable. The trackpad was nice and accurate too and the buttons made refreshingly light clicking sounds. The screen is similar to Acer's 1280 x 800 widescreen and offers a crisp desktop. The glossy coating made movies enjoyable to watch and viewing angles were a bit better too. There was only a little lag but it wasn't distracting. The speakers got loud, but lacked bass.

Powering the notebook is a 2GHz Pentium M T1500 which was one of the faster chips on show. This, alongside 1GB of RAM and the 100GB hard disk, managed a benchmark score of 0.96 - the highest on show and only four percent behind our reference desktop PC.

Where the ASUS accelerated away from the field was in the 3D tests. The Radeon Mobility X1600 chip is noticeably the best on show, but it's still not very powerful. However, scores of 20.7fps and 23.3fps in Far Cry and Half-Life 2 respectively show that while you'll still need to reduce some detail settings, it's the only notebook that can hope of playing some of the latest games.

Other features include 802.11a/b/g WLAN and a dual-layer DVD writer. In terms of connectivity there's a SD/MMC and MS memory card reader, PC Card slot, mini FireWire, GigaBit Ethernet, modem, S-Video two audio ports and an SPDIF jack. There are four USB ports but, annoyingly, these are all clustered at the back on the right. At the back a DVI port joins the VGA and the webcam is joined by a large high quality microphone - a definite enhancement over the usual hole in the chassis.

A modest two year RTB warranty is thrown in but Windows XP Professional is a bonus. While it's true that you'll be able to pick up the A6Ja for less than the $3199 by the time you read this, it takes more than a huge price drop to make the ASUS competitive in this field. Both the Acer and Samsung simply offer more for less money. As such we can't recommend the A6Ja this month.