The hottest point of the notebook was the small metal panel on the bottom of the laptop that measured 92 degrees.

Its the small touches such as the medium grey marked keys, to the metallic ASUS logo etched into the metal bar below the screen that makes this laptop feel like its not pushing the brand in your face like many other makers but yet you know its an ASUS with a track record for reliability (in my experience with their motherboards).

When we watched a 1080p trailer for Skyfall, details like the stubble on his beard were sharp.

Overall the laptop feels very well built and durable with a stylish minimalistic matte black front mantel.

The $1,299 base model features a 2.5-GHz Intel Core i5-3210M CPU with 6GB of RAM, a 500GB 7,200-rpm hard drive with a 32GB 32GB mSATA SSD and a Nvidia GeForce GT 630M GPU with 1GB of VRAM.

The GT555m can do even better with just some slight overclocking but the computer itself performs remarkable and it has the specs I want to play just about any game on the market while not being a heavy 17" monster or a 15" oven.

Although our review unit had a Pentium Dual-Core processor, it’s also available with CPUs ranging from an Intel Celeron to Intel Core 2 Duo (the higher-end Core 2 Duo adds $200 to the starting price).

Even when you select the 64-bit OS, the maximum amount of RAM you can order is 4GB; the base configuration has 2GB, and upgrading to 3GB and 4GB costs $50 and $75, respectively.