Ever since we laid our eyes (as well as our hands) on Asus' NX90 over at CeBIT 2010, this Bang & Olufsen ICEpowered laptop has been high on our interest list and today we managed to get, yet again, up close and personal with one of these, although this time we got our hands all over a retail sample.

Design wise, not many things have changed, the NX90 still featuring that sleek polished aluminum chassis, that is meant to reflect the rooms ambiance (although I say it does a better job at capturing fingerprints) as well as those distinctive Bang & Olufsen ICEpower speakers that flank the 18.4 inch display.

Coming to the speakers, I have to say this is definitely one of the nicest sounding laptops available out there, besting the Asus N73 we recently reviewed, the NX90 coming with the largest speaker chamber available in a notebook as well as with a 11W amplifier that Asus claims to deliver up to 2db higher volume then competing solutions.

And who am I to argue with such a claim, especially since I had the pleasure of hearing the NX90 in action, this being powerful enough to fill a large sized room while also providing an impressive sound quality.

Getting to the technical details of the NX90 I can definitely say Asus chose a top of the line configuration to go with that impressive sound quality, the base model coming with a Intel Core i7-740QM processor together with 8GB of RAM, dual 640GB hard drives and a Nvidia GeForce GT 335M graphics card.



Of course, this is only the base model, Asus letting you configure the NX90 with about anything you may want, including SSDs or hybrid drives.

But moving back to the user experience, another trademark feature that Asus says is unique to the NX90 is the dual touchpad design that should enable two-handed usability and, although that may be the case, I can't say that I am all that impressed by the touchpads since they seem to have a too plasticy feel for my liking.



Anyway, taking a step back, and having a final look at this $2,299 machine, I can definitely say the NX90 impressed me with his sound quality.

Would I buy one?

Well, that's another story, since I don't really feel the need to own such a system, but if I would have an insanely amount of money at my disposal and I would really want to replace my desktop PC with a laptop then the NX90 will most certainly make its way on my narrow list of option.