Asus S8600/P3-850/DVD Laptop Review

Asus has not gotten to where they are today by turning their backs on new markets with the potential to rocket past their "bread and butter" markets. Case-in-point: the Asus K7M slot A mainboard. At the time of its birth, Intel was putting the pressure on every motherboard manufacturer to not support the new AMD Athlon platform. Sure, Asus first delivered the K7M under a cloak of stealth, but then quickly called it its own. The point is Asus took a chance and now has a very successful complete line of Socket A mainboards that I dare guess that rivals the sales of their previous Intel based cash cows. The writing was on the wall then for the eminent success of the line as it is now for the notebook market. Notebook sales are now surpassing desktop sales as corporations now see the need for laptops growing exponentially. Additionally, prices of laptops are now falling to levels that can be deemed affordable by even modest income households. Unlike the motherboard and video card markets, however, the Asus name does not necessarily assure a clean kill to the competition. Today we take a look at Asus´s challenger to the slim-book segment of the notebook market, their S8600/P3-850/DVD. So let´s check out some of her features and see if Asus has the feature set to compete with the established notebook manufacturers.