We’ve given ASUS’ U-series of laptops/notebooks plenty of praise since we first looked at the UL80VT back in late 2009. As one of the forerunners for switchable graphics, and sporting a large 8-cell battery that managed to last over 14 hours in ideal circumstances (or “only” about 10 hours for moderate Internet use), it had plenty of good ideas. When NVIDIA launched their Optimus Technology a few months later, seeing ASUS as the first major OEM to support the feature was hardly a surprise. Time passes quickly in the computer world, and devices that were once cutting edge start to look dated and slow. Overclocked CULV processors and G 210M/310M graphics were fine in 2009, less so in 2010. These days you can’t swing a power brick without hitting an Optimus enabled laptop, and while we liked a lot of the updates to the core platform in ASUS’ U30JC, we had two chief complaints: the LCD and the GPU.