Shiny black notebook cover with piano finish can be described as: “heaven to be seen with, and hell to maintain it”. Dust, fingerprints and similar will be painfully obvious. Nice detail is that small cloth is included in the package so you can eliminate those “thorns in the eye” with ease. Cover is not flat as most covers are but it has small indentation at the base.

Rest of the chassis is made of dark grey plastics and seams robust. To be quite honest with you, ASUS X59GL isn’t like any other notebook in this price range: it is very firm and can be characterized as very quality built product. Cover is very solid and with chassis is connected with 3 hinges. Big touch pad has vertical scroll area. Touch pad keys look like one big button and it is pretty noisy. Most of the latest ASUS notebooks have similar touch pad keys but we prefer separate keys. Below these keys are LED activity indicators. Since palm rest area has also piano finish, you can expect regular cleaning practice of this area.

Keyboard is surprisingly good for notebook from this price range. It has big Enter key and emphasized  cursor keys but FN (Function) key and left Ctrl (Control) key have switched places and that is detail that experienced users won’t like that much. Around keyboard is plastic frame, and you guessed it right, it also has piano finish. But all those shiny surfaces are nothing compared to area above keyboard that has mirror finish and can be actually used as mirror although it is actually too small to be used as one. Female population will appreciate this detail but we are not too sure about male users. In this area are located 4 additional buttons. Power button is located right beside those and this can lead to accidental power off (Stand-By) of notebook. Luckily first button on left is button used for disabling touch pad and it is not used too often so these accidents are not that likely to occur.

LAN connector and 3 USB ports are located on left side and beside those is wireless switch button. On same side are also present Express card slot and audio connectors. On the back side are HDMI and one more USB port. On the right side is located only optical device and we think that one USB connector on right and two on left side instead of three on the left side is better solution. Front side is used for card reader only.