ASUS X450 : 18 Months Later


Source : www.asus.com

 If you live in the US, then you'll find many peoples carry around a MacBook. But I live in Indonesia, which means you'll look rich if you use an Apple device.

 But many peoples here who don't work a lot with computers tend to buy cheap Windows laptops, many bought laptops for less than ~$400. But they're usually powered by Intel Atom or Celeron Processors, which I don't want.

 So I've gone for the Asus X450, on paper this laptop is no joke, it ships with Intel Core i7-4720HQ, 4 GB of RAM, Nvidia 940, and 1 TB of hard drive.It costs about equal to ~$700. If you're looking for a cheap gaming laptop, then this might be fine.

Dimensions and Case


 It's not very portable as a 14-inch laptop though. It weighs over 2.1 kilograms and its over 24 millimeters thick.

 The size of this laptop according to www.Asus.com is : 34.8 x 24.1 x 24.8 cm (WxDxH)

 As ever, cheap devices aren't well built, so does this laptop. The whole lid is plastic, so is the bottom panel. The only metal part here is the upper panel, the panel where the keyboard and track pad sits.
Metal on the chassis
The lid cover is glossy and get scratched very easily.
Note the scratch!

Display

The display is 14-inch with a resolution of 1366x768. However colors appear to be bluish and the viewing angle is narrow. The panel is also glossy despite having no touch panel. The screen is bright enough for day to day use, but use it outdoor and you might have trouble.
Glossy and no IPS panel

Performance

Yes, Intel Core i7 are popular for being fast, and this laptop is equipped with the quad core i7, it is powerful for heavy 3D rendering and heavy games, but if you run multiple apps, this laptop feels kinda slow. That's the issue with the hard drive this laptop is shipped with. It is a slow 1TB drive, so slow that I recommend you to replace the hard drive with an SSD. I installed a Samsung 850 EVO 256GB and it performs a lot better than ever. And also I upgraded the 4 GB RAM to 8 GB. This sure does increase performance a bit.

Battery Life

This is the place where this laptop completely struggles to keep up. Wi-Fi browsing with 40% screen brightness and power plan set to "Power Saver", this laptop only lasts about 3 hours.

Connectivity

Now this is quite tricky, you can see there are 3 USB ports, but only one of them is USB 3.0.
On the left hand side there is a power plug, VGA, HDMI, Ethernet, USB 3.0, USB 2.0, and a headphone jack. Meanwhile on the right hand side there is kensington lock, DVD drive (which I replace with a HDD caddy), and another USB 2.0 port.On front there is an SD card reader (wow!).

Input Devices

The keyboard is island style, and it lacks backlit. However the key travel is decent enough at 1,6 millimeters. I typed this review with the keyboard and I found it's just OK. The trackpad on the other hand is large enough. The trackpad has no dedicated button, and uses the "diving board" mechanism, the clicking noise is rather loud, so for left clicks you better just tap on the surface instead of pressing the lower area. However the surface isn't covered by glass so be careful of scratching it.


Speakers

Interestingly, there is no speaker grille on this laptop, but the speakers sound quite decent. They don't get very loud, once they get very loud they don't sound good. It's a lot better to use a pair of good headphones with this laptop.

Pros

  1. Great gaming performance.....
  2. With an affordable price tag
  3. Middling build quality
  4. Many ports

Cons

  1. Terrible battery life
  2. Screen displays inaccurate colors
  3. Heavy and thick
  4. No USB-C
  5. One USB 3.0




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