Introduction and design
The Asus N550JK is a 15.6-inch laptop for people who want a powerful computer capable of a playing some recent games without them looking like a slideshow, but don't want to pay the Earth for it. It starts at £799 (around US$1285, AU$1465), the version reviewed, jumping up to £899 (around US$1445, AU$1650) if you go for the thoroughly worthwhile IPS 1080p screen upgrade.
There aren't a great deal of capable machines at this price that can really handle all that much gaming, making this a pretty interesting laptop. The MSI GX60, HP Envy 15 and Lenovo G710 are the key alternatives at the price. All offer dedicated graphics cards for about £800 (around US$1285, AU$1465) – but the nice, clean look and slightly higher-end GPU of the Asus N550JK will be a draw for many.
Power over portability
The Asus N550JK sits in a bit of an awkward middle ground that doesn't generally get much attention anymore. Starting at £800 (around US$1285, AU$1465), it's not truly top-end, and it's far too large to be considered particularly portable or Ultrabook-like. This is a solid, practical laptop that's best suited to life on a desk.
It's not a laptop to try and show off in a coffee shop – the 2.7kg weight would quickly earn you shoulder ache anyway. We did try lugging it around for a day but the experience wasn't too pleasant. However, the design is good, particularly considering that mid-range laptops often miss the mark on looks.
The Asus N550JK's lid is lightly brushed dark blue/grey aluminium. Treated metal is one of Asus' standard design calling cards, but the texture is much less pronounced and showy than it is in the Asus Zenbook Ultrabooks.
Aluminium is used once again inside. The entire keyboard top-plate is aluminium, with an anodised-style finish and a neat looking pattern of concentric circles of dots up top. Initially it appears these are cut into the keyboard surround, but they're actually raised.
Could we do without them? Absolutely, but it's just Asus' attempt to stop the N550JK from plunging into real design anonymity. They also help highlight the laptop's Bang & Olufsen speakers, not that the drivers are anywhere near this pattern. Instead, the dots surround the power button and an Asus-specific button that brings up an Asus console app when in use. It gives access to a few basic system settings.
Impressive build quality
As with most laptops that care as much about the bottom line as looks, the underside of the Asus N550JK is plastic rather than metal. But then a metal underside rarely does a laptop any favours in terms of heat transferral. Hot legs, anyone?
Build quality is very good. There's only a slight flex to the hand-rest part of the keyboard surround, and while we're sure the aluminium shell isn't all that thick, it's enough to give the laptop a higher-end feel.
Asus hasn't tried too hard to slim down the N550JK, though. While the sides taper smoothy – bar a rough edge where metal meets plastic – it's still 28mm thick. Add that to the considerable 2.7kg weight and you have a fairly chunky laptop.
In return, the N550JK is pretty powerful, but it is still an entry-level performance/gaming laptop. And as such it's no surprise that you have no easy access to the laptop's insides. There are no removable panels to give you easy access to the RAM slots, and the battery is non-removable. So this is a purchase for those who simply want to buy a laptop and largely make do with it.
Connectivity and screen
The N550JK boasts an impressive array of on-body connections. You get three USB 3.0 ports, one of which has additional power output to make charging smartphones and tablets (especially the latter) less sluggish. There's also a mini Displayport, full-size HDMI output, SDXC card slot and Kensington lock port.
Aside from dedicated graphics, one of the key draws of the Asus N550JK is its optical drive. It's a DVD multiwriter, although a Blu-ray drive is an option.
There's a mystery socket too, a little 2.5mm audio jack port next to the power socket. This hooks up with a small additional speaker that comes with the N550JK as standard. It's a teeny-tiny subwoofer to accompany the Bang & Olufsen drivers that sit in the underside curve of the front of the laptop.
Sound issues
Are the speakers any good? They're passable. There's a little more mid-range than some laptop speakers, but as they fire forward from the middle of the laptop, there's no sense of stereo. Speakers to each side give much better sound dispersal for movies and music, but here the arc of the sound is very narrow. Add in the fairly poor treble extension and you have a pretty boxy sounding laptop speaker. This is not one of the most successful laptop speaker tie-ins.
Adding the subwoofer does add bulk to the sound, but it distorts at higher volumes and integration with the N550JK's own speakers is extremely poor. It's almost like listening to a next-door neighbour playing the same tune/movie when you plug it in, and there even appears to be a bit of lag to its output. The modular subwoofer is a neat idea, poorly executed.
Keyboard and trackpad
Asus hasn't tried to be quite so flashy with the rest of the N550JK's hardware, though. The keyboard offers a fairly conventional layout with a full numerical pad to the side. Key action is fairly crisp, and is deeper than what you'd get in a slimmer laptop. The spacebar is weirdly squeaky, but it's a quirk we can live with.
While there are versions of the Asus N550JK with keyboard backlights, the entry-level edition reviewed here doesn't have one. While backlights are generally most useful for roving laptops, it's a solid reason to upgrade to the higher-end version.
The trackpad is on the small side for easy use of gestures – which explains why Asus turns most of Windows 8.1's gestures off as standard (they can be turned on within the Asus Console application) – and the right button zoning is a little tricky. In use it also feels as though the N550JK trackpad would benefit from off-centre positioning. As there are traditional left-right zones for the mouse button, you have to get your finger quite a way to the left of the laptop to reach the main button.
However, the surface is nice and smooth, and design-wise it fits in perfectly with the rest of the keyboard surround.
Screen dream vs screen nightmare
One of the most important things to note about the Asus N550JK is that there are two screen options available, and the experience they offer is completely different. We got hold of the lower-end 1,366 x 768-pixel version – sadly.
It's a TN-type screen, and the resolution is pretty low for a 15.6-inch display. There's clear pixellation, and colour reproduction is weak too. Images look washed out and anaemic, while contrast also is fairly poor. Horizontal viewing angles are acceptable, but there's the usual contrast shift should you tilt the screen back too far. You wouldn't see this in the IPS version.
The screen finish is glossy, but this is true of the majority of touchscreen laptops.
Touchscreen performance is perfectly good in this lower-end version and the display tilts back to around the 150 degree mark, but we strongly recommend spending the extra £100 on the version of the Asus N550JK with a higher-end screen. It has a 1080p IPS display, and that would fix the weakest part of this particular review laptop.
Performance
- 3DMark: Ice Storm: 102877; Cloud Gate: 14254; Fire Strike: 2798
- Cinebench Graphics: 86.57 fps; CPU: 634 points
- PCMark 8 (Home Test): 3113 points
- PCMark 8 Battery Life: 2 hours 16 minutes
The whole point of a chunky-ish laptop like the Asus N550JK is that it gets you much more performance bang for your buck than a thin, light laptop. It has a 2.4GHz Intel Core i7 processor, the i7-4700HQ, and the important thing to note about this is its HQ series tag.
HQ series processors are designed to run a lot hotter than the U series chips you'll find in almost all super-slim laptops. You get better performance, but also much poorer battery life.
In our PCMark 8 battery test, the Asus N550JK lasted just 2 hours 16 minutes. Credibility away from home is not the laptop's strong suit. However, this was with the screen set at maximum brightness.
For a more anecdotal look at battery stamina we took the Asus N550JK out for a day's work on the road. With the screen backlight set to around 60% and no tasks more arduous than a bit of browsing and word processing to do, you should be able to get three to four hours off a charge. It's far from enough for a full day's work, but that is not what this laptop is about.
Tech specs
Here are the specs of the laptop for your perusal:
- CPU: 2.4GHz Intel Core i7 4700HQ
- Graphics: GeForce 850M 2GB
- RAM: 8GB DDR3 SDRAM
- Screen: 15.6-inch, 1366 x 768, TN (1080p IPS an option)
- Storage: 1TB 5400rpm hard drive
- Ports: 3 x USB 3.0, HDMI-out, Mini DisplayPort, Ethernet, headphone jack, subwoofer jack
- Connectivity: 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
- Camera: 720p webcam
- Weight: 2.6kg
- Size: 383 x 255 x 27.7mm
The GeForce GTX 850M GPU is an upgrade from last year's Asus N500JV, which used the lesser 750M card.
For a device that sells for significantly under a grand, the Asus N550JK has a boatload of power. While it is a multimedia laptop that's never going to be sold as a world-beater, it can handle things like video editing and pretty hefty Photoshop work thanks to its decent processor and fairly generous 8GB of RAM. With a slimmer, lighter laptop at this price, you'd probably be looking at something with 4GB of RAM, which soon gets chomped up by these data-intensive tasks.
The 3113 score we got from PCMark 8 is a good deal higher than the 2493 score of the Dell Inspiron 7000 too, a laptop of about the same size that uses a U series processor rather than an HQ one.
Game on
Gaming performance is pretty great as well. In the 3DMark Fire strike test, the N550JK scores 2798 points, way higher than the 1000-odd result of the GeForce 740M-based Toshiba Satellite S50D. If you're after a reasonable cost gaming laptop that doesn't have the tacky look of some out there, this is a good bet.
You'll be able to play modern games at 1080p resolution and at least mid-level settings. Of course, this is another reason to opt for the higher resolution 1080p IPS screen version of the N550JK rather than our base model review version. Games look pretty naff on a 1,366 x 768 pixel TN screen.
The Asus N550JK's strong per-pound gaming performance is also seen in the Cinebench 15 benchmark. It ran at 86fps, which is a great result at this sort of mid-range price. Here we really see the benefit of Asus upgrading to a GTX 850M CPU over the previous 750M chip.
However, serious gamers would benefit from bumping up to something like the Medion Erazer X7611 and its GTX 765M GPU. Contrary to what the numbers may suggest, it's more powerful. But it's also £200 (around US$320, AU$365) more, after accounting for buying the more expensive 1080p variant of N550JK. This Asus really is a bit of a bargain.
Sluggish side
While the Asus N550JK has a lot of processor and GPU power available, there are some bottlenecks elsewhere. The version we reviewed had a 1TB 5400rpm hard drive. It's slow even by hard drive standards, and doesn't have anything like the data access speed of a good SSD.
Things like going into sleep and returning from it are a fair bit slower than they would be in a laptop with a proper SSD, and we measured boot-up from cold taking 19.5 seconds. That's around twice what you might expect from an SSD. It's not perfect for stop-start use, but as a computer to use for longer sessions it should do just fine.
Verdict
The Asus N550JK is the sort of laptop that's easy to dismiss. It's not slim, not particularly attention grabbing and lacks a stand-out feature to brag about. However, as a package it's pretty attractive. A metal finish, good core specs and decent at-home versatility make it a solid bet for people who want to game as well as work on their laptop.
We liked
The GeForce GFX 850M offers enough power for reasonable performance in fairly recent games, and using aluminium for the keyboard surround and lid gives the design a much appreciated touch of class.
You may not get many flashy extras in the N550JK, but the performance for the money is pretty respectable.
We disliked
The TN screen version of this laptop has a pretty rubbish display, so make sure you upgrade to the 1080p IPS version – it's a must. Also, without an SSD, the N550JK doesn't exhibit the same sort of day-to-day snappiness as an otherwise less-powerful Ultrabook would.
Battery life is pretty poor thanks to the use of a 4-cell battery and a CPU not geared to efficiency.
Final verdict
The Asus N550JK is a practical laptop that is also a dab hand at games, especially given it costs a bit less than most gaming laptops. It's not very portable and the version with the lower-end display is one to avoid unless you really don't care about image quality, but otherwise this is a good buy.
from www.techradar.com
