Asus N55S
The industry may be looking to Intel’s Ultrabook concept as the way forward, but Asus’s newest offering shows it’s still possible to inject some novelty into larger laptops. The N55S takes a 15.6in display and some seriously beefy components, and adds Bang & Olufsen speakers and an external subwoofer.
Visually, the N55S is a classy affair. It breezes into view with a glossy black lid encompassed by a thick strip of chrome, and the chassis tapers to a delicate curve around its edges. The two-tone black and silver interior looks great, too.
There’s no mistaking the all-plastic construction, though. Next to HP’s Envy laptops or Apple’s MacBooks, all hewn from slabs of metal, the N55S feels a bit ordinary. It’s only once you spend some time prodding and poking at it that the quality of the build shines through. The thick lid gives the display plenty of protection, and there’s only the slightest whimper from the base when you twist it viciously from side to side. The flipside to such solidity is weight: at 2.79kg it isn’t ideal for the daily commute.
But this isn’t a laptop with travel on its mind; it’s an entertainment laptop through and through. The Bang & Olufsen ICEpower speakers deliver far more clarity than most laptops, and the Asus SonicMaster software makes it quick and easy to tweak playback for music, movies and games. The real novelty is the separate subwoofer, a little accessory that plugs into the Asus’ side. The results are impressive. There’s still no semblance of real, ground-shaking sub-bass, but the extra speaker makes its presence heard, adding more depth and fullness to the sound.
That sonic performance is matched by a fine display. The 1,600 x 900 resolution is a welcome surprise – we’re used to 1,366 x 768 displays on today’s 15.6in laptops – and the matte finish does its bit to keep reflections and glare at bay. A measured contrast ratio of 550:1 and maximum brightness of 281cd/m2 see the Asus deliver bright whites and inky blacks, and while the low gamma of 1.9 leaves images looking a tad pale, it’s nothing we couldn’t learn to live with.
We have no such qualms with the N55S’s innards. Its quad-core 2.2GHz Core i7-2670QM is backed up by 6GB of memory, a 640GB hard disk and a Blu-ray reader. Two USB 2 ports and an optical S/P-DIF output adorn the right edge, while two USB 3 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, D-SUB and an HDMI connector are on the left. Single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3 round off the networking options.
With that quad-core CPU at the helm, and Nvidia’s GeForce GT 555M chipset powering up when the occasion demands it, the Asus N55S is about as fast as mainstream laptops come. After barrelling through our Real World Benchmarks to a fine result of 0.83, it lapped up the challenge of our Crysis tests. It wasn’t until we cranked it up to High detail and a Full HD resolution that the Asus finally slowed to an average of 21fps. Once we dropped to its native 1,600 x 900 resolution, this figure rose to a more playable 28fps.
Whatever you do, however, make sure you keep it hooked up to the mains – with a time of only 4hrs 55mins in our light-use battery test, all this power comes at a heavy price to portability.
And the Asus makes one final misstep. The wide, responsive touchpad is great, but the keyboard has a slight give in the base, and a rattly feel dogs every key press. Still, there’s just enough feedback from each stroke to let you know you’ve successfully pressed a key, and while the keys are a little larger than the average, we soon found ourselves rattling off paragraphs.
The keyboard and battery are weak points then, and you could say the Asus lacks the visual allure to tug at the purse strings like pricier, metal-bodied models can. But that’s before you see the price – at £735 inc VAT, the N55S tramples all over the opposition for sheer value. This is, without a doubt, the most competent desktop replacement we’ve seen for less than £1,000, delivering devastating power and genuinely impressive audio at a knock-down price. Sure, it has its flaws, but taken as a whole package you won’t find many better laptops than this.
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