Asus n550jv review - multimedia notebook

Hello there from middle Europe. In this review I would like to give you insight on the latest product of Asus N series, Asus N550jv. It is a multimedia laptop with price from 800 to 1100 euro depending on configuration. ( ULV processors, i7m Quad Core , All Haswell architecture). His predecessor was Asus N56. Very popular notebook in last generation of Intel processors. Some changes has been made ( facelift, cooling system redesinged, hinge redesign, sound system change), but still these two notebooks look quite similar. Key factors of N Series are definitely over - average sound system, middle range graphic card, full hd displey. How did these changes turned out ? Feel free to find out in the next lines.

#change 2013-10-18 3DMark2013 added


For what audience is this review aimed for ?
Notebook enthusiats, potention buyers of multimedia notebook in price range of 800 - 1100 eur

Alternatives:
Lenovo y510p
Dell Inspiron
Dell Inspiron
Dell XPS HASWELL
Acer v5-573g v7-573g



Background
Som, my three years old acer 5551g felt a little rusty, so I have decided to buy a new laptop, which will take me thru the my Master´s degree. I have been choosing between Lenovo y500, y510p, Acer v5-573g, but after I discovered a shop in my country which had Asus in stock, I have grabbed it immediatly.


Specification


CPU - i7m-4700 HASWELL , 2,4 Ghz base clock , 3,3 single core TB, 3,2ghz 4 cores TB
GPU - NvDIA gt750m 2gb DDR3 VRAM

Whole this setup costs 888 eur.

Case
The base of the notebook is made from plastic and aluminium. Back side of the display bezel is covered in aluminium with metalic finish. In the middle we can find backlighted Asus logo. Front side of display has plastic bezel ( matt ). Base unit is colored in silver tone and is made from aluminium. Edges are beleveled and have nice shine. The unit on top of the keyboard is textured in "rippled" design, starting from power button and asus console button. The same pattern can be found on n56, but it has only visual attributes ( n56 has audio speakers under those patterns ).
The bottom of the unit is composed from single plate, which I believe is also aluminium ( few reviews state that it is plastic, but when i was doing maintainance it didn´t feel like plastic).
Overal stability is very good. The unit doesn´t yeild or bend. The only exception is displey lid, which has little flex. One thing which is creating little disconfort for me, is the passage between base unit and bottom plate. You can definitely feel the crossing ( Almost as if your are going to get cut, but not really ).
The displey lid can be opened to more then 135 degrees. It have regular size for 15 incher, but the thickness is in the middle of ultrabook and multimedia laptop from 2012.






Ports

LEFT : Charging port, subwoofer port , LAN , HDMI , miniDispelay port, 2x USB 3.0 ( One chargeable !! ), sound I/O
FRONT : Notification lights
RIGHT : SD card reader, usb 3.0, Optical drive , Kensington lock

I would say that this is pretty average for this category ( mini display port is nice addition )



Accesories
Notebook came in pretty dirty package. Altought, after opening it revealed, that the package has high quality and it is sufficient to protect the innards of the packge from possible harm. Package contained notebook covered in protective cloth, charge brick, cable brace, subwoofer, DVD with drivers.




maintainance
If you wanna acces the innards of the notebook, you will need TORX t5 screwdriver. After removing 10 screws from the bottom plate, you can detach the bottom plate. ( Bevare. The plate have 3 hatches under the hinge, two in the hinge corners and two around LAN connector ). Inside, you can switch HDD, 2 ram modules, ODD, battery. Cleaing of the fans is piece of cake, but there is a warranty sticker over the heatpipe, so no repastin anytime before warranty expire.



Keyboard and touchpad

Because the notebook belong to category of 15 inchers, it is natural that it has numeric block. It is little weird, because the right arrow is situated direcetli under key "1". Aside of that, typing experience is prety good. Nothing extraordinary, just good. Keyboard have silver finish, which is kinda problematic in combination with backlighting and the fact that the base unit is also silver. It is hard to read the decals on the keys.
When it comes to touchpad, it takes a little while to get used to it for users that didn´t had clickpad. Apart of that, it is pretty accurate with recent drivers. Gestures for win8 works w/o problems. Backlighting is quite good.



Displey
One of the main features of this notebook is it´s wonderfull full hd IPS matte screen ( it is shame if you get this notebook with HD screen ). It has very good contrast and brightness. Normaly I work under 60-70% brigtness. Readability on the sun is also good. The main catch is that this displej also has "backlight bleeding"". It is not bad and noticeable, but when you pump brightness to 100% and have dark background, you can notice slight bleeding in the upper right corner. Overall, it is very good display. Hopefully in the future more and more notebook would have screens like this one.

Performance

Right out of the box the notebook is ready to work with rocket speed. Multitasking, video processing, modeling, gaming. Whatever you throw at it. Of course the main anchor of this system is it´s slow HDD. The system has score of 3101 in PCMark 7. As mentioned, the reason behind this "low" score is slow HDD and 2gb + 4gb ram. ( 4gb + 4gb would be more optimal ).




My model is equiped with Core i7-4700m with the base clock of 2,4 Ghz. It is a mobile processor of 4. generation , which supports hyperthreading nad turbo boost 2.0. Overall processor has 4 cores and 8 threads with dynamic overclocking to 3,4 Ghz. That is nice, but it is really true ?
Thankfully yes. The processor runs smoothly at 3,3 Ghz with 1 core active and 3,2 Ghz with all four cores active. It is not 100% usage if Turbo Boost, but it prettz solid. Thanks to this fact, the score in Cinebench 11.5 benchmark is pretty good - 6,76 for 64bit multithread and 54,91 fps for OpenGL benchmark






Graphic card
Notebook has two graphic cards. The first one is HD4600, which is integrated in the processor. It´s main purpouse is to take care of everyday task and thus save energy. When the raw power is needed, the NVidia gt750m kicks in. It has 2 Gb of ddr3 memory. Why Asus choosed not to give it Ddr5 is mystery, but we can´t do anything about it. it has base clock of something around 969 core clock which can be pushed to the 1160 mhz and shader clock of 900.
In stock, the card do quite well, with score in 3DMark11 over 2700. After doing some little tweeking ( +100 core clock, +200 memory , totalling 1250 mhz core clock and 1100 memory clock ) the score jumps to the 3040 !!!

When it comes to gaming, i didn´t do any benchmarks.
So far I can tell that DoTa 2 runs at max with 60 fps, GW 2 in full hd smoothly at medium settings, and BF3 in medium at 28 fps.

If you are interested in more games, just google it






Temepratures and cooling system
Cooling system have redesigned. In this model there are two fans. From them the two heatpipes which goes thru the one chips then one single goes to the another chip. The heast is disperssed thru the vents under the displej hinge. So far, I like this system, because the area of the keyboard is pleasingly cool, even at load. The are over the keyboard gets hot, but that is perfectly normal due to the thermal design.
How does it turns out in real life ?
The components runs at 35 degrees in idle and up to 80 for CPU and 77 for GPU. Throthling of CPU kicks in when the temperature goes over 80 and GPU is also loaded. This is not critical, because you can always dissable turbo boost on CPU. Notebook still have performance and you will be having hard time to get those numbers over 80

Overall I like the new cooling system. If we consider the fact how powerfull the componetns are and how thin is profile of this notebook, asus did quite a good job. ( Still could do better, but well )






Sound
Comming from acer 5551g, sound system asus is wonderfull and spectacular. Sound is clean ( as long the volume is up to 80 % ) and subwoofer does the job for basses (it is not a gimmick, it helps ).
Overall the sound is sufficient form small dorm parties, watching films with friends, listening ti music and so on.

Battery life
I wasn´t able to test this section too much. After watching movie on 50% brightness for 2,5 horus the battery stated 52% remaining. For my needs, the battery life more and sufficient.

Conclusion
Asus did a good job and created interesting and good looking multimedia package. Notebook have raw power, good sound, middle graphics and battery life in it´s portfolio. The very good dispej is joy to look at. I would like to see an mSata port, or little changes in keyboard ( black instead of silver ). It is allrounder in multimedia sector and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in it

Cheers !!.

 

still waiting for new shippment to arrive to Slovenia. this is the laptop i'll be getting, I just don't understand why did the official page dissapeared for a few days and why is there such a short suppply for them with such a great demand?

nice review tho

 

I think ASUS outdid themselves on that one- maybe not in a good way haha. It seems from my end like they either: A did not anticipate how well the unit would sell and became backlogged or B are directing their manufacturing resources toward something else right now because those units have been extremely scarce. We aren't even expecting word on them any for at least a month. That would explain your delay

 

did you get your laptop so far..?
there is not even one available in Croatia for almost a month now...!
if anyone has any info about this model, please inform ... as i understand,it is still available and in stock in USA, some European countries,even Asia...
tnx in advance...

 

After installing 120 gb Samsung EVO SSD, Pcmark7 jumped to the close 6000 range