List Price: $1,099.00
Sale Price: $1,039.00
Today's Bonus: 5% Off
[UPDATE (8/15/13): If you read the comment thread to this review, you'll find that there has been some confusion around whether this laptop offers a true high definition display. Turns out that this model being sold by Amazon is full high resolution (FHD) 1920x1080.]
Bought this for my son for college and he loves it.
Pros: 4th gen I7 processor; excellent graphics and better-than-expected performance from the NVIDIA graphics card while gaming; a relatively fast boot probably helped along by the 24 gb ssd; 1 tb of storage; 8 gb memory; light weight considering the size of the screen; and a touchscreen display that makes using Windows 8 almost tolerable, and it looks amazing -so good that I would have assumed it was 1080p (but it's not). [CORRECTION: As stated in the update, the display resolution is 1920x1080.]
Cons: It runs a little warm when gaming, so we bought a cooling pad; the bottom of the case could be a little better quality of plastic; would prefer the hdd be 7200 rpm instead of 5400. All of which are very minor issues. My only significant complaint is the keyboard. The chiclet keyboard feels cheap and there's something about the layout that makes it easy, for me, to lose my position and strike the wrong key. My son, the laptop's primary user, doesn't notice it. So it may be a generational thing or just my problem. And the backlighting on the keys is lackluster at best. I would prefer Asus to have installed black keys and some kind of rubber gasket to prevent light from bleeding out of the sides of key. Those two changes alone would have turned the feature from worse than useless to excellent.
If the option were available to me, I would probably have given this laptop 4.5 stars because of the keyboard, and really only because of that. As a writer, it would take me some time to adjust to this keyboard. But my son thinks it's 5 stars all the way, so 5 stars it is. Overall, this is an excellent value that you will find hard to beat. Quality components, I7 Haswell, solid graphics card, touchscreen, beautiful display, nice fit and finish... It's a win!
Note: This has nothing to do with the computer but avoid the Microsoft app store like the plague. It's a mess and many of the apps are buggy. You're much better off downloading and installing software the old-school way. Skype, for example, was a nightmare. I ended up uninstalling the app that came from the MS Store and downloaded the Win7 version of Skype in order to make it work properly. Had to do this with a number of applications.
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REVIEW UPDATED:So I just went through a form with Amazon to do a full refund after a month with the computer. This is due to the requirements for the computer. I could not justify the price for what it is. For schoolwork, it is just too big. For gaming, it is not good enough for the price. This computer was the envy of my friends and I truly did love it and will be sad to see it go away...
I am going to take my money and invest it into a very cheap and heavily discounted Asus X202 touch laptop or similar laptop for school, use the excess money to get two solid state drives, one for my new laptop and one for my desktop. I will also get new ram for my desktop as well as a next gen graphics card that so far is future proof. The rest of the money will be thrown towards a PS4 or Xbox One and will take a significant chunk out of them making it easier to get them when they release.
This way I get a computer that is more practical for school, and two very powerful game systems that blow this laptop out of the water.
I will truly miss it, it is a great laptop and I recommend it to anybody with a much bigger disposable income. I'm truly sad to see it go.
Oh, also it had battery trouble and would not keep charge after a month of use. Thats just one more reason.
BELOW IS MY OLDER REVIEW:
Ok, so for about the past 3 months I've been researching various laptops at around 1k for my first year of college.
This was the first one to have everything I wanted-
4th gen Haswell Quad Core
Good enough battery life
Touch Screen at 1920x1080
A good enough dedicated graphics card (gt750m)
The reason i give this 3 stars are because of various flaws I found with it.
The first one I ordered got here in a day. It was a amazing computer, well built, good audio, great screen, battery life. The nvida card was giving me trouble and after a session of Crysis 2, the gt750m's driver reported error code 043, which essentially means it died. I sent it back and got a new one same day from amazon and starting dealing with new issues.
My new issues were the 5400rpm hard-drive and the networking card.
The HDD is just too slow for my tastes, I've grown up on 7200rpm emachines and have a OCZ solid state drive in my desktop. it is simply too slow and I plan on replacing it if I can stay within warranty.
The Networking card (Qualcom Artheros Ar9485wb-eg) is also really slow. It takes a full minute to download 1000kb of data. Both the original and the replacement had this issue. i use either wired now or use a usb wifi adapter. Again if I can manage to stay within warranty I will replace it with something better.
Now for the better stuff.
I really like the gt750m nvidia card, it can handle most games at the same graphics of today's 7th gen consoles. The most taxing game I have are Planetside 2, it is playable in big battles on very low settings at full resolution but at any other settings it is iffy. I can manage 40-50 frames at these settings. I played left 4 dead 2 and that was eaten up. The optimus technology automatically switched to the HD 4600 integrated card in the cpu when I played Halo Combat Evolved at Maximum settings in a close quarters unlimited grenades and rockets 16 player match, the integrated card chewed it up. I haven't tried Crysis 2 on the replacement model yet.
Build quality feels like a very fine aluminum, almost like plastic but very solid, I like it.
Screen is the best I have ever had, it is beautiful.
Keyboard, I didn't like the fact it is silver but it is easy to type on and although the backlit bleeds a lot, it does make it easier to see the actual keys and not just the letters.
Mouse pad is the best I have used. Does not mess up your cursor if you accidentally touch it when typing papers like on some notebooks.
Audio is good for a notebook, the additional subwoofer is weak and I forgo it for my cheap gogroove speakers.
Battery life may sound average at 5 hours but it is very generous, when it says 3 hours and 19 minutes it really does mean that much time is left if you keep using how you are. Other notebooks seem to have a less accurate timing.
Not too much bloatware, easily removed within five minutes.
All in all i give it 3 stars because my first model failed and it has a slow HDD and crappy network card.
Pros:
Full HD IPS Touch Screen with great angles
Good keyboard although bland
Great mousepad
gt750m handles modern games well and is capable at low settings select next gen titles
battery life is generous
CPU is powerful when on high performance mode
good audio for a notebook
Cons:
SLLLLOOOOOOOWWWWWW HDD at 5400rpm (upgradable)
Crappy network card that WILL frustrate you (upgradable)
Maybe a little big to bring into classes?
First models gt750m died on me
Best Deals for ASUS N550JV-DB72T 15.6-Inch Touchscreen Laptop
I recently decided to replace my four year old desktop system with a laptop.Given that this was going to be my main computer, I needed a machine that had a good amount of grunt for video conversion and other processor intensive tasks. This machine has the new Haswell i7-4700HQ processor, which has impressive performance with relatively good power consumption.
I am an occasional but enthusiastic gamer, so I needed reasonably good graphics enough to run Civ V, Simcity, Skyrim and whatever is released next at mid settings. Obviously GPU is always a trade off between price, performance and power consumption, but I think the GT750M strikes a reasonable balance between the three. You will have to make your own call, though. If you want more performance, look at the Lenovo IdeaPad Y510p 15.6-Inch Laptop (Metal Dusk Black) which has 2 GT750M's in SLI mode. If you don't do much 3D gaming, an ultrabook or convertible with Intel HD4400 or 4600 integrated graphics (there are quite a few around to choose from) might suit you better.
The screen is beautiful. As screens get better on smartphones and tablets, I find the 768p screens on cheaper laptops hard to look at. Spoiled I guess. The screen is glossy but not as reflective as some I have seen and the viewing angles are excellent.
Not everyone loves touchscreens but it was a must for me. Again, using a lot of touchscreens on other devices I find touch a really natural way of interacting with the user interface, even where it hasn't been specifically designed for touch. Windows 8 is only half the product on a non-touch screen and it seems inevitable that more apps and operating systems will incorporate touch in the future. If you don't want the touchscreen, the ASUS N550JV-DB71-CA Multimedia Notebook (15.6-inch, i7-4700HQ, 8GB-DDR3, 1TB HDD, GT 750M-2G, BD-ROM, Windows 8) is the same laptop without the touchscreen. The trackpad is good too, although I am not a fan of the hidden buttons that everyone has copied from Apple. Initially I found that tapping on the trackpad to click was unresponsive but you can adjust the sensitivity of this. The keyboard is very good in terms of key size and travel, although I would have appreciated a bit of separation between the main keyboard and the number pad so I could easily feel where the enter key was. Frankly I wouldn't have been too fussed if they had left out the number pad altogether.
In terms of size and appearance, this laptop has a very high quality build. I don't care much what my laptop looks like but I do want one that doesn't creak or move while you use it and this certainly fits that bill. The 15.6" form factor is pretty hefty I would've preferred a 14" version but as it was a desktop replacement I was not too worried about the size or weight. If you plan to carry it around a lot, I would recommend you go for something smaller.
While I've said I don't care what my laptop looks like, one thing I do like about this laptop is that it is gaming-capable without looking like a gaming laptop. I find those flashy, neon-lit, tattoo-sporting gaming laptops ridiculous but unfortunately this is almost the most capable gaming laptop I have found without the bling. Even the Lenovo IdeaPad Y510p 15.6-Inch Laptop (Metal Dusk Black) (which looks like the natural next step up from this in the gaming performance terms) has a garish red keyboard which I would feel silly using to do my tax return.
Another important factor in choosing this laptop was warranty. I live in Hong Kong and laptops are generally much cheaper on Amazon than in the stores here, so I wanted a good international warranty. The rules about international warranties vary wildly between manfacturers, but Asus's international warranty is excellent. By contrast Acer (who have a similar model to this laptop) do not offer a true international warranty, so in my circumstances I had to rule them out of consideration entirely.
In terms of shortcomings, this laptop is much better with a decent SSD to replace the supplied HDD. I went for the Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Single Unit Version Internal Solid State Drive MZ-7TE250BW. Luckily it is pretty easy to replace the HDD armed with a Torx#5 screwdriver. One of the advantages of a slightly bigger laptop like this over an ultrabook is that everything is user accessible and replaceable the RAM, the HDD, the wifi card, the battery, even the optical drive.
A bigger shortcoming is that, unlike several of its competitors, this laptop does not have provision for an mSATA SSD. This means you cannot install a 64GB or 128GB SSD as an OS drive and keep the HDD for data. You have to use one drive, and that means being faced with a choice between a smallish but fast SSD and a big but slow HDD. In my case, I have a NAS for storing data, so it was less of an issue for me. Also USB 3.0 (all the USB ports on this laptop are USB 3.0) makes external drives very fast.
I really didn't identify any other issues with this machine. All in all I am one happy owner.
In my dreams I would quite like this CPU/GPU combination in a convertible form factor a touchscreen is more useful again if you can fold it flat and use it like a tablet. But at the moment, none of the convertibles have a dedicated GPU or even Intel HD5100 graphics (which approaches the GT750M for performance). Maybe next year for that.
PS: I noticed that some of the specs for this machine on Amazon and a lot of other online retailers were wrong. Amazon seems to have corrected them now, but to make clear:
* No model of this laptop has an mSATA drive or any place to put one.
* This model has a 1080p IPS touchscreen. The DB71 model has a 1080p IPS non-touchscreen.
* This model has a DVD-RW drive. Some Asian and European models have a Bluray/DVD combo drive or a Bluray-RW drive.
* This has 8GB of RAM, two 4GB modules. Some Asian models come with 16GB RAM.
* This model has a 1 year international warranty and 1 year accidental damage protection (in the US & Canada only). In other countries, Asus offers a 2 year international warranty but no accidental damage protection.
* The keyboard is backlit with 3 levels of light.
One final thing: if you are shipping this (or any) laptop to or through Hong Kong, you will need to get hold of the Material Safety Data Sheet for the laptop battery. For this laptop, the battery part no is C41-N550 and the MSDS is available by telephoning Asus Hong Kong. Do not try Asus USA, they will not know what you are talking about!
Honest reviews on ASUS N550JV-DB72T 15.6-Inch Touchscreen Laptop
First off, I bought this laptop from another vendor, and cannot comment on Amazon's shipping or service. However, after owning this product for about a month, I can comment on the laptop.Pros:
-Top-of-the-line 4th gen Core i7 processor
-Brand new, dedicated video card
-absolutely massive hard drive
-keyboard w/ backlight
-Full HD touchscreen display with IPS technology (very wide viewing angles)
-excellent build quality
Cons:
-hard drive is only 5400 RPM
-keyboard backlight is not perfect
-gets a little warm with heavy use
-it doesn't make me pancakes
Conclusion:
This really is an excellent laptop, especially for the price. For a little more than $1000, it offers you a slew of high-end components inside a well-built, attractive casing. For some more money, you could get a laptop with a higher resolution screen (Macbook Pro Retina) or with slightly better components (Razer Blade) but there's really no reason to unless you're a hardcore gamer or have a need for ultra-high resolution displays. The touchscreen makes Windows 8 infinitely more enjoyable, and makes me wonder why people ever complained about it. The hard drive, while massive, is a bit slow, and seems to occasionally bottleneck the system during some intensive tasks. However, during most use cases, this is a non-issue, and is easily rectified( Just buy yourself a faster hard drive). It does get a little warm when under heavy use, and may require a lap desk or a cooling pad to remain comfortable at times, but again, the problem is easily fixed. The keyboard backlight is a nice touch, with one minor issue. At certain angles, light leaks out from underneath the keys, making them hard to see. But, when one is sitting normally, this isn't an issue. The keyboard itself is wonderful, and I'm not sure why people have complained about it. I suppose it's a preference thing.
Overall it's an amazing laptop for the price, offering an excellent mix between build quality, aesthetics, and power.
Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for ASUS N550JV-DB72T 15.6-Inch Touchscreen Laptop
Pros:Very fast processor
Decently portable at ~ 6 lbs.
Great Build quality
Great Sound quality
Typing on the keyboard is perfect for me
Illuminated Keyboard is great at night while I'm coding or browsing the internet.
Decent graphics card (GTX 750m) for some light gaming As I have gotten older (26), I see myself gaming less on a laptop.
The Intel 4600 HD graphics work great for everything else when you aren't gaming, Nvidia Optimus seamlessly switches between the two gfx cards
Touch Screen works really well, it's great for those lazy nights when I have the laptop on my chest in bed.
1920 x 1080 Screen looks beautiful
Cons:
SLOW hard drive, Do yourself a favor and replace it with a Solid State Drive immediately, I went ahead and got the Samsung 840 EVO (250gb).
You will thank me later.
Can potentially get a little warm depending on use (I've noticed that if I keep the screen brightness down and setting it on powersaver mode it doesn't get very hot). A minor issue if you are like me and put it on your lap and chest while laying.
Wish the wireless card was dual band and supported 5ghz, but this can be fixed buy purchasing a ~$30 dual band internal wireless card
They skimped out on the webcam a little but this is fixable and not a huge issue.
Potential Issues:
*** TOUCH PAD *** I had to send my first one back because the right corner of my touch pad was incredibly hard to press for right-clicking, I went to microcenter to double check if their display model had this issue and it did not so I knew I needed to return mine.
The second model I received fixed this issue, but as other reviewers have noted the touch pad can lift slightly above the bezel in the top right corner. Perhaps ASUS will address this in the near future.
Windows 8 I think windows 8 is growing on me, start up is super fast, the search is powerful but I am not too fond of the way apps run without a close button. To get around this, apps like chrome need to be re-run in desktop mode.
But I'm currently trying Windows 8.1 Preview and I like it even more, It fixes many of my previous gripes and allows you to go back to desktop mode by default with the familiar windows 7 interface. The search is made even more powerful.
All in all, this is an awesome laptop. Design is beautiful, functionality is nearly flawless, and it is quite feature rich. Pretty much all of the cons can be fixed. At roughly ~$1000 it was a steal for me! Keep it up ASUS!
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