From the outside,and the price level, this Asus FX553VD seems like a rather typical productivity focused 15.6-inch
based laptop computer.However,look a little deeper and you will see that Asus has endowed this with some gaming ability, despite it looking or costing nothing such as your normal gaming laptop.If you only want a super-portable mobile laptop or
convertible, this is not really for you – but if you want something that is satisfied to run Excel
during the day time and Baywatch at night,it is in fact a rather intriguing proposition.
From the exterior, this looks like a relatively mid-range office efficiency
laptop. There are a few orange highlights that suggest it’s a bit more than that.That price might give it away a
little though; if there wasn’t some type of discrete gaming GPU inside, you could
very easily pick up a competing model for $500 much less. From what we can explain to – and
it’s getting harder and harder to tell each day due to numerous coatings – the complete chassis is manufactured from a plastic exterior.Weighing in at 2.5kg with battery ,it’s as well rather heavy compared to the
ultra-light weights we have seen in this form factor of late.
The consolation for this is some quite beefy hardware within. The 15.6-inch IPS screen is a basic 1920 x 1080 model,and
we truly do mean standard. Compared to some other laptops in this price range,the colour quality and clearness of the display screen is rather incomplete.However, the favorite of the laptop world is running this machine,
Intel’s 7th Generation Core i7-7700HQ CPU.With quad HyperThreaded cores that boost up to 3.8GHz, this machine
has CPU process in spades.It’ll cut thru anything you throw at it with no problem, a fact assisted by the large
16GB of DDR4 memory feeding it data files at high speed.
Sadly,the main OS SSD is rather inadequate. At just 128GB, with only 118GB of that usable, you’ll be filling this
M.2 SSD faster than you can click on installing the Adobe suite installing button. We had to mount the majority of our
benchmarks on the secondary drive,a 1TB mechanical drive, as it held spitting up an error that there just simply wasn’t enough space,despite there being a healthy 75GB of free space on the main SSD;we are guessing a
BIOS update will correct this bug in the future.
Building this a relatively decent gaming device is the inclusion of Nvidia’s entry-level GeForce
GTX 1050 GPU. As our benchmarks present, it’s doesn’t really have the chops
to perform today’s most recent games at Ultra detail, though it’s good If you are more of a casual gamer.Still,at this
selling price it looks a little under-powered;a GeForce GTX 1060 would have delivered enormously improved
performance. At least it’s not too noisy, hitting the 50dB fan noise that seems to be the basis
for all of the new Nvidia mobile GPUs.
Unfortunately,battery life was fairly “weak”,hitting just 129 mins in our PCMark 8 Home Accelerated battery experiment.
If you are expecting full-day performance from this Asus FX553VD laptop,we would suggest that you’re going to be frustrated.As far as some other features go, things are pretty much par for the course.
The addition of a Blu-ray drive is exciting,but comes at the cost of USB connectivity. There are only two USB 3.0
and a single USB 2.0 Type A connection,along with a single USB 3.1 Type C connection.There is also HDMI out and an
Ethernet in, but that’s about it. Asus has tried to offer a rather special laptop machine; with a business form factor but
the inclusion of a GeForce GTX 1050 to give it a little gaming grunt.However,for the price we think you’re far better with something just like an Alienware with external GPU accelerator,which will provide a much more portable office machine, with serious gaming general performance when you get home.
Asus FX553VD MAIN SPECS:
15.6-inch IPS panel • Intel’s 7th Generation Core i7-7700HQ
CPU (quad-core, HyperThreaded, 3.8GHz Turbo) • 16GB
DDR4 • Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 – Battery
4 Cells 48 Whrs Battery -1 x USB 3.1 TYPE C port(s)
2 x USB 3.0 port(s)
1 x USB 2.0 port(s)
1 x RJ45 LAN Jack for LAN insert
1 x HDMI
Chicklet keyboard with isolated Num key
Illuminated Chiclet Keyboard – intelligent thermal design – filter out ambient noise-Asus FX553VD Price:£1,160
Photo source:asus
