Asus N550 video game This evaluation

Asus always attaches great importance to the audio-visual entertainment notebook market, Asus N Series notebook as the first to enter this part of the market products, has been deeply loved by consumers. A few years due to similar technology, product shape similar, the homogeneity of the brand between the serious, the brand began to open ideas to strive for product differentiation, especially in the mid-range products. ASUS has also undergone this transformation, innovating N-Series notebooks to make consumption feel a whole new experience in every generation of products. N Series products undergo several generations of change, forming a set of ASUS unique characteristics of the design concept, many characteristics of the design by consumers love.

Overall appearance

The new ASUS N550 Hardware, paired with the latest Haswell I7-4700hq,nvidia Geforce gt750m High-end discrete graphics, 16GB memory and 1TB hard drives, the screen uses 1080p Full HD IPS screen ( It is divided into two versions of non-touch fog panel and mirror touch screen, and continues to be equipped with B&o sound system and external speakers. Overall view is very balanced, is the audio-visual game of the reasonable configuration, no obvious short board.

This June, Intel just released the latest Haswell processor, through the hardware product update, ASUS also launched its own latest generation of N-Series notebook products N550. N550 in preserving the N series of N56 Classic design while continuing to innovate, the product in the selling point has many of the characteristics of the current consumer attention, HD IPS screen, all metal fuselage, external subwoofer and strong hardware configuration. So the new N550 also have what advantages, these advantages of the place can give users what, and what shortcomings and shortcomings, I believe this article can give you a more clear answer.

Appearance evolved into all metal body

Fuselage Fuchscassida Adapter

In terms of appearance, the Asus N550 has a 15.6-inch fuselage size, which can be said to be the best experience size for the current video and entertainment book. All-metal body design (except the screen B side of A, C, d are anodized alumina material), where A and D face are metal wire drawing treatment, and C-side rely on high-quality metal oxidation process to reach the touch of matte material, surface processing on the metal texture of strong style and did not use a skin-type coating and paint surface. ASUS N550 Screen maximum opening and closing angle reached 150 degrees, fully able to meet the general user demand for screen opening and closing angle, in the same class products at the leading level.

The Asus N550 is a long-width, high-size, physically tested data bit 383mmx255mmx27.8mm. In terms of weight measured bare metal weight data is only 2.35kg, with adapter travel weight of 2.71kg. For a 15.6-inch large size originally said that the bare metal weight is still quite light, and because the machine adapter load power is very large, the volume and weight is also difficult to control the state of the lighter, so the travel weight slightly less, weight overall is a very normal performance.

Screen material changed from TN to IPS

With full HD IPS screen

The new generation of N550 on the hardware of the most gratifying innovation is the screen material from the previous Generation N56 TN screen into the IPs hard screen, the resolution also continues to maintain 1080p HD performance, so on the N550 screen end, the experience is quite good, In the same type with the positioning of the audio-visual entertainment this product occupies a leading position. In addition, the machine is equipped with Windows 8 system, in order to cater to the new landscape of Windows 8 to promote touch, but also to provide users with a better experience, the new N550 in the function of the screen is divided into two versions, the official listing model will have a non-touch version and touch version of the two configurations, The non-touch version of the screen uses a matte screen design that continues to enjoy consumer acclaim on the N56, while the touch version of the N550 features a mirrored design to ensure a touch experience. When buying, consumers can choose according to their own needs.

In addition, the author here would like to give a suggestion to manufacturers, not only Asus, other brands are the same. Is it possible to consider the combination of the matte display and touch advantages of the screen, and introduce the products of the matte touch screen to give consumers more choice. After all, the market competition requires manufacturers to provide consumers with differentiated products to show the quality and unique design concept, the current market all touch screen notebook products are a mirror screen of water, not only reflective serious, and will easily leave a lot of fingerprint perspiration, in fact, through the interaction with netizens learned that, In fact, there is a considerable number of users are looking to get a fog touch screen notebook products, including the author himself, I hope the manufacturers think more, in the future of the product to bring consumers more choice more experience.

Detail experience: full-size backlit keypad with smooth, precision-controlled touchpad

Keyboard details

In the design of the keyboard, the new N550 a generation of N56 black key cap design, the use of a new silver-gray key cap, with the entire C-side with the seamless, the overall feeling stronger and more simple and generous. And in the key hat surface material processing can see ASUS's sophisticated, high-quality paint coating process so that the key caps of metal luster, you do not look closely or even aware of the C-side of the metal material is different, in other words, plastic sense is not strong, this is commendable.

In addition, due to the Asus N550 15.6-Inch large size, in order to increase user convenience and comfort level, the keyboard is equipped with a full-size keyboard, equipped with a separate digital key area. The overall touch of the keyboard is good, the body does not have to be overly rigid thickness, but also to the key cap has excellent key and flexibility to bring more space, the overall experience is good.

In the layout, N550 keyboard is still more in line with the current mainstream users, the FN function key position is not with the CTRL replacement, novice use will not have the habit of obstacles. The white backlight of the keyboard not only allows the user to use more calmly at night, but also increases the aesthetic degree, the night can play a very good decorative role, and the top cover inlaid with white backlight logo complement each other, echoing each other.

Touch Panel Details

In the design of the trackpad, N550 uses a large area of the one-piece touch panel, the surface with a certain touch texture of the laser texture design, the use of both smooth and can realize the advantages of incomplete smooth surface, not on the pure smooth surfaces sliding that abrupt, abrupt, astringent feeling. However, the overall accuracy of the trackpad seems slightly worse than other products, and the mouse also has a very slight sense of delay, the use of a little more procrastination, not neat. Of course, this is also related to the use of personal habits, some users do not like touch completely abrupt feeling, soft soft, supple, meat control feeling instead in the Web browsing experience and other aspects of more advantages, so this is still different from each other.

In the touch of the button, because of the use of one-piece design, concise more than the general feeling, one-piece touch board more common "seesaw" feel more obvious, press up is always not as good as the sub-body button feel so well, not to give a person absolutely control feeling. However, notebook trackpad use frequency is still not so high, Chinese consumers are still more accustomed to the use of external mouse, so look at the actual use of the touch board feel is harmless.

Interface Rich location Reasonable

Fuselage left interface

In terms of interface, N550 provides a richer interface design, which has 2 USB3.0 interfaces on the left side of the fuselage (1 of which support shutdown charging), 1 RJ-45 ports, 1 HDMI ports, 1 MINIDP interfaces, 1 audio input and output interfaces, With 1 external speaker interfaces and a power connector, most of the N550 interface is designed to the left of the fuselage, which is a very suitable design option.

The right side of the fuselage is designed with 1 common USB3.0 interfaces, 1 Blu-ray burning optical drives, a secure keyhole on the back end of the spindle, and a groove in the narrow edge of the fuselage for the SD card slot.

Fuselage right Side interface

Overall, the interface design of N550 is quite rich, and the location of the interface has obvious function tendency. Designers fully consider the actual use of the user needs, the use of the interface and frequency, for the interface has a more reasonable layout, especially in the HDMI interface, network port, USB interface, SD card slot, the location of these interfaces selected. And in the full extent of the interface, to ensure that the mainstream of the common interface readily available to users should not have any obstacles to use.

Featured Features

B&o Sound System

N550 is not a general, Asus hope that the N-series to become the player of the world's most high-energy products, of course, it will be equipped with many features, which is in line with its positioning, but also become its market with similar products to compete with the capital. The first feature is the N550 continuation of the N-series pre-made external speakers, which is easy to understand, with external speakers compared to ordinary notebook products with more high-quality sound performance. And the new N550 is equipped with a corresponding change in the surface material of the speaker, from the original piano light lacquer surface to the current matte texture, the outside of the speaker at the top of the use of Asus concentric circle design, compared to the old paragraph more prominent quality, but also more beautiful.

Circular lattice design with no speakers

In addition N550 is currently the mainstream models on the market on the few B&o high-quality sound system products, from the past experience of the test, the general ASUS mainstream household size with B&o sound System products sound quality performance will be better than similar products, this N550 is so. At present mainstream market beats audio, Waves MAXX, dolby these several types overall performance is inferior to B&o, JBL and Harman, this is the author's personal evaluation experience for reference only, after all, audio this thing is the benevolent see of the beholder. It is worth mentioning that the machine's speakers are not on the fuselage C side of the left and right side of the circle lattice, but at the bottom of the fuselage, the circle lattice is just decoration, and the previous generation of N56 design is different.

External speakers

Leap Motion Body sense components (not included)

In addition, Asus N550 is a very rare product in the market that works with leap Motion, and supporting leap motion means that users can achieve a very surreal somatosensory experience with the external leap motion component, although the experience is very small in terms of actual production capabilities, The external leap motion does not have the built-in components to be comfortable, but ASUS at least has the attitude of wanting users to feel more. However, since the leap motion component is more expensive, ASUS does not yet have the component standard for N550, requiring users to purchase it themselves.

Performance testing

The N550 model, configured as the top with product in all N550 series models, is equipped with the I7-4700HQ standard voltage processor of the latest Haswell platform, the processor uses 22nm process, quad core Eight threads, the default frequency is 2.4GHz, via turbo Boost Turbo technology is up to 47W for 3.4GHZ,TDP design. In addition to the i7 version of the test machine, N550 will also provide users with a variety of Haswell architecture processor version, for users with limited budget, can have more choices for ASUS market positioning is also more favorable.

Positioning the audio-visual entertainment, ASUS N550 Of course will be equipped with a strong independent graphics card, or for users of the product itself will appear too tragic. This test N550 is paired with the Nvidia Geforce gt750m discrete graphics card and retains the Intel HD Graphics 4600 Torch Core graphics integrated in the processor, Users in the actual use in accordance with their own use of the weak performance of the core graphics card and relatively strong performance of the independent video card to switch back and forth in order to achieve the power-saving and performance of the dual effect. Self-improvement after the performance of the torch Core graphics HD 4600 performance has been comparable to the low-end, so the user usually in mobile use when you can choose to switch to the nuclear display, will save a lot of power consumption, at the same time to meet the mainstream should not be a problem, only play the game when the switch back to gt750m alone.

In addition, the Asus N550 is equipped with dual channel 16GB DDR3 1600MHz memory, which is basically the highest factory configuration in mainstream and even high-end gaming, enough to guarantee the whole machine's experience under any application under the Windows 8 system. Storage, the machine with a 1TB HDD, because it is not the location of ultra-polar, so SSD may not be the first demand of this part of the user, HDD can meet the use of ordinary users. Of course, if you want your hands of the N550 become faster and stronger, you can choose the hard drive tray to carry out a strong upgrade, the current SSD price is not high, 120GB products as long as 500 yuan, upgrade costs can be accepted, compared with the factory can be more in line with the actual demand for ordinary users. In addition, the machine is equipped with Windows 8 x64 system, the system characteristics of everyone is also very clear, the boot speed, Metro interface fluency is its characteristics. Lack of course is not the Metro interface Bad touch experience and some of the old software compatibility, here is not highlighted.

The performance of the processor is ferocious

CINEBENCH 11.5 Test

We measured the ASUS N550 using the authoritative test software cinebench 11.5. Cinebench is recognized in the industry as a benchmark software, in the domestic and foreign mainstream media most system performance test can be seen in its shadow. It uses the cinema 4D special effects software engine developed by the company for the film and television industry to test the performance of the CPU and graphics. The single core and multi-core tests are calculated separately, and in addition they provide OpenGL testing. This N550 test machine is equipped with the I7-4700HQ four core eight thread standard voltage processor, the default frequency of 2.4GHz, Turbo Boost up to 3.4ghz,tdp up to 47W. In the Cinebench 11.5 test, a single core score of 1.48pts and a multi-core collaboration score of 6.86pts were obtained, and the overall performance was quite good.

Graphics performance is the mainstream top

3DMark 11 Test

In the display section of the test we selected 3DMark 11来. 3DMark 11 is a comprehensive benchmark tool launched by Futuremark, which gives full play to the benefits of multi-channel graphics and multi-core processors. In the graphics aspect, N550 is equipped with the latest Nvidia Geforce gt750m discrete graphics card with 4GB GDDR3 memory particles with 384 stream processing units, which we tested using 3DMark 11 performance mode during the test. Through the test, ThinkPad S3 's final score reached P2697 points. Because the distance from the last test of the project is very close, remember the last time to participate in the 3DMark 11 Test video card is HD 8670M, the graphics card and gt630m performance is the same level, scored 1260 points, so gt750m overall performance of about GT630 and HD 8670M this level of graphics card twice times more, as the GTX model in addition to the best performance of the mainstream notebook graphics card, the advantage is obvious. gt755m

However, I also note that although the machine's graphics performance is very eye-catching, but still not the limit of gt750m, because the Asus GT750 is equipped with GDDR3 particles, compared with the performance of the GDDR5 will have a certain loss, the situation with the previous generation n56,n46 the same situation. At that time, N46, N56 in the same configuration gt650m Lenovo Y470 show a weak performance, is because Lenovo Y470 gt650m with GDDR5 particles, and N46 only carry GDDR3 particles. This is ASUS N550 in the graphics card is the author Nitpick singled out the small weaknesses, in fact, the difference in performance of about 15%, ordinary users can completely ignore.

155 Frames Run "Street Fighter 4" Play like!

"Street Fighter 4" Test (Full HD resolution)

In the game measurement of the link, we first chose the "Street Fighter 4" This is a little low-end game, the actual test in the performance of the gt750m independent graphics card running this level of game with play, in the case of 1366x768 resolution off vertical synchronization, the average score of 155 frames, There are still 113 frames in full HD resolution. It is generally believed that more than 60 frames of the game is very smooth, obviously gt750m without any problems.

"Lost Planet 2" test (Full HD resolution)

"Metro 2033" test (Full HD resolution)

"Biochemistry Crisis 6" test (Full HD resolution)

And in the "Lost Planet 2" "Metro 2033" "Biochemical crisis 6" and other games in the performance is also commendable. The above is a screenshot of the number of frames in these tests, which is not described in detail here.

4 hours of daily use

Powermark Endurance Test

In the endurance test, the author will be set to the energy-saving mode of medium brightness, using it normal internet, watching movies, brush micro bo, almost can adhere to more than 4 hours, is very good. The performance of the machine is similar to what I had expected before, because after all, N550 is a performance-oriented entertainment, not only equipped with I7-4700HQ four core eight thread processor, and gt750m power consumption can not be ignored, but also has a 1080p Full HD IPS screen, The three main power consumption components are all high-performance products, can have more than 4 hours of performance is very rare. And in the more stringent powermark endurance test, N550 performance is worse, eventually in 166 minutes to consume 81% of the power, the conversion of which means that all 100% power can support about 198 minutes or so, The test system takes into account the actual use of the user and the machine sleep to save data, such as the required power, given a 2 hours 59 minutes, about 179 minutes of the battery life. Good performance loss of a little battery life I think it's worth it.

Mechanical hard disk is the bottleneck of whole machine

HD Tune HDD Test

Atto Hard Drive Test

Asus N550 on the hard drive with a 5400 rpm 1TB Seagate Hard Drive, overall performance is good, but performance is still said to be the bottleneck behind N550 performance. In the actual test, the average reading speed is 86.8mb/s. From the efficiency of the file copy of the histogram can be seen, the performance of the hard disk in 8-16m after the beginning of the embodiment, can be maintained in the 100mb/s above, the curve to see stability is also good. Purely on the mechanical hard disk performance, N550 this piece of Seagate hard disk is good, but still is the performance bottleneck of the machine, this is very undoubtedly.

Comprehensive Performance Testing

PCMark 7 Comprehensive test

In the comprehensive performance test, we use Futuremark's professional-grade system test software PCMark 7. The PCMark 7 contains seven different test links, comprised of a total of 25 independent workloads, covering everything from storage, computing, image and video processing, web browsing, and gaming to everyday PC applications. In the test performance of PCMark 7 N550 scored 3523 points, the overall performance is quite good, do not forget PCMark 7 is a hard disk performance has an extra emphasis on the test software, if N550 can add an SSD, I believe the score will probably reach more than 5000 points high. Of course, reality is reality, it does not allow you to assume.

Full Text summary: The most interesting video and entertainment book

In fact, N550 is not without shortcomings, the author of this article has repeatedly mentioned the shortcomings of N550 and suggestions for improvement, but also hope that the N series products can do better, for users to bring more reliable audio and video entertainment experience. Although there are such small deficiencies, but throughout the product and compared to the current mainstream market products, you will find that N550 is currently the mainstream notebook market audio and video entertainment This is a very rare product.

In fact, if the manufacturers want their products factory volume, quality control and in place, the price can be maintained to a reasonable category, the product has no other brand characteristics and creativity is very difficult, N550 or N series basic guarantee to achieve these elements, which is also a lot of "foreign brands" into China acclimatized reasons, Chinese brands are inherently human in nature, because they know what they want. It seems that the Asus N series is always able to understand what users want, and after giving the actual performance requirements, there is an extra budget for the profit of the product at this level so that the N series will always have the same qualities that are different from other products and develop healthily. This is the reason why the Asus N series is successful and what other brands need to focus on.

Although Asus N550 is not a extreme high-end products, although there are some can improve the space, but I always believe that in the mainstream price segment, N series has behaved very good, the current N550 series on the market only top with X47JV (matte non-touch screen) a configuration, The top with model in each e-commerce price of about 8000 yuan, the follow-up will introduce other configuration of the N550, in general it is the current market on the 8,000-yuan level of the most interesting video and entertainment models.