Asus K53E-B1
- Category: Notebook Computers
June 16, 2011
Editor's Rating
- Attractive design
- Very good quality speakers
- Good quality display
- Strong battery life
- No 5GHz 802.11n support
- Average performance
The Asus K53E-B1is a 15.6-inch dual-core Intel all-purpose notebook that has an attractive design, great audio quality and fantastic battery life. Performance is only average, but the competitive price tag makes it a good buy.
The Asus K53E-B1 isn't an ultraportable or a desktop replacement, but a sort-of in-between notebook as it weighs 5.7 pounds and measures 14.9 x 10 x 1.4-inches (wdh). As it is quite heavy, you might want to keep this on your desk and refrain from lugging it around with you, but it's certainly not out of the question.
Asus designed the K53E-B1 with a brushed-aluminum and shiny dark brown exterior. This design is quite sturdy and is built well-enough to withstand some bumps and bruises.
The keyboard is full-sized and is quite comfortable to use and type with accuracy. There's also a numeric keypad, but there's a lack of space between the two, so that can sometimes pose an issue. The touchpad is multitouch-enabled and is quite large, so we didn't have any issues running out of space while performing these gestures. Also, the touchpad is able to distinguish between the touch of your fingers and the accidental touch of your palm.
The 15.6-inch widescreen LED backlit display has a native resolution of 1366 x 768-pixels, which is 720p high-definition. We found the screen to be quite bright and displayed colors with a high degree of accuracy.
Built-in are Altec Lansing stereo speakers, which we found to deliver some really great quality audio. In fact, we thought it was subjectively one of the best sounding speakers on any laptop we've tested.
In terms of connectivity and port selection, you'll find three USB 2.0 ports, HDMI-out, VGA-out, Ethernet, SD/MemoryStick memory card reader, audio ports and a super-multi DVD optical drive. There's also 802.11b/g/n wireless networking, but the 802.11n 2.4GHz spectrum is only supported, which leaves the 5GHz spectrum unsupported.
Specifications of the Asus K53E-B1 include an Intel dual-core i5-2410M CPU (2.3GHz), 6GB of DDR3 memory, a 640GB 5400RPM hard drive and integrated Intel HD graphics. Asus includes Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) as the operating system.
The Intel integrated graphics prohibit you from doing any gaming, but Web browsing, e-mailing and productivity use of the Asus K53E-B1 works without any issues. The Intel i5-2410M CPU also isn't the fastest mobile CPU out there, so that also limits your performance, especially with doing processor-intensive tasks, like video encoding. However, the casual user will most likely find this computer to be adequately speedy for their needs.
Battery life is definitely worth mentioning as with the Asus K53E-B1, we were able to get just above 6 hours of battery life, which is quite good, especially compared to similar notebooks. However since this really isn't a portable notebook, battery life might be less of a worry.
