Review: Asus N550JK

Conclusion

...the Asus N550JK straddles the line between mainstream and gaming laptops with stylish design and a good dollop of processing power.

Today's laptops are all about compromise, and consumers need to identify the features that matter most and shop accordingly. Attempting to cover as multiple bases, the Asus N550JK straddles the line between mainstream and gaming laptops with stylish design and a good dollop of processing power.

Winning some battles and losing others, Asus attempts to justify the £800 price tag through an IPS touchscreen with ultra-wide viewing angles, an Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia GTX 850M graphics in a 15.6in form factor that's both attractive and solidly built. The N550JK has the makings of a very good laptop, however the plus points are offset by a few niggling issues that include middling battery life, a highly reflective display and a sluggish 5,400rpm hard disk.

This is a laptop that should really be better than it is, yet Asus isn't a million miles away from producing an entertainment laptop that ticks more of the right boxes. This year's model still needs work, but an SSD and a clean install of Windows is all it would take to elevate the N550JK from average to approved.

The Good		The Bad
Very good CPU performance Reasonable gaming potential Attractive design Wide viewing angles Responsive touchscreen Good connectivity options		Middling battery life Very reflective display Speaker placement not ideal Annoying bloatware Sluggish hard disk

HEXUS.where2buy

The Asus N550JK laptop is available to purchase from Currys and PC World.

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At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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Bloatware should just come highly compressed and available as an optional install or just have a link to download such rather than polluting what should be a clean Windows install.

Also, a glossy panel isn't an inferior panel, especially not when talking about actual image quality that highly benefits from a glossy panel, be it colors or contrast. Sure, outdoor usability is hurt as a tradeoff, and that is very much why there should always be options for glossy and matte panels.

About the stock drive, it should at least come with an SSHD that would mitigate some of the pure mechanical drive pitfalls.

The miniscule bezel on the Dell XPS 13 and soon new XPS 15 make all other laptops now look rather dated.
Does anyone still use the numeric keypad these days?

Oh so close Asus. Oh so close.

tribaljet
Also, a glossy panel isn't an inferior panel, especially not when talking about actual image quality that highly benefits from a glossy panel, be it colors or contrast. Sure, outdoor usability is hurt as a tradeoff, and that is very much why there should always be options for glossy and matte panels.

I doubt you'll find any pro screen which uses a glossy panel. True pro monitors even come with hoods to absolutely minimise the glare from lights.

Myss_tree
Does anyone still use the numeric keypad these days?

I can't imagine it would be any fun working with any kind of data without a numpad. Given the width of the screens now they make sense to me, rather than leaving a large bezel or even worse upping the size of the keys (we've a few laptops at work with oversized keys and they're horrible coming from a normal keyboard).

So…. Drop the processor down to an i5, switch the DVD drive to an external one, make the battery bigger and upgrade to an SSD = winner. Simple! :p

this_is_gav
…

I doubt you'll find any pro screen which uses a glossy panel. True pro monitors even come with hoods to absolutely minimise the glare from lights.

Point being? Image quality remains vastly superior on glossy panels nonetheless, regardless of panel quality tier.