The Asus X553SA is a cheap laptop, with a good great of entry-level features across the board in a ‘proper’ laptop frame. Asus would readily admit there are compromises at this point, but should they put you off a buy? Having spend a good while the laptop, there’s only one major issue here: performance. Intel has made amazing progress with its Core M series processors over the last 18 months, but the Celeron chipset used here is slow. Matched with a slow hard drive, you’ll need patience to get on with the Asus X553SA. Also see: Best laptops 2016 UK
Asus X553SA review: Price
At £279, the Asus X553SA is not too far off as little as you can spend on a new, full-size 15.6-inch laptop that has a large hard drive rather than a tiny Chromebook-style wedge of solid state memory.
Asus X553SA review: Design
A laptop with a shoestring budget, you’d hope the Asus X553SA wouldn’t make any silly design moves, and it doesn’t. This is a very normal-looking laptop with a plastic shell. In pure aesthetic terms it’s pleasantly simple. While the lid is plastic, there’s still a texture of concentric circles fanning across it, mimicking the brushed metal style Asus uses in its higher-end ZenBook laptops. Asus sent us the sober, all-black version. It’s a good look for those who want a low-key computer. However, there are colourful models too. It comes in pink, white and purple, each radically altering the impression they’ll make while changing nothing but the colour. Build quality isn’t too impressive, though. Press down on the keyboard and you’ll see flexing, a sign of a less-than-tough laptop. Little build issues like this are all the more grating now that tablets have made us expect expensive-feeling devices for similar money. The Asus X553SA’s size and weight are those of the ageing laptop archetype too. It’s 2.2kg and 26mm thick. As such it’s too heavy to take around for hours at a time without your shoulders complaining, but will fit into most larger record bags for the occasional trip out.
Asus X553SA review: Connections
The Asus X553’s features strategy is to offer plenty of breadth, but not all that much depth. It’s probably the right direction for a cheap laptop. It has both VGA and HDMI video connections, sure to please those who have old pre-HDMI monitors they are not quite ready to retire just yet. However, there are just two USBs. One is a USB 3.0 port, the other a USB 2.0. Other entry-level laptops tend to offer three USBs, but all the Asus X553SA’s connections are decked out on one side, which may make manufacturing cheaper. There are also headphone, Ethernet and SD ports. The Asus X553SA isn’t here to cater for the hardcore crowd, but there’s enough too satisfy many. On the connection-free side is the DVD multi-writer and Kensington lock port. Once you start adding up what the Asus X553SA, it starts to sound like a pretty good deal.
Asus X553SA review: Keyboard and Trackpad
The question is whether the deal will merit the sacrifices required. Its keyboard features one of these. At a glance it does a lot right. It has a standard layout, and even manages to fit in a NUM pad to the right. However, the flex-happy casing and entry-level keys leave it feeling springy, with a less well-defined action than a more expensive laptop. There’s plenty of key travel, but it seems vague compared with a taut chiclet design. The Asus X553SA’s trackpad is large, designed to work well with gestures. With a smooth-but-textured plastic surface it tries to emulate the feel of a glass-topped trackpad on a budget, and doesn’t do too bad a job. However, like a lot of Windows laptop pads, it comes with frustrations. It uses evenly-spaced buttons integrated into the pad itself, and as there’s a NUM pad, the left mouse button area is actually towards the left of the laptop. As such, the resting position of your left hand needs to be way over to the left, which may feel unnatural. The Asus X553SA will work best when used with a mouse, much as there are some good parts to the pad.
Asus X553SA review: Display
You’re not going to get a stellar screen in a sub-£300 standard-design laptop. The Asus X553SA takes a few cues from the tablet school of display design, but this is ultimately a fairly uninspiring laptop screen. Given the price, that should not be a deal breaker. The Asus X553SA has a 15.6-inch 1366 x 768 pixel LCD screen. It’s not terribly sharp, this being the same resolution and pixel density laptops of 10 years ago. This isn’t an IPS screen either, meaning it only looks entirely ‘right’ seen front-on. Look at the display from above or below and it either looks washed out or shadowy, thanks to something called contrast shift. Asus’s stab at getting a modern look consists of using a glossy screen finish rather than a matt one. On the positive, this makes the colours look reasonably punchy even though actual colour performance of the screen isn’t great. Using our colorimeter, we found it hits 59.9 per cent of sRGB, 41.3 of 42.4 Adobe RGB and of DCI P3. These are the three most popular colour standards, and hitting just 60 per cent of sRGB means the display will look a little undersaturated. However, for the price it’s a fine performance. The issue with using a glossy display is that it’s incredibly reflection-prone, even among glossy laptops. Take it outside and the Asus X553SA will be virtually useless. The display goes up to a reasonable 283cd/m, but reflections are so severe that seeing what’s on-screen becomes a trial.
Asus X553SA review: Specs and Performance
A so-so screen and a springy-feeling keyboard are issues you can probably get used to if you need to stick to a very tight budget. The issue you need to take more seriously is performance. Most of the laptops we review have Intel Core series processors. All of these get you largely compromise-free day-to-day performance when matched with fast-enough storage. The Asus X553SA has a much lower-end Intel Celeron N3050 CPU. It’s a dual-core chipset clocked at 1.6-2.16GHz, and its performance is fairly dismal. See also: AMD vs Intel. It scores 1143 in PCMark 8, which is less than half of what a good Intel Core i5 might score, and 1558 points in Geekbench 3. That is the same sort of score we might expect from a £150 entry-level phone. Limited power is often a non-issue when you take a laptop from the abstract world of benchmarks and into the context of real use. However, here the low raw power is obvious. Rudimentary parts of Windows 10 can take a little while to load, like the Start menu apps display, and even browsing feels sluggish a lot of the time. This Intel Celeron processor has a higher TDP than the latest Intel Atom CPUs (which tells you how much heat they can generate, or how hard they can rev if you like) but actual performance is worse in some cases. It’s not all down to the CPU. The Asus X553SA also has a slow 5400rpm hard drive. Download over an ultra-fast optical connection (100Mbit Virgin Media is our test connection) and there’s a further knock to performance, and the system becomes almost difficult to use if it is installing a program at the time. Of course, in the trade off you do get 1TB storage. Just buying a 1TB SSD would cost you almost the whole price of this laptop. We’ve seen an awful lot of good stuff happening in laptop hardware over the last couple of years, but the Asus X553SA suffers from performance traits that might have annoyed in laptops 10 years old or more. The issue is that both the CPU and the hard drive are potential performance bottlenecks, and their choke point is within arm’s reach at all times. The Asus X553SA will still make a fine machine for basic office tasks, browsing and so on, but you do have to accept that some of these may feel slower than they do on your phone or tablet. Bargain hunters out there should consider looking for an older Core i3 machine, some of which are available at a similar price. It almost goes without saying that the Asus X553SA’s gaming performance is terrible. Even with visuals pared right back and the resolution dropped down to 720p, Thief is categorically unplayable, with an average frame rate of 5.8fps, dropping as far down as 2.6fps. Just for masochist satisfaction we also tried it at the native screen resolution (1366 x 768 rather than our usual 1080p) and it averages 2.9fps, dropping down to 0.4fps at points. The less demanding Alien:Isolation is unplayable too, averaging just 9.3fps with settings minimised and resolution at 720p. Theme Hospital (1997) should run fine, but don’t expect games from this era to shine.
Asus X553SA review: Battery Life
The problem ultra-affordable laptops like this face is in justifying their existence other than by virtue of their full-size keyboards. As we’ve seen, performance and screen quality do not impress. Battery life affords the Asus X553SA no comeback. Playing a 720p video on loop it lasts four hours 35 minutes. Even though the Intel Celeron CPU feels weak and slow, it does not appear to offer particularly good efficiency.
