MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: Asus... junk or gem?

> The power connector fell off the
> motherboard after 3 months, leaving it unable to charge the battery; ASUS did repair
> it under warranty no fuss after exchanging some Chinglish emails ;-)

The same thing happened to my friend, just after his warranty expired. He had it repaired by a guy who specializes in laptop repair. The repair guy claims that he's repaired "hundreds" of that exact same power connector issue on various ASUS laptops. There's obviously some sort of design problem there that needs to be addressed.

That said, I picked up a cheap ASUS laptop last year from Best Buy for $400 and I haven't had any power issues yet, but I'm VERY careful to not put any stress on the power cord. Here's the specs...

Asus K53E-RBR4 Laptop
Intel Core i3-2330M (2.2GHz)
15.6" (1366 x 768) LED
6GB DDR3
640GB HDD
HDMI
WiFi-N
DVDRW
Webcam
6-Cell battery
Win 7 Premium 64-bit
$399.99 (purchased on 03/05/2012)
Best Buy SKU: 4776005

I've successfully played Age of Empires III on it quite a bit, though I need to turn down some of the eye candy (shadows, smoke, etc...) or it bogs down really bad during battles.

I've also played Portal on it, outputting via HDMI to my 1080p HDTV. Though, again, I need to turn down some of the eye candy like the portal draw depth. Even with settings turned way down, Portal still locks up or crashes from time to time. I'm not sure that the Intel HD 4000 graphics are really up to the challenge (or even meet the minimum requirements).

I wouldn't spend over $500 for anything in this class of laptop if you plan on doing anything beyond mild gaming with older games. For anything more serous, I'd spend a little more and get something with dedicated graphics. Just stick with Intel Core CPUs.

Also, and this is just a pet peeve, but I really HATE laptops that have a full dedicated numeric keypad on the right side. It forces your hands off center to the left, which makes it uncomfortable to type. Who the hell uses keypads anymore other than accountants? They should leave out the keypad and put speakers on the sides of the (centered) keyboard instead.

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