Price: $1,080
Ratings: 4/5
First impressions
With a slew of Windows 8 powered devices,
Asus is planning to capture a much bigger piece of the market share than it
has. Not just here in India, but worldwide. With well-built laptops and great
performance for the buck, they have been on target so far. So, will the VivoBook
S400 with its 14" of HD awesomeness manage to take the Asus ship where it
plans to go? Let's find out!
Asus
VivoBook S400
Review
Powered by the 3rd gen Intel Core i7 processor,
the Asus VivoBook S400 has a slight chunk in its armory. Even though for
regular gaming and basic multimedia it is great, even for intense hogging apps
like Adobe Photoshop and the likes - the only problem is the fact that the U
series (3517U in this case) are all powered by dual-core processors. Which
meant that the benchmarks were a bit of a mixed bag, even though we had a 4GB
of DDR3 RAM in support to the processor and an onboard Intel Graphics HD 4000
GPU. Heavy gamers might not readily go for this configuration, though most
games we tried ourselves worked fairly well - with only a few dropped frames on
some really high end graphics intensive games. Multimedia viewing and
multi-tasking with resource hogging apps was fairly good too, but things
could've been a lot better with a dedicated graphics card instead of the
on-board one. The display on the 14" LED screen is quite bright and sharp,
though the glare factor is a bit annoying. Plus it is prone to fingerprints -
and since it's a touchscreen Windows 8 device, you might be doing a lot of
cleaning on the screen. Windows 8 in itself is a mixed bag, and the performance
on the S400 was as good as any Ultrabook we've tested so far. Connectivity
options are well covered with an HDMI port, a USB 3.0 port, 2 USB 2.0 ports, a
card reader slot, a VGA port, an Ethernet port and headphone/mic port. The
keyboard on this wide VivoBook is nicely laid out and really comfortable to
use, with the trackpad following suit. The only downer seemed to be the audio
output on speakers (which are on the side panels, on the lower side) - which
were rather average, even though they are powered with the SonicMaster
technology.
The
keyboard on this wide VivoBook is nicely laid out and really comfortable to
use, with the trackpad following suit.
Verdict
It's quite hard to easily recommend this
Ultrabook to everybody, but at an asking price of 60K, it still is one of the
cheaper options available in the market. It's got almost everything to please
every kind of user, with a few disappointments that also exist in other devices
in the same price range. So, is the S400 going to take Asus all the way to the
top? Perhaps not, but it's laying a solid foundation for other devices at a
premium price to build on!
Specifications
·
Intel Core i7-3517U
·
14" LED Backlight HD screen
·
Windows 8
·
4GB DDR III RAM
·
Intel HD 4000 GPU
·
500 GB HDD
·
WLAN 802.11b/g/n & Bluetooth 4.0
In the same league
Lenovo Ideapad U510 Ultrabook
Lenovo
Ideapad U510 Ultrabook
·
Windows 8 Price: $1,090
·
3rd Gen Intel Core i5
·
4GB RAM
·
1TB 24GB SSD
Samsung NP530U4C-S03IN Ultrabook
Samsung
NP530U4C-S03IN Ultrabook
·
Price: $1,115
·
3rd Gen Intel Core i5
·
6GB RAM
·
1 TB
·
Windows 8
