Asus K501LX-EB71 Review of a High end Laptop at a Mid Range Price

Choosing a high-end laptop is very tricky, because some of them are better for video editing, others for gaming and others offer a better balance between design and internal hardware; but they all cost roughly around the same, so how are we supposed to choose? Which is better? Which is worth buying?

Well, if what you want is a high-end laptop with good specs that doesn’t sacrifice the thinness of the device (or at least not nearly as much as other laptops), then the Asus K501LX-EB71 is an excellent choice, especially if you consider the price point, at least by the time we wrote this post, you can check the price here. 

If you wanna know more about this device, then keep reading because we’re about to start our in-depth review of the Asus K501LX-EB71.

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The first thing you notice when you see the Asus K501LX-EB71 is that it’s a very pretty laptop. It has a very premium look and feel thanks to its metal components, as well as a very classy, blue and silver design (“dark blue”, to be more specific). The good thing is that neither the colors nor the design are very flashy, so it’s still discrete and elegant enough for an office environment. 

Its 15.6-inch, anti-glare screen is pretty good as well, rocking a Full HD (1920x1080p) resolution. This gives you plenty of space for multitasking and plenty of visual detail for your videos and images.

If you don’t know what “anti-glare” is, it’s pretty much just a shorter way of saying that the screen doesn’t reflect as much light as regular screens do, making outdoor usage better and reducing the levels of eye strain in the process.

If you want a higher resolution or a bigger display, you can still connect the laptop to your TV through the HDMI port and enjoy even your 4K videos without a problem, thanks to the dedicated GTX 950M graphics card (of which we’ll talk about in the next category).

The whole purpose of a high-end laptop is to have powerful hardware, and the Asus K501LX-EB71 doesn’t disappoint at that. In fact, one of the biggest pros of the laptop is that it comes with a 5th generation, dual-core, Broadwell based Intel Core i7 processor with 4 threads, 4 MB of cache and an excellent clock speed of 2.4GHz (3 with Turbo Boost).

I know that being only a dual-core processor, this i7 might not look very powerful, but I assure you that it’s more than capable of handling most programs and apps without any performance issues. Although, I do admit that it won’t be super efficient at rendering videos, because this process eats CPU cores as much as Chrome eats RAM. In that sense you're better off looking for a quad core laptop.

Nevertheless, the Asus K501LX-EB71 is still capable of fluidly handling video editing software, you’ll just need a little patience when it comes to rendering. Besides, you still have a very good graphics card that will improve the efficiency of some video editing features, including 3D rendering.

Speaking of the graphics card, the Asus K501LX-EB71 comes with a dedicated, Nvidia GeForce GTX 950M graphics card that performs quite well at gaming. To be more specific, you’ll be able to fluidly play games such as Dota 2, League of Legends, Tomb Raider, Diablo 3, FIFA 15, The Sims 4 and many others at the highest graphical settings and a 1080p resolution.

Even better, if you’re willing to turn down a bit the visual quality and the resolution, you’ll be able to play more graphically demanding games like Battlefield: Hardline and GTA V at more than 30fps.

Like I mentioned before on this review of the Asus K501LX-EB71, this graphics card will also help you complete other tasks such as video editing with more efficiency, and it will also allow you to watch your 4k videos as long as you first connect it to a compatible TV or monitor.

You won’t have to worry about random access memory either, because the Asus K501LX-EB71 comes with 8GB of DDR3L SDRAM that runs at 1600MHz. This will help you run your work apps and videogames with more efficiency and also improve the multitasking experience.

The thing about powerful laptops, is that they have to sacrifice some of their battery life in the process and the Asus K501LX-EB71 is no exception. We’re talking about 4 or 5 hours per charge with relatively heavy use. That's still pretty good all things considered.

Also, it's worth noting that this is the average battery life when it comes to high-end laptops (unless you're a MacBook Air with 12 hours of battery life of course), and it’s actually more than enough for the average user. Just remember to take the charger with you in those long days away from home and you won’t have any problem whatsoever.

The storage category is both a pro and a con of the Asus K501LX-EB71 at the same time. Specifically, this laptop comes with a solid-state drive that allows for amazing read/write speeds, as well as better software performance (including Windows). The only problem is that it only allows for 256 GB of internal storage. 

Again, this could be more than enough for the average user, but it’s something you’ll have to take into account before buying this laptop. The good thing is that the Asus K501LX-EB71 comes with 4 USB ports (2 of them are 3.0) and an SD card reader so you can easily connect your external storage drives.

Closing in on the Asus K501LX-EB71 review, we can tell you that the laptop comes with the basic connectivity platforms: WiFi (802.11 b/g/n), Bluetooth (v4.0) and an ethernet port for your wired LAN connections. 

It also comes with two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, an SD card reader, an HDMI port, a headphone/microphone jack and an integrated webcam for video-conferences.  It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but any more ports would have meant a thicker and bigger structure.

In regards of the OS, the Asus K501LX-EB71 comes with Windows 8.1 out of the box, but you can easily update it to Windows 10. The update will be free until mid-2016 and most users (both pro and average) have loved the new Windows so far, so I’d say it’s a no-brainer.

Another extra worth noting is that it has a backlit keyboard with an integrated numpad, allowing for a better writing experience.

To finish off our in depth review of the Asus K501LX-EB71, we must say that it's without a doubt, one of the prettiest, most balanced high-end laptops in the market right now, deffinetly worth buying. At least when you consider that it costs less than a thousand dollars (see price here).

It has powerful inner hardware, beautiful outer hardware, it’s upgradeable to the latest Windows version available and it’s cheaper than most high-end laptops. I don’t know about you, but this seems like one of the best deals you’re gonna find in the high-end market right now.