The ASUS N550JK is the best value laptop you can buy today. Surprisingly finding all of these while not spending upwards of $2,000 was nigh impossible.
I did my research on laptops (for a bit too long) and found that this was the best, the pros defiantly overwrite the cons.
Let me break down some of the components:
Display
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The display is beautiful. This model comes with a few different presets you can choose from. The viewing angles are quite amazing as well.
Touchscreen
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I didn't think I'd use it to be honest. I felt like it would be one of those cheap, semi-responsive, fury-inducing gimmicks that I've seen all too much in other touchscreen models. Well, it's not, in fact it's amazing. It's incredibly responsive and smooth to the touch. I use it often to scroll through long webpages with my thumb or I use the swipe "back" gesture to traverse through my history, which is very handy.
Trackpad
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The trackpad itself it good, not great. That's not to say it is bad by any means. The trackpad feels fine but it's the clicking I have an issue with. You can only really tap mid-left for left click and mid-right for right click. If you try pressing down on the far left or right of the trackpad, you will notice it feels stiff and unresponsive. I've turned off mostly all the gestures as I'm not a fan, but overall the trackpad does it's job. Best thing about any trackpads is if you don't like it, you can just use a mouse. Still slightly annoying but at least the option is there.
Keyboard
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The keyboard is usually my make-or-break component since it's obviously the most used. I previously owned a Sager I ordered online and instantly hated it when I began to type on it because of it's raised, paper-thin plastic with deep grooves in the center of each key. It wasn't for me. These keys are solid and responsive, though there is a little give and bend when you push towards the center of the board, it's not the greatest laptop keyboard of all time, but it is certainly not a detriment to the overall quality.
GPU
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This particular aspect of the laptop is usually very important to me because I do enjoy gaming on my laptop. After several hours of comparing benchmarks with other similar laptops, I'm more than happy with the performance that the GTX850M is capable of. Everything that I've played on this laptop runs beautifully. I can run most modern games on ultra settings with a passable framerate, but for the sake a playability I usually tone it down to medium or high. If this is your main concern and this review is still somewhat relevant, don't let this stop you. It's a fantastic GPU.
Hard Drive
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Not much to say here, The one thing that needs to be done on this laptop out of the box is to upgrade the HDD to a SSD. the HDD that the laptop comes with isn't great. Actually, it's god awful. It's so bad that I don't even want to type it's RPM. I'd consider it a bit bottleneck considering how fast the rest of the machine is. I'd HIGHLY recommend picking up the Samsung 840 EVO SSD for it.
Speakers
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Good sound, not amazing. The speaker placement is sort of confusing to me, I'd say the speakers are probably one of the most unfavorable things about the laptop. The audio ports can be quite tight at times as well. If you plan on playing music with this often, then you'll need to find the right surface to put it on to give it decent sound. I don't really use the subwoofer module much as it's not that impressive... but I suppose it's there if you'd like to use it.
Battery Life
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The battery life is actually pretty good, it's something to respect in a market where most laptops die fairly quick while doing menial tasks. Again, it's not a selling point of the laptop, but it's not something that should not bother you by any means.
Overall
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So, this laptop is incredible for the price. You get solid components across the board (build quality, battery, display, graphics, etc.) except for the hard drive (ASUS what were you thinking?). This laptop doesn't have features that are top-notch (maybe besides the display, but even then 1440p would have been nice), but the point is that this laptop does mostly everything right. Simply, you get a very high quality laptop that will last you quite a while.
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