This past summer, I’ve been interested in a laptop upgrade to replace my 6 year old HP dv5000 (& selling the old unit to recoup the costs). I did a lot of product research to find a new laptop at a reasonable price I could afford. At first I was curious about budget gaming laptops under $750, but couldn’t find anything decent without going above $1000. Well, until I came across a ridiculous deal for the Asus K53TA. In terms of performance for the price, this laptop stood outside of the current trends for both the standard and discount price gaming laptops for an astonishing $450 price.

Let me explain why this was a good deal in terms of product specifications. To start, the most notable feature of this device is an extraordinary dual pair of ATI brand graphics processing units (or GPUs). This is a feature unheard of in laptops cheaper than $1,000. When combined in parallel computing, multiple ATI graphics cards utilize a technology called CrossfireX to share their processing and significantly boost gaming performance.
One card is built-in to the quad-core central processing unit (CPU) with a new hybrid technology AMD calls an Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), the other is a dedicated removable graphics chip. There are now four different kinds of GPUs in laptops:
1. Internal: built-in to the mainboard and often standard/low performance.
2. Dedicated: a removable card that's often highest performance.
3. External: a rare portable card that plugs into the laptop with mid-high performance.
4. APU: a removable hyrbid cpu+graphics card with mid-high performance.
The GPUs featured in this unit are an APU 512MB A6-3400M & a dedicated 1GB ATI HD 6720G2. With CrossfireX, ATI combines the performance of both GPUs into 1.5GB DDR3 (0.5GB+1.0GB) of raw graphical horsepower. Powerful enough to run games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with maximum graphical settings at 60 frames per second (FPS) – the best rate most games can run at these days. I remember when many gaming desktops from 5 years ago struggled to barely play this game on medium graphics at 30FPS! Who’d have thought a laptop for $450 in 2011 would run it at the highest settings. CrossfireX can also combine 2 dedicated GPUs or a dedicated and internal GPU.
So moving on to the quad-core CPU aspect of the APU (also called the A6-3400M) – it features 4 solid cores with a stock speed of 1.4Ghz each and turbo boost of 2.30Ghz when processing hits 100%. 1.4Ghz might sound like a draw-back at first, but I came across a highly compatible and safe overclock tweak that locks in a new speed of 2.0Ghz by using the program K10Stat & applying these settings. This barely raises the idle and max-load temperate of the APU beyond a few degrees Celsius. So does this actually increase performance with the 2.3Ghz turbo boost already prevalent? Yes, in fact it increases it a lot because many applications including games don’t use a constant 100% and thus only call in Turbo Boost in short (and often unnoticeable) durations. Locking in 2.0Ghz absolutely leaves a noticeable boost in everything and I’ve been using the overclocked setting for months without a single crash or temperature rating above 65C on max load and relatively 45C idle. Be aware these APUs can safely handle up to about 90C with performance taking some impact after 75C.
1. Internal: built-in to the mainboard and often standard/low performance.
2. Dedicated: a removable card that's often highest performance.
3. External: a rare portable card that plugs into the laptop with mid-high performance.
4. APU: a removable hyrbid cpu+graphics card with mid-high performance.
The GPUs featured in this unit are an APU 512MB A6-3400M & a dedicated 1GB ATI HD 6720G2. With CrossfireX, ATI combines the performance of both GPUs into 1.5GB DDR3 (0.5GB+1.0GB) of raw graphical horsepower. Powerful enough to run games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with maximum graphical settings at 60 frames per second (FPS) – the best rate most games can run at these days. I remember when many gaming desktops from 5 years ago struggled to barely play this game on medium graphics at 30FPS! Who’d have thought a laptop for $450 in 2011 would run it at the highest settings. CrossfireX can also combine 2 dedicated GPUs or a dedicated and internal GPU.

Now for the active memory and storage specifications, this laptop features 4GB of high performing DDR3 memory and a 500GB hard disk drive that unfortunately isn’t a solid-state or hybrid hard disk/solid state drive but still don't anchor performance either. A solid state upgrade could certainly boost the performance further, but the current drive does use SATA2 technology that is considerably faster (and larger) than the 160GB IDE drive in my old HP dv5000. In terms of hard disk technology, SATA2 is basically newer and more responsive than IDE.

The 15.6" LED monitor features a native 1366x768 resolution with an adjustable backlight that provides more than enough picture illumination. I used ATI’s fantastic color control software to further calibrate the monitor to my personal tastes with 100% backlight, 60% gamma, 90% brightness, and a 110% contrast. Before the color quality of the screen was just bright and standard looking; now the color looks spitting image of a plasma’s deep vivid color with these settings. The backlight, gamma, and brightness are all highly different settings – but it’s most important to have the backlight all the way first, then tweak the other settings. Else your picture will be too dim and washed out regardless of your tweaks in ATI’s Catalyst color controls. However, it’s good to use as little backlight as possible when running on the battery for the maximum power duration.

Overall, I’m seriously impressed with this whole laptop for the price I paid and many others for this price range don’t compare. I originally got it from BestBuy’s online store as a bizarre limited time deal between them and Asus which doesn’t appear to be available anymore after several months have passed now. However another site called FatWallet.com originally led me to the deal so they are literally found just about anywhere (even outside of NewEgg.com when it comes to laptops).

No comments:
Post a Comment