ASUS K501UW-AB78 15.6-inch Full-HD Gaming Laptop (Intel Core i7, GTX 960M, 8GB DDR4, 512GB SSD) Glacier Grey Reviews

Alright just a brief summary first and I’ll get to the pros and cons. I’ve used this laptop a few days, and I’ve got to say, I’ve probably never liked a laptop more than ever. It’s light, fast with regards to opening programs and boot time, its got a nice big ssd, room for upgrades like a 2.5in hard drive and 1 SO-DIMM 2133mhz 8gb stick of ram to make this a 16gb ram laptop, but I felt the keyboard was a bit wierd because of the key texture, the size of the numpad numbers (i use a pin for my windows log in and just used to the regular sized keys) and the cooling could be better gaming wise. The reason the cooling configuration could be better because when you’re gaming the gpu and cpu are throttled. This is fixed with either a homemade standoff with the laptop or a laptop fan stand. And other than that, the touchpad, bluetooth, wifi and everything else was pretty good.

So here it is, the Pros:
Its light, you can have it on your lap and it wont heat up (major bonus points because I would love to have a non heavy laptop that you can game on the desk, but also use on your lap for less intensive stuff, its upgrade-able and the touchpad, it feels good and pressure you need to click is just right. Oh and the back panel is easy to remove, and its held on by clips after the screws so be gentle when removing the back panel.

The Cons:
Throttling due to low rise of the laptop through its rubber studs, the screen is not an IPS or higher quality, the ram is soldered, and the solid state drive has a capacity of only 476gb instead of being near 512….. and the back panel has so many screws….

Also soon i’ll be posting some framerate tests for some modern games and some classic favorites (skyrim, fallout 3, etc) on my channel, aswell as a review: Just look for Wyrless Freequincy

Edit: Its confirmed that this laptop does indeed have ddr4 ram.

Video review:[…]
Just in case link doesnt work: /watch?v=a4gWz7M2590

I looked extensively for a light gaming laptop. I checked NewEgg and Best Buy daily for hot deals and picked this one.
I bought because…
1. 4.4 lbs – Most other models with similar specs and price were coming in 5+ lbs
2. 512 SSD – Others came with 128 GB SSD and Large HDD. I am not too techy, so I didn’t want to deal with dual hard drives
3. Gaming capabilities while looking professional – I like the fact I could bring this laptop to a business meeting if I needed to.’
4. Price – I paid 0 which was on the low end for the specs
5. Ability to easily upgrade RAM and SSD – I saw some models which required removing the keyboard and looked very difficult to upgrade.

What do I think?
– I love the SSD – Yeah it is that fast
– Runs the games I play – CIV 5 and other turn based games
– I wish it was a 14", but 15" is not terrible
– I like the keyboard, I have larger hands and see the advantage to a proper spaced out board
– The charger block is WAY big
-Trackpad is fine, I see why people gripe about it, but i think the more you use the better I will get

If you are considering something in this range I recommend this one.

I bought this laptop to do some astronomical image processing. This is a thin and light laptop that makes it portable and easy to work with. Having both Windows and Linux next to each other on the Solid State Drive helps to boot up the system super fast in a few seconds. Also when you are in Linux (Ubuntu in this case), you can also have access to where your Windows is installed. Therefore no space in going to be missed switching back and forth between different operating systems.

On Windows, everything works perfectly on this laptop. Since all of my science is being done on Linux, first I tried Open-SUSE tumbleweed on this laptop. This OS cannot recognize and install the necessary drivers for the Wifi and trackback out of the box. Since it needed some extra effort, I preferred to switch to Ubuntu, which I found that it usually better works on Laptops.

It’s a good laptop, however I could not still find a good stable Linux operating system for it. Right now I installed an Ubuntu 16.04 and it works just fine, however it does not recognize all of the drivers, and some features like track-pad does not work properly. this is a software issue and I am sure that I would be able to resolve it in future.

I also installed a 1TB hard drive (7200 RPM) for my daily work. It was super easy and the hard drive work very well in Ubuntu. There are 9 screws underneath the laptop, try to organize them in order not to forget their initial positions, since they are in different sizes. The installing part is so easy. Just remove the metal plate from the empty slot and put your hard drive. By closing the laptop, the hard drive would be fixed and secured. So no mounting plate is needed in this case.

I’ve had this Laptop for 3 weeks and I am happy with it. I am not sure how good this would be for gamers, since I did not play a single game on it …