ASUS K53E 15.6-inch Notebook Review – Intel Core i5-2520M CPU

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The ASUS K53E proved to be a very potent notebook thanks to Intel’s Sandy Bridge 2nd generation Core i5-2520M mobile processor that is uses. This notebook blazed through the benchmarks with relative ease and proved to be an ideal notebook for those that are looking for a good mix between performance and portability. We also found that the battery life wasn’t that bad as we got about 3.25 hours of DVD playback and 4 hours of wireless web surfing before the battery called it a day.

It should be noted that we ran our tests on this notebook with the Intel Core i5-2520M and we couldn’t find this notebook with that processor online right now. We could find two versions of it with slightly slower processors though. One is the ASUS K53E-A1 with the Core i3-2310M 2.10GHz processor for $634.90 and the other being the ASUS K53E-B1 with the Core i5-2410M 2.3GHz processor for $749.99. Take note that the Intel Core i3 2310M doesn’t have Turbo Boost 2.0 technology, so the highest clock speed that processor could ever run is 2.10Ghz. The Inteo Core i5-2410M does have TurboBoost Technology 2.0 and can run up to 2.90GHz in some scenarios. For ~$115 more you get the ability to 800MHz faster on the core and the graphics max dynamic frequency is also 100Mhz higher, so you’ll get better graphics performance. Either processor is going to be leaps and bounds better than the notebook that you have today, so you really can’t go wrong with either.

The ASUS K53E notebook does have some limitations though as it’s not the perfect notebook. For a 15.6-inch laptop we found the 1366×768 screen resolution to be a bit lacking for 2011. The speaker placement in this notebook was awful and as a result the sound quality really suffers. We also wish that the notebook had USB 3.0 or at least eSATA ports for fast data transfer with an external storage device. Those are all the negatives that we were able to come up with, so if they aren’t big deals for you then you really have nothing to worry about with this laptop. ASUS backs the ASUS K53E with a two-year warranty, so you don’t have much to worry about anyway!

If you do end up buying one of these notebooks you should consider two things. The first is upgrading the DDR3 1333MHz memory to a Kingston HyperX Plug and Play DDR3 1866MHz kit as we found that it really improved the performance on the ASUS K53E. The second thing we’d advise doing is throwing away the 5400-RPM hard drive that it comes with and investing is a Solid-State drive as that really wakes the system up. By upgrading the memory and throwing in an SSD this system turns into a new beast. What we really like about the ASUS K53E is that there is an upgrade path for it should you ever get the itch to improve performance.

Legit Bottom Line: The ASUS K53E 15.6-inch entertainment laptop is sleek thanks to the timeless design by ASUS and powerful due to the Intel Sandy Bridge 2nd generation Core i5-2520M dual-core processor!