Today I am having a look at the ASUS X555DA-AS11 15.6-inch Notebook. The SSD powered version recently became available and it turned an average notebook into something very special. So let’s see what we have here.
The Exterior
Asus has made another very simple and elegantly designed laptop. The top cover of the ASUS X555DA-AS11 15-inch Notebook comes it black textured finish with a large chrome ASUS logo right in the middle. The texture on the cover is the now typical circular pattern found on most Asus laptops.
On the inside we find the Full HD(1920x1080px) matte screen. It is enclosed by a standard matte black plastic bezel with the built in webcam and dual microphones in the middle of the top edge. The bottom edge features another, fairly large chrome Asus logo in the middle.
The palmrest is finished in a metalic silver with a contrasting black chicklet style full sized keyboard with numpad. A chrome power button is positioned right above the escape key.
A generously sized touchpad is positioned off center below the keyboard. The bottom left edge features all the status LEDs for the laptop. As a final design detail you get the SonicMasters logo etched into the plamrest, right above the numpad.
The overall build quality is good and the body is very sturdy. Asus has been building very similar laptops for many years now.
The Connectivity
The connectivity features of the ASUS X555DA-AS11 15-inch Notebook are as follows:
- The left side of the body features the power connector, a compact Gigabit-Ethernet LAN post, a VGA-out port, a HDMI-out port, 2 USB 3.0 ports and the Kensington-lock port.
- The right side of the body features the DVD-RW drive, another USB 2.0 port, the combo headphones/mic jack and the built in card reader
- On the inside it features Wireless WiFi 802.11 b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.0
The Performance
Now we come to the really important bit with this laptop.The ASUS X555DA-AS11 15-inch Notebook comes with the top of the line AMD Quad Core A10-8700P processor running at 1.8GHz and can Turbo up to 3.2GHz if needed. This processor also features a built in AMD Radeon R6 graphics card to be able to run almost all of today’s games. On top of this allready grate processor and graphics card combination the X555DA-AS11 features 8GB of DDR3L RAM and a 256GB SSD. It is for all intents and purposes a very responsive laptop. Thanks to the SSD and large quantity of RAM it will load up almost anything instantly.
The 256GB capacity might become a problem for some, but as external HDD have gotten ever more affordable, I don’t think this is a problem. If you do need the space, and are willing to take the performance hit, you can always go for the 1TB HDD version of this laptop.
The specs alone make it an ideal budget gaming laptop, but based on the AMD hardware, I would suggest a cooling pad to be necessary. AMDs processors tend to get very hot most of the times.
The battery pack is a surprisingly small 2-cell 37Whr unit, which ASUS claims is good for 5 hours of battery life. I think a more reasonable 3 to 4 hours is to be expected from 37Whr.
