Jun 14 2013, 10:07 AM, updated 13y ago
The Asus K46CB Review
I was amazed the first time I saw the K46 series. Nice alluminium look, albeit with the black plastics framing the screen and underside. What is most interesting to me is the fact that at 21mm, Asus has managed to somehow shoehorn a DVD writer in the model, although most other ultrabook using series has long ago abandoned the DVD writer in their designs for thin and light.
The first K46CM model also had the distinction of being able to include a discrete NVIDIA graphic in the form of a 635M. In effect, it turned what should have been a lightweight ultrabook into a lightweight ultrabook that could play some games.
The K46CB, is basically the old K46CM with a faster Ivy Bridge ultrabook processor, with the newer 740M discrete graphic. So, is it still a good laptop.
The Review
The K46CB still uses the old 1366 x 768 standard TN screen. Nothing much can be said, but I like the fact that the sturdier construction eliminated the annoying sway I find on most other notebooks especially the Lenovo’s. Even a slight wobble of the table translate into a wobble on the screen, something the stiff although thin design of the K46CB has. As for viewing angles, they’ve mostly solve the side by side but look up and down and you’ll still find the colors washing out pretty bad and pretty quick. The display is not as bright as what you would find on top of the line TN screens but, I would say it falls on the industry standard anyway. The back screen is black/almost brown aluminium but the whole thing tends to be a fingerprint magnet. Oils stick easily there.
It has, for an ultrabook, a good selection of ports, HDMI, VGA, an ethernet port, USB, headphone jack and the aformentioned DVD writer, which thanks to the thin design you tend to pick the unit by and hear it grate against the body. I’ve learned to be a bit careful picking the unit up to avoid this. I do think that Asus might as well go and eliminated the drive altogether, and just use the space/cost saving for improving the design.
It has aluminium, or faux aluminium, I couldn’t tell for the keyboard area and palm rest. The keyboards are black, and do have nice placing and size relative to each other, but as a result of the thin design don’t have too much travel, so some may have difficulties in adjusting to the shallow press. That being said, I had no trouble adapting to using the keyboard, but if you need that long travel when pressed, you’d hate the keyboard.
The trackpad, is not perfect. But it is the best one I have used on a Wintel machine these days, which thanks to Windows 8 made it more important than ever. In a scale of 1 - 10, with 10 being the trackpad on an Apple Macbook Pro, I’d give it a 7.
Runs on an intel i5-3337U, a newer ultrabook ivy bridge processor with faster turbo speed. Nothing much can be said, but the more interesting part is the 740M. Now, supposedly faster than the last gen’s 635M, but you are running it to a HD screen anyway, so you should get a decent frame rate anyway. Diablo, Skyrim ran fine, as was Civ V. In a pinch, absolute nice and decent mid to lower range gaming. And it does have Optimus, but..
Having an ultrabook processor in this case didn't help battery life much however. With a rather small battery, the K46CB lasted between 4-5 hours standard wifi browsing using the browser.
What you do need to look out for is the fact that it still uses your standard HDD and single channel ram. So performance do get dragged down by these two factors.
Heat dissipation is quite nice also. At no time during my gaming/prime 95 testing did the laptop became too hot to touch, although the fan, located on the left side of the laptop was loud noticeable.
Sound was nice also, with Asus using its own enhancement called SonicMaster. Songs that I’ve played managed to bring out the normally quieter parts of songs that I would miss with some Acer’s Dolby implementation.
In the midst of all this, Asus did make some compromises. The amount of memory that came with the base K46CB is still the same 2GB RAM. What’s even worse is the 2GB RAM is located under the backplate, while a free slot located under the easier to remove HDD / RAM backplate. So if you wanted to replace the 2GB RAM with a faster model, you need to practically take off the whole backplate. A single slot 2GB RAM also meant slower memory performance, so you may need to splurge a bit on getting the RAM upgraded. At least the HHD / RAM backplate allows easy upgrade to the HDD as well.
Considering all that though, if you wanted something thin, a bit light and portable, and with enough horsepower to do some light gaming, take a look at the K46CB. Priced at between RM1999-2099 with memory upgrades, it has some imperfections, but all in all a very useful laptop.
The Asus K46CB Review, Posting this on request.
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