ASUS K53E Pro Reviews

The Asus K53E-B1 desktop replacement laptop features one of the first dual-core Sandy Bridge processors and amassed over 6 hours of battery life.

Powered by a second-generation Core i5 processor, the 15-inch ASUS K53E is stylish, fast, and offers excellent endurance.

The K53E manages to combine good performance and battery life into a well-made 15.6-inch chassis. Our main complaints center around the low screen resolution, loud touchpad buttons, and lack of ports (no USB 3.0 or eSATA). Otherwise there is a lot to like here: very good performance, a decent keyboard and speakers, cool and quiet operation, a solid chassis, five hours of battery life, and a two-year warranty standard. Overall, the ASUS K53E is a reasonable 15.6-inch multimedia notebook and gets our recommendation.

The Asus K53E-B1 comes with a better-than-usual warranty. It offers up a two-year parts-and-labor warranty, a 30-day stuck-pixel warranty, and one year of accidental damage protection—which is all excellent for a consumer notebook. You also get a comforting 24/7 support hotline if anything ever goes haywire. Asus skimps on software a little but we'd rather have that than having a notebook filled with meaningless 30-day trials of software we'd never use anyway. Onboard is Adobe Reader 9, Nuance PDF Reader, an ad-supported version of Microsoft Office, and a few Asus utilities like Webcam controls and a hard drive recovery burner. For $749, the Asus K53E-B1 really surprises with all it offers. With its sleek design, comfy keyboard, fast Core i5 processor, 6GB of RAM, and a two-year warranty, Asus has done a great job balancing power and affordability. However, the $799 Toshiba Satellite A665 has good specs, a Blu-ray player, and great sound that might be more attractive for media aficionados. And the also-good $749 Acer Aspire 5742G would be better suited for someone who wants to do more gaming but doesn't mind very short battery life.

Good looks, superior audio,excellent battery life, and a modest price make the K53E-B1 a good deal for everyday tasks if portability and speed aren't prime concerns.

The Asus K53E-RBR4 is a good-looking laptop that's acceptably fast, but other systems that cost the same offer more.

This Asus machine might not be the slimmest, lightest, or most compact laptop around, but it's put together quite well, and it sure packs a punch. More importantly, performance comes without compromising battery life—quite the contrary. Considering the excellent performance demonstrated by the Core i5-2520M, I'd have no trouble recommending the slightly slower K53E variant listed on Amazon

The biggest problem with the ASUS K53E is really another ASUS laptop. If you don’t care about games at all, the K53E is fine, but when you can get substantially better gaming performance, a smaller and lighter chassis, and better battery life (except for video decoding) with the U41JF and only pay an extra $100, I’d be more inclined to go that route right now.

The hardware in the K53E may be excellent, it can’t save this laptop, at least not in this configuration. The bargain-priced K53E-A1, with a Sandy Bridge Core i3 processor and a price tag of around $625, is worth consideration among users who want an inexpensive powerhouse. Our review model is akin to the K53E-B1, however, which has a much higher price of $750. The hardware is fast enough to justify spending the extra dough, but the so-so chassis doesn't fit the higher price.

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!