Asus R510J Gaming Laptop Review

Asus has one of the wonderful desktop laptop makers as we seen its ROG series and ZenBook series. We also saw some other Laptop in the Asus Line-up in which the same we will be today, Is the Asus’s R series of the gaming laptop. This is the Asus R510J/ X550J complete review. I would try to get the most from the laptop itself. Over to the first impression, It was totally a normal laptop like looks,  It didn’t have different look like what we saw in Asus ROG or even in Alienware, Again those are high-end specification laptop. This one is the mid-range segment of the gaming laptop. So we will check if this is the ultimate gaming laptop or it amazes us its amazing gaming laptops results.

Specification of Asus R510J / X550J

Our review unit had the following specification.

• 15 inch 1080p FullHD Display
• Intel Core i7 4720HQ up to 3.6 GHz
• 8GB RAM
• 1 TB HDD 5400 RPM
•  nVidia GTX 950m
• 2x USB 3.0 port, 1x USB 2.0 Port, 1x SD Card Reader, 1x DVD multi recorder
• 1x DVI port/ Projector port, 1x HDMI port, 1x ethernet port, 1x Headphone Jack

Design of the Asus R510J

When you look at first you would only notice a black glossy back panel which even I’m personally not the fan of it. It has Embarking of the Asus Logo at the mid of the laptop, so when you open up the Laptop shows the Logo quiet good. The Glossy back is much prompt to get scratched and fingerprint magnetic easily. In my personal opinion, I didn’t like it, As it needs more maintenance, just the back to look good. When you look closely you will notice light and bright red lines in  that back panel itself. It requires proper angle to view, That’s what made an interest in the build. It was like PCB connecting transistors red lines, though it wasn’t connecting any logically, but did the design part well for the laptop. All total laptop has multiple ports as you can see it in the specification itself. Surprisingly it would be the only laptop with a DVD drive which is hardly seen these days and only the portable DVD drive are the options for the laptop. It does add a bit thickness but its must inside the gaming laptop as the PC Games comes in DVD when you buy it in physical stores. The only thing in the design to make it portable enough they added a small battery you will see how well it performed in the Battery subtopic of this review.

The laptop came with special sonic master speakers, So I put down to test. In the portability how well it performs. So to the point any laptop doesn’t have great speakers at all whichever the laptop maybe, dedicated speakers does it works way better. To the point of the  Sonic Master speakers on the Asus R510J they sound well in my test, in the Sound meter recorded the max dB of 80 dB which was whooping high. So the design totally depends on from the point of gamer, gamers don’t see much of the design if there’s is the best hardware inside the rig.

Keyboard and touchpad on Asus R510J

The keyboard had a red theme, which looks stunning for a gaming keyboard. In the chassis of the laptop, they manage to fit whole numerical pad to the right with the Arrow keys. This keyboard was exactly what any gamer would love. It was an almost full-size keyboard which a gamer would require. The key travel at the keyboard was extremely amazing, Though the key ain’t tactile and deliver the best typing or clicking experience as that of the mechanical keyboard. For the laptop, it was a good keyboard. At the same time, you had to give up on the back-lit, I don’t know why did Asus ignore this, keyboard without a backlit is tuff to operate and in low light, you can’t see those red keys that were a totally bad decision with the keyboard what Asus did.

The Touchpad on the Asus R510J, this isn’t the best touchpad. I would say the touchpad totally lacked multi-touch features and for which windows 10 is well optimised. You can’t even scroll it two finger scroll gestures. Each time I used the keyboard arrow keys to scroll the web page. Then I seriously thought to be  a gaming laptop, each gamer had to use an external mouse or gaming mouse in order to play games, There isn’t a game which could be played comfortably with the touchpad. So this part is completely ignorable.

Performance and Benchmarks

If you are a gamer then the only thing you would mainly care inside Asus R510J is the gaming results and the benchmark. So we tested first Cinebench R15 in OpenGL it scored around 17 FPS which was kind of low because you are paying much higher to that laptop. Again considering the mobile GPU that was the best to get. The Cinebench R15 in CPU scored around 350 cb which was again a good score. I would suggest there are much better score maker if you had to spent some more money. The other test was the GFX bench in the car chase which scored 55 FPS which was again a good result.

We did run the Crystal Disk benchmark which didn’t score well because of the 5400 RPM HDD inside. For that HDD it was a pretty decent score.

In gaming, we especially Run us all time favourite GTA V which for our surprise run smoother, without any lags. We Got the score between 30-50 FPS rate which was best at playable. The same case was almost with Battlefield 4, We used nVdia GEForce Experience to use the best settings for the game as per the GFX card.

 

Upgradation

So is the Asus R510J liable to upgrade the hardware. So the answer to your question is yes. The Laptop being compromised and not as flexible to upgrade as that of the PC. In this laptop when you open the lower panel two screws you get access to RAM and HDD. You can upgrade whichever compatible RAM. In HDD I would suggest upgrading to SSD. SSD performs 10 times better than normal HDD. Here’s the explanation video made by me about the SSD vs HDD.  The image below shows how it’s upgradable. At left is the HDD while at the mid is the RAM, at extreme right, is the SD card reader.

Battery Life

At the gaming laptop I would say don’t expect the most out of the battery, because it may keep show different result depends on usage. I use to get  about only 3 hours of battery life with the Asus R510J

Verdict

So here’s The Asus R510J / X550J is a completely decent gaming laptop, not the top notch or not the lowest. We would love to see with better RPM HDD or SSD if it could come like that right out of the box. There were few things like 1 sec resume which did work sometimes and sometimes not. Overall I would say spent some more money and get the Asus ROG series laptop which are more future proof. If you are strict to your budget then this is the only option which I won’t recommend for long term stability.