ASUS R558UQ review:killer features but one grave mistake

The  r558uq is the latest offering from ASUS.It boasts of the latest generation kaby lake processor and a relatively modest gt 940mx graphic card from NVIDIA.So lets check out if its up to the challenge.The laptop had only 4gb of DDR4 ram.Which in most cases gives a bottleneck performance so we bought an additional 4gb DDR4 which we recommend most users to do the same.


DESIGN

The laptop looks good.It feature the grooved design found in Zenfone Series.The grooved design has also been integrated to the power button also.The dark blue color model which we received was lacking an oomph.The front bezels of the screen looks like made of cheap plastic.The keyboard is one of the better ones at the range the travel is good and the keys are a bit deep having a nice feedback.the track pad wasn't very smooth .The brushed aluminum panel is also good.The placement of the exhaust fan was a little bit awkward as it was placed in rear directly facing the screen.The placement brought a little confusion read more about it in the performance section.The battery which uses li-polymer ensures the laptop a little bit slimmer than other latops.
 overall at 43k the looks are good.

DISPLAY

We present you the laptop killer the sub par full hd display.This laptop features one of the worst displays i have seen on a laptop.The display has poor viewing angles and colors are washed out.
Blacks are not black but has a grayish tint. Its definitely has a TN panel.Asus has really cut corners on the screen although its isn't a deal killer.
EDIT:-tweaking color and saturation settings tend to give results which are much better.

CONNECTIVITY

we have an ethernet port an hdmi a vga 
Port 1xUSB2.0 1xUSB3.0 and 1xUSB3.1 type c port .the type c port adds high bandwidth connectivity  and is quickly replacing micro usb. We also have a card reader.Wifi (qualcomm qca9377) and bluetooth is also present.

PERFORMANCE

It features an i5-7200u which has a turbo boost up to 3.1ghz and an nvidia gt 940mx based on Maxwell architecture with 384 cuda cores.The laptop comes with  free dos which keeps the budget low.The additional 4gb ram we added greatly improved performance.The speakers are very loud and deteriorates a little bit at high volume.
The r558uq is one of the lowest costing 7th gen laptops in india with DDR4 ram which is more power efficient and faster than DDR3 .The i5 processor is actually faster than the i7-6500u in cinebench.
Cinebench revealed a score of 325cb which is great. It is one of the fastest laptops in the 40k-55k range.
After going through the trouble of installing windows 10,we found out that the 1TB hardisk is extremely slow and bottlenecks the laptop in day today usage.So we suggest to get an SSD .After running sisoft Sandra we got a sequential read speed of 152MBPS and write speed of 110MBps.Real life copying provided about 33 MBps which is quite slow.
The graphics card isn't meant for gamers but it held its head up high we tried shadow of mordor,saints row IV,watch dogs.
In game benchmarks were used where possible otherwise its FRAPS!!!!
Saints Row IV at 1080p and ultra settings gave an average fps of 13 which is what we expected. At 720p ultra we got an average around 25 fps which is borderline playable .Hd medium gave around 54fps avg so we cranked the resolution to full Hd which translated to 35fps which was good.
Next was watch dogs on 1080 ultra it gave around 12 fps then we switched to 720p medium we got around 38fps which was also great.
Shadow of Mordor at 1080 ultra gave12 fps on switching to Hd ultra it gave 25 fps and hd high gave 32 fps.

As mentioned above the placement of the fan didn't cause any heating effect, actually it kept the area we keep our hands relative cool. The exhaust fan makes only  a slight noise .Even on full power it is  very low.
BATTERY
The li-poly battery present on the laptop does a good job.It charges fully in around 2hrs and lasts for hours.The laptop also features small adaptor.

VERDICT
Overall the r558uq is great but display is the only thing we found bad at this price range.

Pro's
Great performance
Good battery life
Great value for money

Con's
Sub-par display
Slow hdd
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Link:-  Asus R558UQ-DM513D 15.6 FHD Screen Laptop (Core I5 7TH GEN/4GB DDR4 RAM/1TB HDD/DVD RW/2GB NVIDIA 940M Graphics/DOS)