ASUS - 14" Touch-Screen Laptop - AMD Ryzen 5 - 8GB Memory - 256GB Solid State Drive

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The vast majority of our reviews come from verified purchases. Reviews from customers may include My Best Buy members, employees, and Tech Insider Network members (as tagged). Select reviewers may receive discounted products, promotional considerations or entries into drawings for honest, helpful reviews.

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Great Asus laptop!!

  • Incentivized
  • Verified Purchaser
  • My Best Buy® Member
  • Owned for 3 weeks

  Hey I’m an aspiring hip-hop artist and this is my 2nd Asus Computer. I put this system to hard WORK on my music daw (Mixcraft Pro) Nonstop creating ever since I bought it! Runs smooth and fast, also has amazing features like Face ID, Tablet Mode, HDR Video & AMD Ryzen i5 Processor for gaming on the side! Thank you Asus for supplying me with another machine I will grow to love just as my last lol. 9/10. My only wish is a bigger hard drive, but other than that this laptop is perfect for me!

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  Posted 5 years ago by TanBandz

• Rated 4 out of 5 stars

  Great Performing Laptop

  • Top 500 Contributor
  • Tech Insider Network Member

  Overall Build: This laptop has an overall premium feel. It is built from what feels like anodized aluminum. The body had nice rubber feet that keep it from moving when sitting on a desktop. It is very thin but has surprising weight to it for being relatively small. Display: When the display is open, the back part of the display extends to lift the laptop up to a more ergonomic position. The back has rubber to ensure the laptop does not slip when typing. There is a glossy finish on the screen that while looks nice, picks up a considerable amount of glare. I would have preferred a matte screen instead.The bezels are extremely thin, you get mostly display area on this thins which is very welcomed. There is an "ASUS" logo printed at the bottom, I find this annoying and would rather have a plain black bezel, but after a while you learn to ignore it. The resolution of 1920x1080 is surprising low for a laptop in 2019, however, text and imagery look very sharp and the size is readable. Overall color accuracy is about average, images looks more on the muted side than pop. Black levels are terrible however. There is a significant amount of clouding on the bottom left and right side of the screen. This is not noticeable when full illuminated, but darker images, movies, etc... you can really notice this. There is a webcam positioned at the top which offers Windows Hello ability. This is a fantastic feature and allows you to log into Windows 10 using just your face. It is a little on the slow side compared to other devices I've used, but only takes about 2 or 3 seconds to recognize. Keyboard: The keyboard is relativity nice to type on. The key spacing is a little close together and my fingers felt a little cramped on longer typing sessions. Key pressed felt good and were very responsive. There is a back-light which is fantastic, though in a dim lit room where the back-light is triggered, yet the silver color of the laptop is also visible, the white back-light tends to drown out the numbers on the keys making them hard to read at times. Overall this is a decent keyboard and typing experience. Touch pad: The touch pad is adequate. It has good tracking ability. The left and right click has very noticeable a "dive board effect". Luckily it also has the "tap" ability so that pressing wasn't always necessary. When possible, I preferred an external mouse to this touch pad. Ports: There are plenty of different ports available. on the left: charger port, HDMI, USB 3.0, USB C on the right: SD card, USB 2.0, headphone jack, and power button Battery life: Battery life is fantastic. on a single charge I got about 8+ hours of use. This was from installing apps to general usability to even about 35 minutes of light gaming Performance: 8GB of RAM and 256 GB SSD performed as expected. This is about the minimum configuration you should expect and accept in 2019. 8GB of RAM was plenty to maintain a bunch of apps being open at the same time and I did not notice any slow down for my general usage of Office apps and web browsing. It is plenty to stream a movie and play many games. The 256 GB HDD will be plenty for most people, with cloud storage on the rise, this is even less of a requirement moving forward. This laptop REALLY SHINES with the inclusion of the AMD Ryzen 5 3500U processor. This is a quad-core (4) processor with hyperthreadding capability which means windows can divide taks and process up between 8 cores! Geekbench gave this CPU a score of 33362 which lands it about on par with the 8th generation Intel i5 processor. Since this is a new chipset to most people, this is an important comparison to make. Where the AMD CPU differs, is the built in Graphics Processing Unit (GPU. This thing is equipped with a Vega Mobile Gfx. This is a big deal. This onboard GPU allows for the ability to play many modern games with ease. I had no issues running Counter-Strike GO, Call of Duty Black Ops 4, and simiar at medium to high setting and was able to maintain at least 40fps if not higher. The fact the monitor only goes to 1920x1080 is also a benefit here. It keeps that meachine from having to push unecessary pixels to maintain good visual performance. This laptop can play content the onboard Intel HD GPUs built into the i5 chips simply cannot even come close to doing. When playing games or watching video content, this laptop does get hot! The cooling vents are located on the bottom the machine, so if sitting on your lap, this can get really hot. This thing is best used on a desk where it can properly vent. Sound: ASUS has included a harman/kardon audio package with this laptop. The sound quality is average and gets plenty loud clear enough to be useful. It is nothing to get excited about. External speakers or headphones will offer much better audio fidelity. More or less they get the job done. Overall this is a very solid laptop for the price point. The inclusion of the AMD RYZEN is really the star of the show here. It offers great performance, impressive gaming capability from an otherwise non-gaming laptop, and this would be a great performing machine for just about any audience (assuming you are ok using Windows).

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  Posted 6 years ago by elitegangsta

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Small factor powerful device for every day use

  • Tech Insider Network Member
  • Top 1000 Contributor

  >>> Introduction I wanted to try something smaller than the regular 15.6” size laptops we own, as well as to put my hands on non-Intel based processor laptops. After some careful consideration, I picked this Asus 14” that runs on AMD (well I already had in mind I needed to try an AMD based system). I was not completely sold on it, but based on the specs and form factor, I decided to give it a try. First/early impressions are deceiving. After a couple of hours of use I was not really impressed (or perhaps I was just focused on the negatives). Ok, I have to be sincere, I was having buyer’s remorse, the machine looked very small, the default windows mode was too big, the horizontal to vertical ratio seemed excessive, it looked bulky for its size, tablet mode didn’t feel right, among other minor issues. But after days of use, I am very pleased with this Asus laptop. From an initial overall rating of 3.5/5.0 floating on my head, I think this one deserves a rating in the 4.5-5.0 range. In comparison, we have Surface Book and a Dell at home, with this being the third laptop. I was primarily using the Dell, but took this as my next device, and I can say that although it feels a little small, after a while, it is very enjoyable to use. You may say that I am just adjusting myself to it after using it for a while, but no, I still use my work provided Surface Book daily, and I can attest that this device has been as enjoyable as the Surface Book, perhaps a little more, since I can do more personal stuff on this device than on the work laptop. The two most important factors for me are Screen (resolution and quality image quality) and Performance (CPU speed and the like). I have to say that I am content with the decision to go for this little beast. Picture quality is great, and I can perform multiple tasks, for example listening/viewing to YouTube videos while working on a Word document. I have yet to install Adobe Illustrator and Visual Studio for video and software development, but so far, this has proven to do its job fine and swift. After some initial second thoughts, I am very happy with this device. I might even buy AMD stocks now that their laptops seem to perform at par (or better?) than the Intel based ones. This taught me to try things for a little longer, not for the purpose of getting used to them, but to have a better and more solid experience and provide a more informed feedback. >> Overall Pros: takes little real estate, great picture quality, easy multitasking, very responsive. >> Overall Cons: built-in speakers faulty location, recommended resolution/scaling too big, too bulky for its size. >>> Built quality Overall, it feels a little bulky for what is to be an ultra-portable, but it is mentioned to be a military grade quality laptop, so I am giving it the credit for potentially being very solid. I won't drop it on the floor or anything like that, I am just saying that for the extra bulkiness, a higher level of toughness it is worth at the end. From all the bulkiness, the part that adds to it the most is the connection between the screen and keyboard portions, yes, it feels solid, but it is something noticeable after a few hours use. As I mentioned, for an extra level of durability, that should be just fine. >>> Screen We have at home one Surface Book at 3000x2000 resolution and a Dell 4k at 3840 × 2160 resolution, the former 14” and the latter 15.6” screen diagonal size with the latter used mostly by me. So, I’d figure that an Asus at 1920x1080 and 14” inches (with no edges) would be a fine addition. Provided the right Windows 10 settings are in place (resolution and scaling), and as can be seen in the attached picture, the quality of the image of this Asus can compete with the other two ones. I am now appreciative of the smaller real estate that this device takes, compared to the others, while still delivering an outstanding image quality. This device has a 1920x1080 recommended resolution (max resolution). In Windows 10, the recommended scaling is at 150% which results in the screen to show less content than desired (words, pictures look too big). At that setting, in landscape (non-tablet) mode, web pages for major news, technology and other sites, render fine leaving a vertical space on the sides so that you can scroll with your right or left thumbs on the touch screen. On the other hand, at this setting, portrait mode (tablet mode) looks very awkward, with too much vertical content as opposed to horizontal. So, I am not sure 150% should be really “the” recommended scaling for this device. Now, I changed the recommended scaling from 150% to 125%, and at that resolution, although more content is visible from websites, most of them leave a lot of white space on the sides. Tablet mode shows more content horizontally than the recommended setting, so content doesn’t look awkward anymore in that mode, leaving a better impression on my side. Well, with not too big thumbs and digits, I can still manage to hit in the right places at this scaling. I’d figure people with bigger hands/finders would still feel more comfortable with the 150% scaling. >>> Performance I am impressed with how fast this computer is perceived. I was able to multitask easily with no visible performance degradation as far as I could tell. One comparison test I did was to use Outlook on my Surface Book and this Asus laptop to sync my Microsoft email account (Hotmail) in Outlook: the Asus took around 15 mins to sync one year of data, about 1GB, and my Surface Book took basically about the same time. With the Surface Book being an i7 Intel core, I was more than happy with this and other comparison tests I made. Note that video editing and software development are yet to be tested/compared. >>> Setup This machine comes with a Windows 10 Home Version. Initial configuration was a breeze, and for the first time, and given that this one would be solely my laptop, I decided to use my Microsoft account to configure the system. I would usually just setup my personal computers with a local account, but I decided to go for Windows Hello (PIN based authentication) and all the automatic settings from my Hotmail (a.k.a. Microsoft) account. Still with privacy in mind, I didn't choose Cortana to snoop and to get in my way (besides I am too old school to get someone to tell what to do) and I also decide not to sync to OneDrive automatically. As usual, a little too much bloatware than desired, I wish only the basic stuff to be preloaded. Well, after a couple of weeks usage you’ll figure which applications need silencing anyways. >>> Peripherals I've had a few issues in the past on different machines not connecting to Bluetooth speakers timely or recognizing them timely, that seemed to have stemmed from OS issues rather than a hardware problem. I am glad that so far all the Bluetooth devices I have thrown at this, were able to connect. Wireless connectivity at different location, work/home/public, has been going fine with no issues. >>> Storage and Memory Definitely, modern laptops should all be running on SSD drives, not on the 5400rpm ancient ones. I've seen laptops running on 5400rpm disk drives, and I am sure the main contributing factor to the sluggishness presented by those computers was the disk drive. This one is a breeze. Even though it has 8GB and one might be tempted to think that it is not enough and might hurt the performance, it turns out that the 4GB of paging seems enough. >>> Sound Who in their right mind places the speakers at the bottom on the sides of the laptop? Did they do it so that you can “feel” the music when the device is placed on your lap? As opposed to “hear” the music? Or some new-enhanced experience? Regardless, I think this was a bad idea, even when placed on a flat surface, the sound that comes out is not clear because there is some rebound from the underlying surface, you’ll need to hold the machine on your hands or tilt it to get what otherwise looks like a very good sounding speakers. I wonder if the decision was to force people to use headphones or place the laptop on a pedestal to get a clear sound that you could enjoy. Who did this to this beauty? Not a deal breaker to me, but when I want to annoy my family with my music, I want it to do it crisp and clear. In addition, there is also some uncomfortable vibration when the laptop is placed on your lap while playing music on the speakers. >>> Battery This is other aspect of the game, and the Asus Q406D has a decent battery life. in full YouTube/music/video mode at work, just to test the battery, it easily lasted for about 6 hours, so the specs are right in the estimated time. As stated earlier I have yet to try some heavy image/video editing software as well as software development. >>> Laptop vs Tablet mode Ideally if it was detachable would be very handy to use it as a tablet. It feels a little bulky when in tablet mode. Given its size it is not an issue. The nice thing is that I can watch videos on a semi-tablet mode (the device folded half-way). Very convenient. I’d think this to be a perfect laptop for a college student. Buy the pen, and an Office365 subscription (or get it through college) and you won’t need notebooks nor recorders to take notes and record lectures. >>> Keyboard Initially, I was not sure about the keyboard being risen in the back, as opposed to flat from the other ones I have, but it turns out, it feels comfortable when I am typing on this device when it is resting on a flat surface. >>> Touch screen I haven’t bought the Asus recommend stylus, but I have tried writing with my Surface Book Pen and it feels ok. I am sure if I get my hands on the recommended Pen I’d give a more positive feedback.

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  Posted 6 years ago by Goncho