Largest Gadget Discovery Site in India
Login/Signup
Yes all those reports about this laptop having heating issues are completely true. It shuts down within 15-20 minutes of playing games. It couldn't handle even 2-3 year old games like Mass Effect 2 & Dragon Age Origins. I got it replaced from Flipkart using their 30 day Replacement Guarantee. However much to my dismay the replacement I got also suffers from this exact same issue. After Sales Service: In order to get the product replaced it has to be inspected by a technical representative( Asus technician in this case). It took well over 10 days for the technician to visit and give a certificate stating the defect.I now shudder to think of the process involved to get a refund and not a replacement. Last few words on the product itself. While it is ON it is a good laptop and delivers very good gaming performance. However, 20 minutes is hardly enough time to pass an informed judgement. The keyboard is a bit flimsy and the keys don't feel very comfortable while typing. PS . Flip cannot handle criticism , my previous review got deleted for obvious reasons. Horrible experience.
I bought this laptop on June 18, 2012. and also got the windows 8 consumer preview 64-bit installed along with all the drivers... ... ..Windows 8 Boot-up time is "05" seconds... .this laptop it resumes from Sleep within 2 seconds. . I have used it for almost all purposes and haven't experienced any dissatisfaction yet. The laptop is smart on power consumption with the Asus Powergear software and gave 3-4 hours of browsing on battery saving mode and about 2-3 hours of media playback... . ...Intel i7-3610QM Processor With 2Core & 8 Theards... Clock Speed 2.3 GHz Upto 3.00 GHz.... Intel Hd Graphics 4000..... . ..The 8GB RAM provided is faster at 1600MHz much faster for multitasking.... ..The GPU = Nvidia GT 630M is medium level graphics card incorporating the new Optimus Technology and Big Daddy of all entry-level gaming laptops in this range. 2530*1600 Display Resolution by Nvidia.360M...And 96 Core Graphics..Fully 3D support...Bluray... . ..HDMI provides superb quality on my Panasonic Viera HDTV and HD videos look realistic. The DVD writer is dual layer and works well... .. ..1 TB Hard Disk With 5400 Rpm..... All Over performance rating 5.9 Is Good & Best Results.. . .. ...You will find its competitors in Dell, HP and Lenovo but they all are costlier, heavier in weight(this one is 2.3kg) or lack in some or the other configuration. .. . . ....thank you for reading my review.....
Let's start with few glitches, TouchPad: Touch pad is too smooth, smooth enough that even a blow of air from your hand while you type will make your cursor bounce over to other lines that you end up writing your content in a different paragraph than you actually intend to. Clearly there's no manual touch pad lock button. You will have to get used to it. Sound: I was happy running my laptop, thought to listen the sound quality of my baby, I took it onto my lap and launched a song, the euphonious tinkling of the background music bells and noisefree clarity of the sound reconciled my calm and gratified my spirits.( Damn!! my cursor slips away from its position each time my finger's epidermis gets close to this squared metal part). The sound quality was good but it was limited to mostly my ears, its not that loud actually. Suddenly my phone rang, I stretched up a bit and contracted my legs, that gave the laptop's bottom part a little more open room and free air. To my surprise the sound that earlier was quiet and placid suddenly took a boost and waded out. I was not much excited and got over with my tele call. Soon I resumed my comfortable position and took laptop back on my lap. Apparently, the sound got lame and gloomy once again. Well that was odd. I lifted up my system ( and here comes the worst part ) and to my horror saw TWO SPEAKERS AT THE BOTTOM OF MY LAPTOP. Can you believe that ???, speakers at the bottom ???, what were they thinking of ???? I mean how many of us keep our laptop on the top of some 4 legged support aloft in order to give the speakers to give more space to shout, and how many of us keep our laptop on top of our lap or over a flat rigid table to work comfertably, thats the reason it's called a LAPTOP ( listen you asus guys). They trolled us. Drivers: The driver cd strictly says "This disc supports Win 7 64 bit only". Oh yes you genius minded ASUS guys, sure. It's like you've been asked to fill your vehicle's petrol tank from a distant, hideous petrol pump only, no matter what. However I installed Windows 8 and when tried to execute autorun feature of the driver CD it gave an error "Only supports windows 7 ( HOme + Pro + Ultimate ) 32 and 64 bit only " ( and on cd cover it was carved as 64bit only ). Anyway I managed to install each driver in a very easy and obvious fashion that I almost laughed at ASUS's technical team's folly that they would keep an error check if anyone tried installing from cd and not when someone tried installing them the way I did. Installing Windows 8: AS usual, no special way of doing it. Customer Preview Evaluation copy of Win8 is available on Microsoft website for free, download it ( I installed 64 bit version ) burn it in DVD, sneak in your DVD in its place and restart the system. It will ask whether to boot from DVD rom drive or harddisk, clearly its DVD rom. After completing the installation go to Computer -> Right Click -> Properties -> Device Manager. Manually right click on each hardware section and select Update Driver -> Browse My Computer For Driver Software Locate you DVD drive. Just locate the drive, do not bother about going into subfolders. However make sure Include Subfolders checkbox is checked( it is by default ). And hit Next. Sit back and relax. It is advised if you install intel HD graphic driver first than moving ahead to install Nvidia 630 driver. Yes you need to have both of them installed together. Hail Nvidia's OPTIMUS technology. That's it you are done. Verdict: Though the review talks mostly about the gauche part of the product but it's a great product indeed. You would love it. This beast is not going to get out of phase for the next 5-7 years. Will run all your games at extreme graphic details without a lack. With so much of RAM available, solving your multithreaded application's intricacies would be a piece of pie for this speedy 3rd gen processor. Which is 20% faster and has twice the cache than its predecessor. I have ran few heavy games and other resource consuming applications but the RAM usage hardy exceeded 5 GB. So having that much of RAM or spending that much money for it seems pretty futile, however I am sure that near future games and other heavy applications will be more hardware demanding and that's when all the hard work would be paid off. That said, if Rs 55,000 is your budget, there's nothing stopping you from getting this product. Looks are awesome you would stare and adore them. I could give it a 4 star for that speaker thing but I tend to use my headphone always than putting it up on inbuilt speakers. Even if I were to use vociferous music I would use amplified external speakers. Hence that's not the issue for for me. Giving 5 star.
To say the least, this is a Best Value for Money notebook. I always feel, even though ASUS keeps a low profile in the market, most of technically sound people know what ASUS brand value is and how reliable their products are: This thing is a beast with no hype - brand ASUS, and for this price you cant ask anything more. Taking you through the pros and cons of this laptop 1. Technically speaking about the processor, it is an Ivy Bridge (3rd Gen) processor, which uses a 22nm fabrication technology as compared to 45nm in Sandy Bridge Processors (2nd Gen), which results in faster processing and better power efficiency. The processor is blazing fast, 3610QM quad-core with turbo boost upto 3.3ghz, can't ask for anything more at this price. Can handle upto 8 threads in parallel so it's really fast. 2. Major downfall is with the chipset - HM76 chief river, which is an ordinary performance chipset without support for RAID, which means, will have to manage with HDDs which will eventually lose out in sometime as SSD's become cheaper. Still pretty decent if you are planning to buy another one in 3-4 years. Can expect to be good for some time. If it had been the HM77 chipset, it would have sweeped galores. 3. Although the RAM in box provided is great i.e., 8GB RAM 1600Mhz, an option to have it upgraded to 16GB would have given this laptop a good extra 2years of service. I am sure that in 4years you would feel 8gb to be too mere. 4. What disappoints me again is the GPU, GT 630M is the rekindled version of GT 540 and is not the Kepler version, so looks fine for present if you are a gamer, but not sure of some future upcoming games to run smooth. should be fine for other applications like Photoshop, Corel etc. Would have been ideal if it would have been the Kepler version GT 640M, which you find in laptops of 70-80k range. Guess can't have everything at this cost. 5. The display, chiclet keyboard and trackpad experiences are just average. The display is not great at angles, maybe coz of the glossy screen. Will take some time to get used to this chiclet keyboard too although very neat. Backlit keyboard, HD+ (1900*780) display would have been ideal again. Still good for the price and very much manageable. Again can't have everything at this price right. 6. Other pluses are Kensington lock and Ice cool technology. Although the Altec Lansing speakers didnt impress me that much. 7. Talking about hard disk, it is sufficent in capacity but it would have been better if offered with 7200rpm. This is a 5400rpm. May be you could fill up this harddisk, remove and get it cased and use it as external hdd and revamp the laptop with a 7200rpm one if you could. No option to add an SSD is a bit of dissapointment (This is what the ASUS dealer told me, not very sure about it). 8. Havent faced any heating issues as of now and believe the Ice Cool technology is actually functional. Summarizing, ASUS K55VM is a great laptop with the only defaulters as HM76 chipset and RAM expandable upto 8gb max. But pluses are that it comes with 8gb RAM inbuilt and 1TB hdd for a much less and much competitive price of 54k which is a lot less than other competitors offering the same config. If you are planning to buy a laptop with 3-4yrs of service in mind, then I would say, go for this; but what you have in mind is 4-6yrs in mind until you opt for another, then this laptop doesnt offer you much to upgrade so that you could have a decent performance even after 4 yrs. A good competition to it is HP 7010tx although pricier by 6k, overcomes the two disappointments I face with this laptop.
As you can imagine from the specs this is an insanely powerful laptop. I have yet barely scratched at the surface of what it can do. The build quality is nice. Its operation is quite silent. The battery lasts roughly 2 hours for me and takes as long to charge fully. The wireless card seems to drop connections, though I'm not sure if it's a problem with HW or SW. Bluetooth worked flawlessly. Haven't tried the webcam yet. Speakers an mic working as expected. I ran into a problem while trying to install another OS when the BIOS offered no option to boot from USB. From searching in forums it seems you are supposed to press ESC on startup to get boot options. I haven't tried this yet. Apart from this BIOS is mostly sane. Lastly, a word about flipkart service. I ordered on a friday evening and got it by tuesday afternoon. This was my first time ordering from flpkart, but I've ordered from online retailers in the US before - I have never seen this prompt delivery.
research. compare. buy.
