Asus K50IJ review

Asus's K50IJ is a chunky laptop, but its bulk gives it a feeling of sturdiness that makes us confident that it will handle standard daily use and being carried around occasionally.

It looks attravailable, thanks to the glossy coating on the chassis. Thankfully, the coating hasn't been applied to the keyboard and the standard matt finish makes the keys easier to see and type on.

The keys are a little spongy, but once you get used to them, touch-typing at speed becomes easy. Thanks to the width provided by the 15.6in widescreen display, there's room inside for a numerical keypad, which could come in handy if you do a lot of number work.

The touchpad has the same glossy coating as the rest of the chassis. Thankfully, small divots in the pad's surface improve friction and make fine control of the cursor easy.

We were impressed by the bright screen, which has excellent viewing angles. Movies looked great, with vibrant colours jumping out. With a resolution of 1,366x768 there's plenty of space for when you need to do some work.

One slight disappointment is that there's no HDMI output, although the VGA output means that you can still connect this computer to an external display if you need to.

Performance is one area you won't have to worry about, thanks to the 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo T6500 processor and 4GB of RAM. With an overall score of 63 in our 2D tests, this laptop is quick. Things weren't so good in our Call of Duty 4 test, and the integrated Intel GMA X4500HD graphics managed only 4.5fps.

Other than this, there's little to complain about with the K50IJ. The 320GB hard disk means there's plenty of space for all your files. At three hours and 42 minutes, battery life is also pretty good for a budget laptop, and means you can take this computer on short trips or use it comfortably around your house.

With its relatively high-specification processor, good overall benchmark scores and reasonable battery life, the K50IJ is a great all-round laptop. It's excellent value and comes with a two-year warranty, so fully deserves our Best Buy award.