Review ASUS X202E CT001H Touch

[Lutkeveld]

Review of the ASUS X202E CT-001H

 

Unboxing

The notebook is shipped in a modest cardboard box with a easy handgrip on the top. On the front are the specs and some details about the notebook. If you so desire you could use the cardboard box as a cheap lowbudget carrying case.

De inhoud van de box is van links naar rechts van boven naar onder:

- European guide lines

- ASUS X202E CT-001H

- Screen cleaning cloth

- Warranty Guide Asus (2 year pickup & return)

- Usermanual NL

- Usermanual ENG

 

The notebook itself:

Asus did a really good job on designing this notebook. It looks just like the higher-end zenbooks. When you open it  you will immediately notice the nice qwerty-keyboard surrounded by aluminium. It types well and has a reasonably long travel to the keys. The touchpad under the keyboard measures 10 by 6 cm. The left/right mousebuttons are also touchsensitive and intergrate seemlessly. The 11,6 inch 10 point multi touch screen is surrounded by a bezel of about 2-3 cm. This allows you to use the built-in gestures of Windows 8. There is a small gap between the keyboard and the screen which functions as exhaust.

The underside is made of plastic and contains a vent for air intake. The rubber anti-slip feet prevent the notebook from slipping from your working space and create a little bit of clearence for air intake.

Taking the plastic part of the underside is a huge pain in the butt. You have to take a creditcard or something similair and guide it trough the groove. If you excecute this properly the guts of the laptop will be visible. You will see a half-sized pci-e slot which is filled with a Atheros AR5B125 wireless b/g/n module. This card is replaceable.

The 320gb 5400rpm hard disk made by Hitachi. This one is also interchangeable with a ssd/hdd with a max height of 7mm.

The motherboard is located at the right side of the hdd. It’s equipped with a Intel Celeron B847 @1,1 GHZ and 2gb ddr3-1333mhz (soldered on, not replaceable). There is no discrete graphicscard, it’s using the igpu (intel hd2000). It will be fine for normal 2D, and light 3D tasks.

At the bottom right there is the 4800 mAh battery which takes up the most space and weight (total weight: 1,3 kg and dimensions in cm LxWxH: 30 x 20 x 2,2).

Size compared to a 15,6 inch notebook:

Size:

It’s very portable and doens’t take very long to get use to. You can compare it to an oversized tablet with dockingstation. My old Asus K50IJ feel like a huge monster and I can tell the pixels, which I didn’t notice when I was using is. It has the same resolution on a much larger screen which results in a lower ppi ratio. Also the x202e has a very compact power adaptor, which is also a pretty big advantage. You don’t have a large brick lying next to you, but instead it’s a little block the size of a tape-measure. It’s attached to the power plug, so it doens’t dangle in the air. The lenght of the cord is 2,40 meter. Dimensions adaptor (LxWxH): 5 x 5 x 2,5

First Impression:

Robust, solid and compact. It boots up reasonably fast with Windows 8 and everything is easy to find when you get used to it. Coming from windows 7 I have little complaints. I wished they would make a little introduction video, because at first I didn’t know how to do basic tasks like shutting it down or searching documents. The desktop is abot the same as Windows 7 except for the start menu. I’m not really a fan of Modern UI, it feels a tad childish. Most people complain about it, but microsoft doesn’t force you to use it.  And you can add the start menu via a third-party app if you so desire.

 

Screen quality:

 

The screen looks sharp indoor compared to my old ASUS K50IJ (same resolution but 15,6”). The TN-panel has poor viewing angles, but that isn’t an issue if you use it alone. It has a glossy finish which results in a lot of reflection outdoors, but there can be dealt with by pointing the back of the screen to the sun. It’s not really a fingerprint magnet, but it doens’t hurt to wipe the screen every once in a while.

Connections:

Left side (left to right): power in, 100mb ethernetport, 2x USB 2.0, kensington lock.

Right side (left to right): VGA, USB 3.0, 3.5mm audio/mic combo, SD cardreader.

 

Theoretical prestations:

The celeron is often looked at as a slow piece of shit. Altough it is not the fastest in any stretch of the imagination, it is not a piece of shit. In most systems the bottleneck is the hdd, NOT the cpu. In this case the 5400rpm Hitachi disk. It can keep op in the Modern UI, because of the fullscreen apps. Once you go in the desktop environment it will struggle to keep up. It will constantly spike to 100 percent usage while excecuting more than one task. CPU usage will usualy be under 50 percent when the HDD begings to spike, and RAM usage will be under 1,5/2gb (75%).

 

The Intel HD2000 plays youtube videos without any hassle. It struggles when playing dvd-rips, but after a few second the stuttering is gone.

 

Real world performance

Very good for the price. As said, the hdd is the bottleneck in multitasking scenario’s , but it’s easy to replace (with a crucial m4 in my case). The speed of any current ssd can be fully utilized because of the intel hm70 chipset. When the hdd is removed, you can throw it in an external usb3 case for quick and easy external storage.

 

Bang for the buck

Excellent, when I bought this notebook in december 2012 it was about 400 euro’s. Meanwhile the price has gone down by a little. I can recommend it in combination with an SSD,  it’s blazing fast in normal browsing and other low power tasks, but it lacks the power for difficult tasks.

Battery life

Good, but not excellent. On the internet it was stated to get 6 hours of battery life. This may be true, but you have to leave it idle. Your average (grand)mother will get about 3-4 hours, but the average techfanatic will be getting between 1,5 and 3 hours of battery life. The notebook charges quickly if not in use, when in use it will barely charge and use almost all the incoming power to keep te notebook running.

Heat and noise output

Acceptable out of the box, great ofter a bios upgrade. Downloadlink is difficult to find, because the official name of the notebook ‘x202ep’ : http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&p=3&s=476&m=X202E&os=&hashedid=n%2fa

windows 8 64 bit -> bios -> v203 for x202ep

Temperatures are the same after the bios upgrade: 50 idle, 75 load. Only difference is the greatly reduced noise output.

Sound:

Sound is good, but I prefer to use a headset because the speakers lack bass. High tones sound harsh on high volumes, but it’s loud enough for multimedia purposes.

After installing the audio driver from realtek the high tones sound much better, it can be found on the same site as the bios update.

 

Just buy it and replace the harddisk with an ssd

 

Postive:

big trackpad

nice keyboard

sturdy

compact and thin

good sound for a semi ultrabook

HDD is swapable

Silent with bios v203

 

negative:

The HDD (why asus, why)

RAM is not expandable, but that’s not really neccessary (for me)

100mbit ethernetport

Barely charges when in use

audio/mic comboport, I prefer seperate ports

No dvdburner, but I rarely use it and can be bought seperately (external)

 

 

 

 

 

I'm dutch, so please don't judge me on my spelling mistakes :D