A no frills laptop that surprises at many levels.
We ran our usual set of benchmarks on the ASUS U46S, however, we only have one laptop that is expected to be priced in a similar range- something that is AMD Llano based.
|
WinRAR (CPU) |
3DMark 11 (3D) |
PCMark 11 (Overall) |
| ASUS U46S |
2017 |
849 |
1755 |
| AMD Llano based |
1339 |
1363 |
1562 |
As you can see from the table above the U46S managed to produce some impressive results and it’s CPU horsepower made it faster in WinRAR as well as PCMark. The NVIDIA GT540 is not the most high-end GPU but still a big step up from Intel integrated HD graphics.
On the usability side, ASUS equips the U46S with a pretty good chiclet style keyboard however, I am not a fan of the extra column on keys placed on the right side of the backspace/enter keys as it usually throws my navigation off and results in me hitting the page up/page down key when I needed to press enter. The mousepad on the other hand works wonderfully with multi-touch and two finger scrolling supported that worked better than most of the other laptops I’ve tested.
Under general usage, the ASUS U46S is a fairly cool and quiet laptop but cranking benchmarks- especially the ones that put the NVIDIA GPU in high gear makes the fan reasonably loud. It’s not at an irritating level but certainly one that is very noticeable. When the fan kicks in, you feel a very hot stream of air blowing out of the left side of the laptop so just make sure you don’t have anything sitting next to it. The bottom of the laptop also gets pretty warm and is definitely not comfortable in your lap.
Coming to the battery life, the ASUS U46S is a winner in this category. I was easily able to get about eight hours on one charge doing the stuff I usually do- browsing with Wi-Fi turned out with emails coming in, a little bit of video watching and some graphics processing. Watching full length movies will shorten this time by about a couple of hours but even then it has plenty of juice to last you through a long plane journey.
Overall, the U46S is a laptop that might appear to be ordinary because of it’s size and weight but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It performs better than many other laptops, has a battery life that will last you almost twice as long as some of the other laptops and is easy on the eyes and sturdy in construction. Priced at AED 2,999, it is also easy on your wallet.
