If you are looking for a laptop that has a decent price tag, looks good, runs older games and some light gaming, and can handle any office work well, then the Asus F555LA is going to be a pretty solid choice for you. The notebook offers a FULL HD 1080p 15.6 inch screen with decent color accuracy, good speakers. It comes with a pre-installed Windows 10 Home OS, an Intel Core I3 processor, Intel 5500 GPU, 4GB of RAM, and 500 GB of storage.
It is an excellent choice if you are looking for a desktop replacement, and although the Intel Core I3-5010u processor isn’t that powerful, with the Intel HD Graphics 5500 GPU this laptop can do some serious work. The main setbacks of this laptop is the lack of touchscreen and SSD, but if you are a little tech savvy, or know someone who is, you can upgrade the memory to 8gb and put an SSD in this laptop, which will make it even faster.
The GPU in this Asus laptop is better than we expected, and while with its standard specification, it is a great working computer, if you manage to upgrade it, it is going to blow your mind.
Design – The Asus F555LA is pretty
The Asus F555LA-AB31 laptop has a very sleek design. The biggest problem that many people face when it comes to good looking and shiny laptops, that they are fingerprint magnets. Asus managed to solve that with something they call “concentric circle cover finish”. We have tested this out, and it really works. Although the cover can still be scratched, smudges and fingerprints don’t show at all.
I’m not going to say that the laptop is super light, because it is not. It’s 5.1 pounds, so it’s a little heavier than the usual models on the market, but it’s nothing too bad. I mean, it is not going to rip your arms off, or be hard to pick up like Thor’s hammer. The dimensions of the F555LA-AB31 are 10.1 x 15 x 1 (LWH) inches, so it is thin comparing to other models like the HP Pavilion G6.
Although it may not fit in smaller bags, the elegant look is going to make up for that. You can carry it to work, meetings, without feeling uncomfortable.
Screen
This is the biggest advantage of the Asus F555LA-AB31 laptop. We have a 15.6 inch display which is Full HD (Maximum Resolution is 1920 by 1080), with great color accuracy and vibrant colors. It’s got a matte display, which eliminates any screen glare, giving you a better viewing experience. Personally, I don’t like glossy screens, so this was a big plus for me. If you would like to do some gaming, this display is good for that.
We got to admit that, in this price range, you are not going to find a laptop that offers this great resolution and features. Thanks to the Full HD display, you can browse the web, edit pictures or videos, or simply watch Full HD movies.
Although it is big, it isn’t that bright to be honest. At max brightness, I found it a bit dim, and the viewing angles aren’t that great either, but because we are not talking about an IPS panel, it’s understandable.
Audio
When I first heard the quality of the speakers in the laptop, it blew my mind. To be honest, just like with every budget computer, I was expecting a speaker that sounds like a mobile speaker with bad mids and lows. The Asus SonicMaster speakers are absolutely amazing compared to what you get with a similar laptop in this price range. The mids and lows are all noticable, although the bass is not that great, but what could you expect?
It comes with an audio software called ICEpower AudioWizard, which helps you switch between several audio modes like gaming, movie, recording. This comes in handy.
Keyboard
The Asus F555LA-AB31 has a non-backlit keyboard, and it is comfortable, but not the highest quality. Because my hands are pretty big, I don’t like typing on notebook keyboards, but the laptops keyboard felt a little bouncy. Its got a numpad as well, which is great if you are working in Excel.
We’ve got a big touchpad, with the two standard buttons, and gesture recognition. I liked the touchpad a lot.
Other Features (Webcam, Ports, Noise)
The Asus laptop has got more than enough ports, more than you usually get with laptops in this price range. On the left side, you can find the power port, a VGA and HDMI port, the Ethernet jack, and two USB 3.0. On the right side there is a SD card reader, two USB 2.0 and an optical dvd drive.
The webcam is an HD camera, which has an above avarage quality. It is good for Skyping, but wouldn’t use it for taking photos of yourself or for anything else, since it takes blurry images and videos.
Thanks to the ASUS IceCool Technology, the laptop stays cool under heavy load. Temperatures never exceeded 90 degrees, and the noise of the fan wasn’t that loud and they kept the i3-5010u ice cold.
Performance – As you would expect from an Asus laptop
Finally, we are at the part of the review, what most people are excited about! How does this laptop hold up, under heavy load? Can you do some serious gaming? How many software can you simultaneously run? According to analytics, this is the review that most people spend time looking while reading reviews of laptops.
We tested the laptop without upgrading it, so all of the test results are with the basic preferences. Storage wise, it comes with a 500GB HDD.
Let’s be honest. With 4GB of RAM, and a Core i3-5010u processor, you can’t run any games on high or ultra and do serious gaming, or have seventeen million Chrome tabs open. BUT, you can easily do multitasking, like switching between tabs, applications.
We have tested how many Chrome tabs can it possibly handle while running Office, and the highest number was 8. After that, the system got slower, that is because Chrome loves RAM.
The GPU can handle any 1080P movie or video, without throttling. We tested running Visual Studio, and Sony Vegas, and although the rendering times in Vegas wasn’t the shortest, it could handle it.
Now, this laptop can run older games flawlessly, while maintaining a steady 30 FPS, but it is not really a gaming laptop. Battlefield 4 was no problem, and we could run Call of Duty 2 as well. CS:GO had 70-80 FPS on the lowest graphics settings. The Intel HD Graphics couldn’t handle more.
Newer ones? Well, not so much. Although the GPU is a good budget graphics card, we can’t expect that much from an integrated chip. For optimized ones, we tried running them on low settings, but it wasn’t performing very good. But, it doesn’t have problem running Windows 10 and having several softwares open.
Battery Life
The battery life is quite impressive giving that it is a budget computer, but the other models in this category have better battery life than the Asus F555LA-AB31. Of course, the time you can get out of the battery is a matter of what are you going to use the laptop for. In this review, we have used the laptop as much as we could, to test it out. On average, the battery can power the notebook for about 4 – 4,5 hours. With extensive use, this can get to 3 hours, but this is if you really use the computer, running several tabs, gaming, watching a movie or youtube video.
Conclusion of the Asus F555LA-AB31 review
The Asus F555LA-AB31 is a great choice, if you are looking to replace your desktop computer. It is a budget laptop, but has above-average specifiations, like the display and the speaker quality. For editing text, browsing on the web, watching movies it can easily stand it’s ground, but if you upgrade it with an SSD, and more RAM, you will definitely have a portable computer that can handle video editing softwares and since it has a Full HD display, it’s completely suited for it.
If you are looking for something with better performance,check out these 17 inch gaming laptops by Tibco.
