ASUS Transformer Book TX300 Review

Design
ASUS crafted the Transformer Book TX300 working with the same sophisticated style language utilised on its Taichi 21 and Zenbook Prime. The tablet portion on the hybrid capabilities a 13.3-inch display surrounded by a thick black bezel. A slightly off-center 2-megapixel camera sits along the best bezel. Around the left is really a reflective ASUS logo. The bottom of the bezel consists of a capacitive Windows eight button.m15x battery The tablet's metal back panel sports exactly the same concentric circle pattern surrounding an ASUS emblem found on the ASUS Zenbook Prime and Transformer Pad Infinity. A series of thermal vents along the prime edge help keep the tablet cool, when speakers situated on either side pull audio duty. The system's power button sits along the tablet's top rated edge, but stuck out a little as well significantly for our liking.The dock's keyboard deck apes that of ASUS' Taichi 21 and Zenbook Prime. In contrast to numerous Windows eight laptop-tablet hybrids, the Transformer Book TX300 gives a large wrist rest and touchpad. acer s3 battery The brushed aluminum keyboard deck is exceptionally wide for a solution in this class, and we absolutely appreciated the added space.lenovo x240 charger Above the keyboard, just below the dock connector, is really a strip of faux metal knurling . A slider lock sits on the connector's left side. The dock's underside attributes a slightly textured brushed aluminum design and style.
At 4.two pounds and 13.three x 8.6 x 0.27-0.94 inches, the Transformer Book TX300 is both larger and heavier than the 12.5-inch Dell XPS 12, which weighs three.four pounds and measures 12.five x 8.5 x 0.6-0.8 inches. Lenovo's innovative Yoga hybrid is extra in line using the Transformer Book's dimensions at 13.1 x 8.9 x 0.67 inches, but is still far lighter than the ASUS, weighing just three.four pounds.
As a stand-alone tablet, google nexus 7 charger the Transformer Book TX300 measures 13.3 x 8.four x 0.15-0.43 inches and weighs 2.2 pounds. By comparison, the Samsung ATIV Sensible Computer Pro 700t, which features a smaller sized 11.6-inch show, measures 11.97 x 7.46 x 0.47 inches and weighs 1.8 pounds.

Screen
Anyway, let’s move along and talk in regards to the screen. There’s a bright and vivid 13.three inch IPS panel with 1920 x 1080 px resolution around the Transformer Book. So everything is just right right here: the texts are sharp, the colors vibrant and you’ll have no problem whatsoever together with the viewing angles either.
samsung np900x4c charger Light bleeding around the edges from the panel may be disturbing, or at the very least it was on my test unit. But I cannot say that is definitely a deal-breaker for me, since the light spots are largely visible on dark-static scenes and occasionally when watching motion pictures which have black bars beneath and on top rated of the content material.But there’s a lot more about this display. As you might have got by now, this can be a touchscreen and supports as much as ten touch-points. It performs because it really should and I had no issue performing gestures, taps and all sorts of commands on it or on its frame, such as those Windows eight gestures. However, this screen doesn't include an active digitizer, and consequently, it is going to not function with a precision pen. Or in other words, it is not great for inking, sketching, drawing, note taking and so on.
samsung np740u3e ultrabook charger Then there’s that wobbling connection between the screen plus the dock I was speaking about earlier. On my test unit, it was just a nuisance, nothing more. But in time, it may possibly have unwanted effects on that fragile port that keeps data flowing between the slate and also the dock. Therefore, since the actual tablet is heavier than a frequent laptop screen, Asus should really have surely created a stronger hinge here, able to keep-in-place the further bulk.

Horsepower and Overall performance
The Transformer Book TX300 runs on an Intel Core i7-3517U 1.9GHz dual core CPU. That's precisely the same ULV Ultrabook CPU we've seen in numerous models as an alternative to the modestly updated two.0GHz seen in some refreshes. We are able to only guess that Asus worked so lengthy on engineering the TX300 that they did not want to delay it further to get a minor refresh towards the one hundred MHz more rapidly Intel Core i7-3537U. sony sgpt111gb charger Now that fourth generation Intel Haswell CPUs have just began to seem in the Sony Vaio Pro and Duo 13, we want the TX300 could've provided that. Haswell doesn't increase substantially on CPU speed (in fact it's from time to time slower so that you can conserve energy), and graphics speed together with the additional frequent Intel HD 4400 graphics isn't considerably of an improvement, but battery life is improved, and we would not thoughts that here. On an additional note, Asus could release a core i5 version having a 320 gig HDD for any lower price, but it's not around the industry as of this writing.The tablet has four gigs of DDR3 RAM soldered for the motherboard and Asus seems allergic to offering 8 gigs of RAM on their Ultrabooks. hp pavilion 14 b178sa charger That said, four gigs is sufficient for many customers, and unless you use VMs (virtual machines), complicated IDEs or devote your days editing full HD video it performs fine. I generally run Adobe Photoshop CS6, MS Word 2013, Outlook and two web browsers with numerous tabs open and have not exceeded 4 gigs. When I play games, I commonly close applications except social networking, email and my internet browser and I nonetheless don't exceed readily available RAM (I am operating Left4Dead 2 or The Sims 3 and not BioShock Infinite, that is as well hard a title for any 2013 Ultrabook unless you're pleased with the lowest settings and resolution possibilities).power adaptors for t5740e thin client The Transformer Book TX300CA includes a 128 gig SSD and ours was the SanDisk U100 that is not as rapid because the ADATA SSD drive that Asus also uses. Its benchmarks are slower than the ADATA drive, even though in sensible use, it really is tough to inform. The machine has a 500 gig, 5400 RPM traditional spinning really hard disk in the keyboard dock, and it's partitioned into D and E drives of equal size (222 gigs). Happily, Asus areas the 20 gig recovery partition on the HDD so it does not use valuable SSD space. As a result the SSD had 90 gigs free out of your box,
which is greater than the average of 67 gigs for 128 gig Windows 8 SSDs with recovery partitions. Windows 8 sees the 500 gig drive as a really hard disk on a USB three.0 SATA bridge (so it may be safely removed when undocked) and you can set up programs there along with films, music and documents. Of course it wouldn't be a good thought to undock the tablet when you are playing media around the 500 gig HDD. If you are adventurous, galaxy note 10.1 charger you could upgrade the HDD to a greater capacity drive or an SSD drive. It is the only internal that is readily upgradable around the TX300. That USB 3.0 SATA bridge is an uncommon engineering feat that Asus says they worked challenging on. It offers pretty fast speeds plus a solution to address all the ports and HDD through a single dock connector.

Keyboard dock and trackpad
If you have owned and even played with a Zenbook Prime ahead of, you know what to anticipate with all the Transformer Book: it has essentially precisely the same backlit keys as ASUS' earlier offerings (anything following the original UX31, anyway). lenovo m72e power adapter For some time now, these keyboards have had plastic, not metal, buttons, with a superior deal additional travel than they used to. In actual fact, the firm slightly adjusted the important travel this time around, generating that the only change more than previous models.
Regardless of whether ASUS made the buttons deeper or shallower is tough to tell: they feel concerning the identical. All we know is that the keyboard presents extra tactile feedback than most ultraportables, toshiba pa5013u 1brs and that the buttons are bouncy and well-spaced sufficient that typos are unlikely (we're certain you could locate a way, even though). Seriously, when we assume back to ASUS' first Ultrabook, where we had to mash the keys to make certain our presses registered, we're reminded of how far the organization has come, at the very least with regards to typing expertise. Currently, ASUS' keyboards don't get in touch with significantly focus to themselves. asus x200ma ac adaptor And that is a very good thing.Lingering on the keys for any moment, you will uncover a few functions built into particular buttons. The space bar, for instance, includes a control around the left end that activates the Power4Gear Hybrid application, exactly where you could select unique energy management profiles. m4800 9 cell battery The "C" crucial doubles as a shortcut for ASUS' Splendid Video Technologies dashboard, exactly where you change the show settings to "Theater," "Vivid" or some manual configuration. (We left it around the default mode the majority of the time, since we're boring like that.) The "A" button contains an on / off switch for the ambient light sensor. The "V" important, meanwhile, is exactly where you will locate a shortcut for ASUS' Lifeframe camera app, pa5013u 1brs batterywhich has all of the photo filters, borders and emoticons you'd anticipate from a common notebook webcam. The Function keys, naturally, house all your requisite volume and brightness controls. Within this case, you need to utilize the Fn key to activate them; that is either good news or bad news, depending on how much you rely on keyboard shortcuts.ASUS has come a extended way with its trackpads also. The one right here, which makes use of ASUS' own drivers, isn't half-bad. We enjoyed smooth,surface pro 3 adapter controlled pinch-to-zooming in IE10, and didn't even need to apply much stress with our fingers. Two-finger scrolls operate properly as well. Even single-finger tracking is precise, which may be the quantity one particular point we complain about when we test out laptop touchpads. If anything, the touch button is actually a bit stiff, but that is simple to let slide compared to many of the other concerns we're used to.

Battery life
ASUS wasn't kidding when it mentioned the tablet's 5,000mAh battery could final 5 hours: our test unit ran precisely five hours and one minute in our rundown test (video looping, WiFi on). power adapter for dell latitude e6430 For those who take a look at the comparison table above, you will see that is about average for a touchscreen Ultrabook with an Ivy Bridge CPU -- the new Kirabook and the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A Touch each delivered fairly comparable results. The very best you could possibly hope for on a device like that is maybe half an hour longer, hp t610 power supply but hopefully that'll change when Haswell becomes the new chip normal. For now, as we mentioned, the keyboard dock has its personal 3,120mAh battery, which promises to extend the runtime to up to eight hours.
ASUS Transformer Book 5:01 (tablet only)
Acer Iconia W700 7:13
Samsung Series 9 (13-inch, 2012) 7:02
MacBook Air (13-inch, 2012) 6:34 (OS X) / four:28 (Windows)
Dell XPS 14 6:18
Sony VAIO T13 5:39
Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13 5:32
Dell XPS 12 5:30
Samsung Series five UltraTouch 5:23
ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A Touch 5:15
ASUS Zenbook Prime UX51Vz 5:15
Toshiba Satellite U845W 5:13
Toshiba Kirabook 5:12
Toshiba Satellite U845 5:12
Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3 5:11
Toshiba Satellite U925t 5:10
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5:07
Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M5 5:05
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch 5:00
Sony VAIO Duo 11 4:47
Acer Aspire S5 4:35
MSI Slidebook S20 4:34
ASUS Zenbook Prime UX21A 4:19
Acer Aspire S7 (13-inch) 4:18
Acer Aspire S3 4:11
Lenovo ThinkPad Twist 4:09
HP Spectre XT TouchSmart 4:00
Vizio Thin + Light (14-inch, 2012) 3:57
ASUS TAICHI 21 3:54
Microsoft Surface Pro 3:46