Design and features
For an affordable laptop at AU$1199, the K50AB looks quite good. The silken coating on the exterior contains a faint half-tone pattern, making what seems at first an ordinary black more of a deep champagne colour, depending on which way the light shines on it.
The 15.6-inch, 1366x768 glossy screen has the requisite 1.3-megapixel webcam up the top. Moving further down, the speakers are provided by Altec Lansing — this in itself doesn't mean much, but the bundled SRS Premium sound app included does do a good job at making the sound better. The multi-touch Elantech pad has lightly concave dimples, which doesn't interfere with use unlike the UX30's. The keyboard features a slightly squished numpad, and the optical drive has been moved to the left instead of being on the usual right. The usual complement of ports is present — four USB, gigabit Ethernet, microphone and headphone jacks, SD/MMC/MS card reader and VGA out. The nearly ubiquitous wireless N is here too; however, Bluetooth has been cut from this budget model.
Internally it plays host to AMD's hardware — an Athlon X2 QL-65 2.1GHz CPU drives the laptop, while a Radeon 3200 and Radeon HD 4570 pull graphics duties. The user is able to switch between the integrated 3200 to save battery, and the discrete 4570 for extra graphics power by right-clicking on the desktop and running ATI's PowerXpress application — although we wouldn't mind a hardware switch for this too. A 320GB hard drive and 4GB RAM round out the specs for the K50AB, while Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit is the OS of choice.
Performance
Two graphics cards means testing twice — and with the Radeon HD 4570 enabled, the K50AB scored 2929 in 3DMark06 and 3820 in PCMark. Battery lasted a concerning one hour, 36 minutes and 19 seconds in our test, where we turn off all power-saving features, set screen brightness and volume to maximum and play back an XviD file.
Switching to the Radeon 3200 should have presented less performance, but greater battery life — however, only one of these was true. 3DMark06 and PCMark05 pulled in 1485 and 3678 respectively, though the battery test only went for one hour, 37 minutes and 34 seconds — indicating something is wrong either at the hardware or driver level when switching GPUs. Regardless, this is the second K50AB we've had from Asus that exhibited the same issue, so we can only assume the problem is endemic to the series at this point in time.
The K50AB is a typical mid-range laptop that looks good, but the in-built GPU-switching feature doesn't save on battery at all. We'd suggest looking elsewhere for your mid-range needs.
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