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Asus K50IJ-BNC5 review: Asus K50IJ-BNC5

Asus K50IJ-BNC5

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott
7 min read
Editors' note: This review is part of our 2010 Retail Laptop and Desktop Back-to-School roundup, covering specific fixed configurations of popular systems that can be found in retail stores.

The Asus K501J-BCN5 is a member of Best Buy's Next Class program, which elicits feedback from college students about the features they want to see in a laptop. College students told Best Buy they would like a preloaded Office suite, long battery life, antivirus protection, and a backlit keyboard--all in a portable package at an affordable price. The Asus K501J-BCN5 hits on all of these features by and large, but you do pay for it. The K501J-BCN5 costs $699 and is nearly identical to the Asus K501J-BBZ5, which costs only $529 but does not include Next Class features.

6.2

Asus K50IJ-BNC5

The Good

Solid build quality; long-lasting six-cell battery; comfortable, backlit keyboard; multitouch touch pad; a year of AV protection included.

The Bad

Next Class features add to the bill; underwhelming preinstalled software; no HDMI.

The Bottom Line

The Asus K501J-BCN5 serves up long battery life, a backlit keyboard, and a year of AV protection. Unfortunately, these Next Class features add a considerable sum to the price; we like a cheaper yet similarly configured Asus K501J model better.

So, what does the extra $170 get you on the Asus K501J-BCN5 that's not included on the BBZ5? Not a bump up with the CPU, more memory, or better graphics; both laptops features the Intel Pentium T4500 chip, 4GB of DDR2 memory, and integrated Intel graphics. The BCN5 model serves up a larger hard drive (500GB instead of 320GB) and a higher-capacity six-cell battery (62Whr to 46Whr). It also includes a backlit keyboard and a year of Webroot AV protection. Microsoft Office Starter 2010 is preinstalled, even though Best Buy's site claims that Office Home and Student 2010 is included. Starter is very limited, including only stripped-down versions of Word and Excel that are ad supported; we'd rather use free office apps such as Google Docs or Open Office.

In the end, the Asus K501J-BCN5's extras are a tough sell for an addtional $170. If you like the design of the Asus K501J laptop as we do, you may be better off going for the cheaper Asus K501J-BBZ5 and forgoing the added hard drive space and backlit keyboard, finding yourself a free office suite and a free AV app such as AVG or ">Avast. Then again, a backlit keyboard is a must-have feature for many, and this is one of the least expensive laptops we've seen it in.

The Asus K501J-BNC5 uses a similar textured plastic chassis as past K Series models, which features a subtle hound's-tooth pattern on the keyboard deck. The lid is texture-free and has a satinlike finish to it, which doesn't pick up fingerprints but does attract dust and grime. We slightly prefer the lid on the Asus K501J-BBZ5, which has a glossy finish underlain with the hound's-tooth pattern. The wrist rest below the keyboard is wider than usual, but the large plastic expanses to either side of the touch pad feel rigid, with little to no flex. The hinges, too, are sturdy and hold the display firmly in place.

The keyboard features isolated "Chiclet" keys, popularized by the Apple MacBook, which offer a pleasant typing experience. The keys have backlighting, which you can adjust (there are three levels of brightness) by using the F3 and F4 keys. Asus crams a narrow number pad to the right of the keyboard, which results in no keys being shortened on the keyboard with the exception of the four arrow keys. You may not find the need to use them much; the touch pad supports multitouch gestures. So instead of using the up and down arrows to navigate long Web pages or documents, you can simply swipe your two fingers vertically on the touch pad.

The touch pad is surprisingly small, though we never felt especially constrained when directing the cursor to and fro. The mouse buttons are generously proportioned, though they are a bit stiff and emit a loud clack when pressed.

The 15.6-inch LED backlit display features a 1,366x768 resolution, which is what we'd expect from a midsize laptop, and on-screen images are bright and crisp. The glossy screen coating strikes a fine balance between improving the image and keeping glare and reflections to a minimum. Above the display is a low-end 0.3-megapixel Webcam.

The Asus K501J-BCN5 features a pair of Altec Lansing speakers, which emit average sound. They'll suffice for movies and YouTube videos, but music playback is best done with a set of headphones or external speakers.

Best Buy's Web site advertises Microsoft Office Home & Student 2010 as the preinstalled office app on the Best Buy exclusive Asus K501J-BCN5. We were disappointed to find Office Starter 2010 instead. It includes only Word and Excel, and limited versions at that. Worse, Microsoft ads continually rotate through a small box in the lower-right corner of the apps. Office Home & Student costs $119 for full, ad-free versions of Word and Excel, plus PowerPoint and OneNote. We think a preinstalled office app is less important these days, with Google Docs continually improving and with Open Office offering Word and Excel compatibility. The other piece of software included with the Next Class program is one year of Webroot AntiVirus with Spy Sweeper 2010 protection, which costs $35 or $40 if purchased separately.

Connectivity on the Asus K501J-BCN5 is sparse. There are two USB 2.0 ports on either side of the laptop; eSATA is absent. There is a media card reader but no ExpressCard slot. VGA is your only video-out option. We would have liked to have seen HDMI, which can be found on less expensive laptops such as the Dell Inspiron iM501R-1212PBL and the HP G62-225DX. We're happy to report that unlike previous K Series models, Asus has kept bloatware to a minimum. There are a number of Asus utilities of questionable value and a Best Buy software installer, but otherwise the hard drive is relatively pristine.

The Asus K501J-BCN5 features the Intel Pentium T4500 processor, a dual-core chip clocked at 2.3GHz, an entry-level dual-core processor a rung below Intel's venerable Core 2 Duo line and a couple rungs below the Core i3 and i5 series. Budget buyers will find that it delivers more than enough muscle for general use, including heavy multitasking scenarios. Because its configuration is nearly identical to the Asus K501J-BBZ5, we weren't surprised to find the two systems finish neck and neck throughout labs testing.

As a competitive example, the K501J-BCN5 was 9 percent faster than the Pentium T4500-based HP G62-225DX on CNET Labs' multitasking benchmark, thanks in large part to its extra GB of memory (4GB to the HP's 3GB).

When you look at the $679 Toshiba Satellite A665-S6050, however, which uses a higher-end Core i3 processor, you can see the performance hit you take in order to fit the Next Class features in at this price. On our multitasking benchmark, the Asus K501J-BCN5 trailed the Satellite A665-S6050 by 21 percent.

Juice box
Asus K50IJ-BNC5 Average watts per hour
Off (60 percent) 0.41
Sleep (10 percent) 1.09
Idle (25 percent) 9.15
Load (5 percent) 37.27
Raw kWh 39.47
Annual energy cost $4.48

Annual power consumption costs

One of the tenets of Best Buy's Next Class program is lengthy battery life. The Asus K501J-BCN5 uses a 6-cell battery, though it's a higher-capacity unit, rated at 62Whr to only 46Whr on the 6-cell battery found on the cheaper Asus K501J-BBZ5. It lasted an impressive 3 hours, 31 minutes on CNET Labs' demanding video playback battery drain test, which bested the Asus K501J-BBZ5 by 37 minutes on the test. The Toshiba Satellite A665-S6050 ran an hour longer, but it uses a massive 12-cell battery.

The Asus K501J-BCN5 is backed with a standard one-year parts-and-labor warranty. Unfortunately, Asus's accidental damage warranty, which protects you against damage from fire, electrical surges, drops, and spills, does not apply to laptops purchased at Best Buy. You'll find the typical online help--FAQ and troubleshooting pages, universal driver downloads, and user forums--on the Asus support site, but we couldn't find any specific mention of any K501J models.

Multimedia multitasking test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Adobe Photoshop CS3 image-processing test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Apple iTunes encoding test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Video playback battery drain test (in minutes)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

6.2

Asus K50IJ-BNC5

Score Breakdown

Design 8Features 6Performance 4Battery 8Support 7