Who says you have to spend £1500 on a high-performance laptop?
The new Asus VivoBook Pro N552VW is a mid-range laptop with some pretty impressive high-end components going in its favour. Although it's not specifically seen as a top of the range gaming model, it could quite easily stand toe to toe with some of the heavy-weight examples currently available.
Inside you'll find an Intel Core i7-6700HQ processor running at 2.6GHz with a turbo frequency of 3.5GHz. There's an impressive 16GB of DDR4 memory installed, along with a 128GB SSD with Windows 10 Home 64-bit preinstalled and a further 2TB mass storage hard drive.
Graphics come courtesy of an Nvidia GTX960M with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, a GPU clock speed of 1097MHz, boost clock of 1176MHz, and a memory clock of 1253MHz. It's certainly a good GPU, one that'll keep up with the vast majority of modern gaming without too much trouble.
The 15.6" QFHD display manages a maximum resolution of 3840 x 2160, which is really quite an amazing thing to behold. It's ultra-sharp and looks absolutely magnificent when you view 2K/4K content; image purists and photographers will certainly enjoy the quality of the screen. However, it can seem a little close to overkill for the most part. Although the N552VW is a good setup internally it's not really up to true 2K/4K gaming, and Windows 10 needs to scale everything up to 250% before it's readable at that resolution.
Connectivity is very good here, with three USB 3.0 ports, HDMI, mini DisplayPort, a single USB Type-С port, gigabit Ethernet, an SD card slot, and a combo audio jack. Wireless connectivity consists of 802.11 ac and Bluetooth 4.0. Interestingly, Asus has opted to include a Super-Multi DVD drive, which makes for a refreshing change in a modern laptop.
The keyboard is a standard full-sized Asus setup, if you've ever used one of the company's Vivo or ZenBooks before then you'll know what you're getting. Other than that it's a good feel, with decent travel and well spaced apart. The trackpad too is good, and supports the various Windows 10 gestures.
The design of the VivoBook Pro N552VW is equally similar to that of the other Vivo and ZenBook range. The keyboard section is a metallic grey colour with a swirling patterned speaker holes to each corner. Externally there's a slightly brown brushed aluminium lid with a thumb print kind of design to it.
It's certainly a sizeable and weighty laptop this, measuring 383 x 260 x 29.9mm and weighing 2.53kg without the power brick. You can be forgiven for leaving it at home or the office if you commute daily, unless you're in training for an Iron Man contest.
The performance of the VivoBook Pro N552VW is extremely good. There's nothing it can't handle from everyday use, and video and photo editing is a joy thanks both to the great display and the high-end processor, memory and GPU.
Surprisingly the N552VW costs around the £1000 mark, with some examples being as low as £900 depending on where you shop. This is actually a really good price for a laptop of this specification, which goes to prove you don't need to hit the £1500 mark to put yourself ahead of the crowd.
We really liked the Asus VivoBook Pro N552VW. It's a great performer, has an incredible screen and despite being a tad heavy, will keep up with you for some time to come. David Hayward
An impressive laptop with a high-end gaming spec.