[Part 1 - ASUS R400, The Challenger]

When it comes to buying laptops, many consumers are simply mislead by many things, they do not know what exactly they want and what will fulfill their needs. Instead, something like this pops out first: "but I thought Apple wus awsum!". In fact, it all depends on what you want to do with the laptop, if you are aiming at games, spending more on the GPU will benefit. If you seek more performance with office works or image rendering like Photoshop, a better CPU is ideal. Note that in the laptop, computer, and electronics market in general, higher price isn't necessarily implying better performance (yes apple). It is crucial to make decisions carefully when buying them, you can get easily scammed, or end up with unbalanced performance that some you don't even need. Furthermore, improvements, generations, advancements all happen too quickly when it comes to technology, yes, the latest hardware are usually best for the money. What I mean is, do not buy anything old unless the prices are really really cheap, like that 0.5 dollar pentium 4 chip. The laptop I will recommend you today is known for its versatile performance, a quality overlooked by many, and thus, it is not popular, and therefore, cheap for its premise. There is always a lingering false impression on consumers that laptops with bigger screens are better, and this is mainly caused by them being more expensive. The 15.6 to 17.3 inch laptops are not always better, they may look professional, but much of their high costs are spent on the excess size and battery consumption. Anyways, the ASUS R400 I will recommend has a 14'' screen and 2.4kg weight, a smaller laptop than average. And it will solve the problems that have been troubling us for centuries! Like And here it is, yea, all laptops look pretty much the same: It's Asus, and we all know that the Taiwanese manufacturer makes horrible batteries, they claim that this laptop will last 4 to 5 hours but it's really just 3 and a half hour, don't let them fool you. About the price, since I live in China, I will use the chinese currency as the standard for comparison, 1 dollar is about 6.14 yuan right now. Just keep that in mind. The laptop is going to cost 4999 RMB in retail, you'd rather shop online and the sellers will offer you a better price, but usually about 4700 RMB. It's on the medium level, in fact, you can see it's price corresponds exactly to that of an iPad 3 (64GB) its performance however, is far above what its price implies. Usually laptops this price are aimed at casual spenders, a 4 to 5 thousand yuan laptop for general purpose in a family. But this one proves to be different, far different. The Specifications: Price: 4999 RMB CPU: Intel Core i7-3610QM GPU: Nvidia GT 630M, Intel HD Graphics 4000 RAM: 4GB DDR3-1600MHz Hard Disk: 500GB (7200RPM SATA) OS: Windows 7 Home 64-Bit You see what I mean by versatile performance, usually a quad core i7 is found in those behemoth laptops that weight like watermelons! And this is what they look like: But this laptop is, instead, enforcing mobility and practical use. The i7s ending with 'QM' are on the top of the mobile CPU hierarchy, the QM stands for Quad Core Mobile, yes, extremely powerful, this is almost reaching the limit, even the fastest mobile CPUs today can't go much faster. I will explain this in more detail when we compare the CPU Performances. Now the GT 630 is a high end general purpose GPU for laptop, above it are those gaming aimed GPUs which costs a whole lot more. But even with GT 630 we can play most 20GB PC games at decent frame rates in medium quality settings. The 4GB RAM with the 2GB dedicated GPU RAM is enough for most everyday tasks, and with a quad core i7, it can theorectically have 4 dolphins running Xenoblade Chronicles simultaneously each at 80% speed with little or no lagging. Well don't be surprised, the desktop version of the 3rd gen i7, the i7-3770K can run 10 World of Warcraft (yes, the whole game) at the same time easily. That said, you can expect this laptop to take down most people's especially when it's so cheap! Oh, portability, you can also carry this around and treat it like an iPod! I bet most people's laptops can't do that Sounds good doesn't it. But the story hasn't even begun yet. We have contestants from all types of mobile devices at various price ranges ready to face this challenger head-on! Yes, we will be comparing this to the MacBook Pros and Samsung Slate Tablets running Windows 8, HP Ultrabooks and Dell i5s. We'll then summarize its advantages and weaknesses. [Part 1 - ASUS R400, The Challenger] [Part 2 - The Representative Contestants From Each Family] [Part 3 - CPU, The Battle For Overall Performance] [Part 4 - RAM, Disk Space, and Side Determinants] [Part 5 - GPU and What We Care The Most: Mobile Gaming] [Part 6 - Conclusions, ASUS Worthy or Not?]