Scott Wingo Business: Micro Express NB5720 notebook review: Performance isn't always pretty

The thin-and-light Ultrabook trend has even clunky laptops looking relatively sleek these days. Micro Express’ NB5720 is far from a sexy, stylish Ultrabook, but it looks pretty good for a boxy, half-plastic laptop.

If you’re looking for style, look elsewhere. But if you place power, performance, and price over prettiness, the $1599 NB5720 is definitely worth a look. It’s not a total eyesore—it boasts a smooth, slate-gray, brushed-aluminum cover with tapered edges and a minimalist keyboard deck. But it’s nearly as thick as a brick—1.68 inches—and it weighs more than several: 5.75 pounds. That’s a lot of bulk paired with a 15.6-inch screen.

The NB5720 has a great collection of components, but it's more than twice as thick as the typical Ultrabook and weighs nearly 6 pounds.

But when you’re looking for a no-excuses laptop, what’s under the hood is what really matters, and the NB5720 doesn’t disappoint on that score. You’ll find one of Intel’s best fourth-generation Core processors onboard, for starters (the 2.8GHz, Hyper-Threading–enabled Core i7-4900MQ). That’s supplemented by 16GB of DDR3/1600 memory and a discrete Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M graphics card. Storage comes in the form of a 256GB SSD, plus a 750GB hard drive that spins its platters at 7200 rpm.

As you might expect, this notebook burrowed through the bulk of our benchmark suite like a woodchuck preparing for a honeymoon, producing a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 483. That renders it nearly five times faster than our reference notebook, the Asus VivoBook S550CA, which has a more humble dual-core, hyper-threaded, 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U processor (from Intel’s Ivy Bridge family).

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2044474/micro-express-nb5720-notebook-review-performance-isnt-always-pretty.html#tk.rss_laptopcomputers

click here for more info visit this site link website