Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'll start off by saying I've been doing IT for a living for 15 years as a systems admin. I bought this vivobook to upgrade a razer blade stealth (2016) due to it's inability to anything but extremely low impact games, and I wanted a large display. Overall satisfied with this purchase and upgrade. So, the reason I bought this over other models when looking was because it's the latest generation i7 with the "U" designator which stands for "ultra low power" at the time of this posting (April 2018) There are other higher numbered intel i7's out there in the Kaby Lake - R generation, and they will be more powerful with more cores, but more power means higher temps. I feel you as a consumer need to find a balance between power and thermals if you want a pleasant experience. This was my chosen balance, I think it fairs extremely well. In addition to the processor, the GPU I feel is in the exact same "sweet spot" of thermals vs power as the processor. The MX150 in a lot of models while more powerful than just running the integrated intel graphics and is roughly half as powerful real life performance as the 1050. The 1050ti in a lot of models is about 25% more powerful as the normal 1050 but also has a higher TDP which means more power consumption and thermals. The result, fairly demanding middle of the road games run at 60fps @ 1080 with medium settings stutter free. Exactly what I was wanting, exactly what this is. So far, the only upgrade I did was to upgrade the SSD from the 256GB SATA M.2 SSD to a 512GB PCIE NVME M.2 SSD. The one I have is a Samsung 950 PRO. It took way too much research to find out that the motherboard is capable of running on this. In the Q and A's even the manufacturer denies that it will run, saying only SATA M.2 is supported. But anyone coming across this review, can confirm NVME drives will run at full speed on at least the 17.3 version N705UD-EH76. If you do the upgrade to NVME or just wipe/reload windows, please ensure you at least get the intel drivers from ASUS support website. There are thermal framework drivers etc that if not installed will make your system fan seemingly lose it's mind at random intervals and is pretty annoying. Also annoying is how absolutely batsh*t crazy the engineering was on the construction of this. I am actually docking 1 star for something most users will probably never experience, just because of how bad it is. If you do end up taking this laptop apart, you have to not only remove the keyboard portion to do any upgrades at all, but to access the SSD slot you will also have to completely disassemble and remove the entire motherboard, which is attached on one corner to the display hinge. To make matters worse, as a tech, when you take a part machines, the 1st thing you remove is the power to limit the chance of arching power from damaging components, but in this situation, you first remove 3 ribbon cables and the HDD before you can even access the battery. Anyway, rant, but this is by far one of the worst engineered internals of a laptop I've ever worked on. I also broke the port on the ribbon connector which does not effect the functions of the cable, but it basically melted in pieces in my experienced hands, shame on you asus for cutting corners. I probably will not be digging into it again to repaste the CPU in which I originally planned on doing. The screen is nice, not fantastic, good viewing angles, decent color, nothing special, nothing bad. No excessive flex to the screen, it and the system seem rigid and feels like it should last. Keyboard also nice for typing, numberpad looks goofy because of how small it is, looks like they reused the 15in keyboard on the 17in model. Whatever, it works. The audio is excellent, not sure what people are going on about, for a laptop, the sound is rich, bass filled and loud, not tinny or shallow like most. Probably some of the best audio I've gotten a chance to own in a laptop. I don't know, I'm happy with it. Overall, the machine, when completely in 1 piece, runs like a dream. The system is extremely fast and responsive. The system externally remains cool under most office and media consumption tasks and only gets moderately warm under low / medium stress, under high stress it does get hot to the touch, but not terribly uncomfortable, the system thermally throttles like any turbo boost intel chip. The fans run audibly at low consumption and seemingly low temps, but aren't horrible or super annoying, just not ideal. Other reviewers have never had a gaming laptop apparently, this behaves in line with basically every other gaming laptop I've ever used. Pros ======== -great performance -good price/performance ratio -excellent build quality -excellent weight/thickness vs screen size Cons ======== -internal construction/layout/disassembly (OMG BAD! Shame on you ASUS!) -fan noise/RPM under low stress is too high, no way to adjust bios update did not fix either. -unclear specs (PCIE NVME is supported! Just not installed by default. No fingerprint reader) -questionable keyboard layout / size (number pad is too small/compact) UPDATE: 6 Months later and still going strong. Latest BIOS update seems to resolve the weird fan speed issues I was seening. Much more stable "active cooling ratio" no documentation on changes but it seems better anyway. I upgraded the wifi chip with a NGFF Intel wifi/BT combo card because of some dropped packets while gaming and my bluetooth audio was spotty. $25 upgrade and immediately resolved the problem with the realtek wifi. I also upgraded to a 2TB hybrid HDD because reasons... internals still hard to take apart and work around but at least those 2 parts were fairly easily accessible. Adding a star in hindsight because I feel my first review was a tad harsh, it really is a good laptop, my salty review was made almost directly after opening it up and saying "what the hell". Good job Asus, thanks.