ASUS X507 review – a laptop from a previous generation

So, you are browsing the Web for an affordable everyday laptop. You stumble upon the ASUS X507 and see reasonable processor options, a dedicated graphics card around the corner and… a dated design. Is it worth the purchase or you should hard pass on this one?

Well, naturally, it is our job to give you the most information we could about it, so you can make The decision. Of course, this laptop is not brand new. In fact, it is in store for quite some time now, but the sole fact that it is still offered by some retailers means that there is still interest in it.

Now, let’s see how ASUS has coped to keep the price so low on this unit. Did they make compromises with the build quality, the battery, the performance, or all of them?

You can check the prices and configurations in our Specs System: https://laptopmedia.com/series/asus-x507/

Contents


Specs Sheet

ASUS X507 - 规格

  • Innolux N156HGA-EA3 (CMN15F5)
  • 颜色精度  7.5  2.9
  • HDD/SSD
  • 以至于 1000GB SSD + 以至于 1000GB HDD
  • 内存
  • up to 8GB
  • 操作系统
  • No OS, Linux, Windows 10 Home
  • 蓄电池
  • 33Wh, 3-cell
  • 车身材料
  • Plastic / Polycarbonate
  • 外形尺寸
  • 365 x 266 x 21.9 mm (14.37" x 10.47" x 0.86")
  • 重量
  • 1.68 kg (3.7 lbs)
  • 端口和连接性
  • 1x USB Type-A
  • 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps)
  • 2x USB Type-A
  • 2.0
  • HDMI
  • 读卡器
  • microSD (SD/SDHC/SDXC)
  • Wi-Fi
  • 蓝牙
  • 音频插孔
  • combo audio / microphone jack
  • 特点
  • 指纹识别器
  • 网络摄像机
  • VGA
  • 背光键盘
  • 麦克风
  • 扬声器
  • 2x 2W
  • 光驱
  • 安全锁槽

全部 ASUS X507 配置

#CommissionsEarned

What’s in the box?

Expectedly, the package contains only the laptop, itself, as well as a 65W charger and some paper manuals.


Design and construction

When it came out, the X507 had a very interesting design feature. The backside of the base is risen, which makes it look like a skateboard ramp. Some people like it, some people don’t, but it is what it is. Unsurprisingly, the entire body of the device is made out of plastic. Also, the plastic is not of the highest quality, which makes the laptop not very sturdy, and by no means carry this notebook by its lid – you are most certainly going to break the fragile hinges. On the bright side, the plastic all around makes the laptop extremely light – 1.68 kg. It is also relatively thin at 21.9 mm.

Quite frankly, the design is not that bad, as the lid cover has a brushed metal finish (on the plastic). However, you won’t be able to open it with a single hand. By the way, the side bezels are surprisingly thin, given the dated design.

Now let’s move to the base. Its fabric-like finish on the palm-rest area sits in contrast to the circular embossment on the keyboard deck, for a very weird combination. As of the keyboard, there is no illumination, and the material on the keycaps is low-quality. However, the key travel is decent and the feedback is clicky. As is the touchpad, with its great gliding and somewhat good tracking.

On the bottom plate, there are two speaker cut-outs, a tiny ventilation grill, and half of the exhaust grill. Also, here you’ll find the service lid, but more on that – later.

Ports

On the left side, there is the power plug, two USB Type-A ports (one 2.0 and one 3.1 (Gen. 1)), an HDMI connector, a MicroSD card reader, an HDMI connector, and an Audio Jack. On the other side… only a single USB Type-A 2.0 port.


Disassembly, upgrade options and maintenance

Similarly to the ASUS VivoBook K570, the X507 is one of the difficult laptops to disassemble. However, ASUS made sure that you rarely need to open it up, by putting a service door that hides the memory modules. If you need to get to the storage, on the other side, you will have a hard time.

First, remove the rest of the screws you see on the bottom panel. Then, turn the laptop on its feet and pry the keyboard deck. Be careful because there are two ribbon cables, you need to remove before you can lift the deck away.

After this, you can immediately see the 2.5″ SATA drive bay. You are not done yet, though. The next thing that would be the best to remove is the display. Unscrew the hinges, and unplug the WLAN card connector, and you’re done.

Now, for your convenience, you can check the video guide we made, as it shows the exact locations of all screws, you need to further remove. Keep in mind that you have to take the motherboard out, before removing the 33Wh battery.

Now, that you’ve successfully managed to extract the motherboard from the chassis, you can upgrade your M.2 SSD. By the way, there is something interesting about the cooler. It lacks heat pipes. Instead, it uses two heat spreaders (one each for the CPU and the GPU), that are made out of copper and have pretty large fins, so that air can pass through them and dissipate the heat. Additionally, there is a channel on the bottom plate that directs the airflow. Sadly, as we saw on the ASUS X512, this is not the greatest cooling solution you’ll find there. Perhaps it’s cheaper?


Display quality

ASUS X507 is equipped with a Full HD TN panel with a model number Innolux N156HGA-EA3 (CMN15F5) – the same found on the Aspire 3 (A315-34). Its diagonal is 15.6″ (39.62 cm), and the resolution 1920 х 1080 pixels. The screen ratio is 16:9, and we are looking at a pixel density of – 142 ppi, and a pitch of 0.18 х 0.18 mm. The screen turns into Retina when viewed at distance equal to or greater than 60cm (24″) (from this distance one’s eye stops differentiating the separate pixels, and it is normal for looking at a laptop).

As expected from a TN panel – the viewing angles are terrible. We offer images at 45° to evaluate image quality.

The measured maximum brightness of 247 nits in the middle of the screen and 231 nits as an average for the whole area, with a maximum deviation of 13%. The Correlated Color Temperature on a white screen is 6000K – warmer than the optimal for the sRGB standard of 6500K.
In the illustration below you can see how the display performs from a uniformity perspective. In other words, the leakage of light from the light source.

Values of dE2000 over 4.0 should not occur, and this parameter is one of the first you should check if you intend to use the laptop for color-sensitive work. The contrast ratio is mediocre – 310:1.

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction to the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors, etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

The yellow dotted line shows ASUS X507’s color gamut coverage.

Its display covers 53% of the sRGB/ITU-R BT.709 (web/HDTV standard) in CIE1976.

Our “Design and Gaming” profile delivers optimal color temperature (6500K) at 140 cd/m2 luminance and sRGB gamma mode.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange, etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Design and Gaming” profile.

Below you can compare the scores of ASUS X507 with the default settings (left), and with the “Gaming and Web design” profile (right).

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle, and the surrounding light conditions.

Response time (Gaming capabilities)

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and vice versa.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 15 ms.


PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses, the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

ASUS X507’s display uses PWM to adjust its brightness up until 64 nits. Additionally, the flickers have a very high frequency, which makes it comfortable for long use periods in this aspect.

Blue light emissions

Installing our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

Conclusion

ASUS X507’s TN panel has a Full HD resolution, quick reaction time and a comfortable backlight in terms of PWM. Sadly, it has very poor viewing angles, horrendous contrast ratio and modest color coverage to top it off.

Buy our profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for ASUS X507 configurations with 15.6″ FHD TN Innolux N156HGA-EA3 (CMN15F5).

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].

Read more about the profiles HERE.

除了获得高效和健康友好的配置文件,购买LaptopMedia的产品,您还可以支持我们实验室的发展,我们在实验室测试设备,以产生最客观的评论。

办公室工作

Office Work应该主要由那些花大部分时间看文本、表格或仅仅是浏览的用户使用。该配置文件旨在通过保持平坦的伽玛曲线(2.20)、本机色温和精确的色彩来提供更好的清晰度。

设计与游戏

本资料针对专业处理色彩的设计师,以及游戏和电影。设计与游戏》将显示面板发挥到了极致,使其在白点D65的网页和高清电视的sRGB IEC61966-2-1标准中尽可能准确。

卫生保健

Health-Guard消除了有害的脉宽调制(PWM),并减少了影响我们的眼睛和身体的负蓝光。 由于它是针对每个面板量身定制的,因此可以保持色彩在视觉上的准确性。 Health-Guard模拟纸张,因此大大减轻了眼睛的压力。

以33%的折扣获得所有3份资料


Sound

Despite its low price, the ASUS X507 has pretty decent speakers. Not only the entire frequency range is clear of deviations, but it also has a quite high maximum volume.


Drivers

All of the drivers and utilities for this notebook can be found here: https://www.asus.com/Laptops/ASUS-Laptop-X507UA/HelpDesk_Download/

Battery

Now, we conduct the battery tests with Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with. There is a 33Wh battery unit inside this machine.

We extracted around 7 hours and a half of Web browsing and almost 6 hours of video playback from it.


CPU options

Ultimately, this is a laptop with a very wide price range. It comes with processors like the Celeron N4000/N4100, Pentium 4417U, Pentium Silver N5000, Core i3-6006U, Core i5-8250U, Core i7-7500U… We would bet that depending on the region, there will be more options.


GPU options

As of the graphics solutions, in addition to the integrated chips, there are the NVIDIA GeForce MX110 and MX130, both equipped with 2GB of GDDR5 memory.


Temperatures and comfort

Max CPU load

In this test we use 100% on the CPU cores, monitoring their frequencies and chip temperature. The first column shows a computer’s reaction to a short load (2-10 seconds), the second column simulates a serious task (between 15 and 30 seconds), and the third column is a good indicator of how good the laptop is for long loads such as video rendering.

Average core frequency (base frequency + X); CPU temp.

Intel Core i5-8265U (15W TDP)0:02 – 0:10 sec0:15 – 0:30 sec10:00 – 15:00 min
ASUS X5072.51 GHz (B+87%) @ 72°C2.44 GHz (B+53%) @ 94°C1.89 GHz (B+18%) @ 79°C
ASUS X5092.56 GHz (B+60%) @ 75°C2.33 GHz (B+46%) @ 97°C1.95 GHz (B+22%) @ 94°C
Lenovo Ideapad L340 (15″)3.27 GHz (B+104%)@ 72°C1.99 GHz (B+24%)@ 60°C2.01 GHz (B+26%)@ 65°C
ASUS VivoBook S15 S5322.96 GHz (B+85%) @ 75°C2.95 GHz (B+84%) @ 90°C2.17 GHz (B+36%) @ 68°C
Lenovo ThinkBook 13s2.76 GHz (B+73%)@ 75°C2.74 GHz (B+71%)@ 84°C2.11 GHz (B+32%)@ 74°C
Lenovo ThinkPad T490s3.43 GHz (B+114%)@ 91°C2.69 GHz (B+68%)@ 91°C2.19 GHz (B+37%)@ 80°C
HP ProBook 450 G62.69 GHz (B+59%)@ 64°C2.53 GHz (B+60%)@ 68°C2.09 GHz (B+31%)@ 71°C

A hot, hot CPU we have here. It was no secret that this laptop’s cooling is not the greatest out there, but the results from the chart above solidify the proof.

Real-life gaming

NVIDIA GeForce MX130GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 2 min)GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 30 min)
ASUS X5071006 MHz @ 81°C980 MHz @ 81°C
Dell Inspiron 14 5482 2-in-1993 MHz @ 69°C901 MHz @ 69°C

When we take a look at the graphics card, the things get from bad to worse – 81C on this low-power GPU is just pathetic, isn’t it?

Comfort during combined load

Thanks to the layout of the components inside, you are left with a relatively warm left side and very cool right side of the X507. While 41-2C is not too much, you could clearly tell the difference between the sides, especially, as the fan sucks air from the gaps in the keyboard.


Verdict

A weird, weird notebook we had here. Three or four different finishes around its body, different colors on the top, bottom and base. The lifted backside of the base, which makes it look like Quasimodo the hunchback of Notre Dame. But yet, it is still offered with Kaby Lake-R processors and optional dedicated graphics card.

Let’s start with the downsides. One of them is cooling. Instead of putting the conventional heat pipe – to heat spreader type, ASUS has gone for a heat spreader-only solution. There is one for both the CPU and the GPU and they are presumably made out of copper. While this sounds good, as they both are independent of one another, this results in an immediate heat up. For example, when playing games, it takes around 10 seconds for the graphics card to reach 80C and start throttling.

By the way, if you want to see the cooling on your own device, you need to fully disassemble your laptop. Yes, there are two RAM slots hidden beneath a service lid, for speedy upgrades, but the M.2 slot is on the bottom side of the motherboard. Petty.

Next, there is the build quality, which is sadly nothing spectacular. Plastic all around, which also happens to be a not very good quality one.

On the bright side, the battery life is semi-decent with 7 hours and a half of Web browsing and around 6 hours of video playback. Certainly, it won’t last you through a business day, but frankly, this is no laptop for work either.

ASUS X507’s TN panel has a Full HD resolution, quick reaction time and a comfortable backlight in terms of PWM. Sadly, it has very poor viewing angles, horrendous contrast ratio and modest color coverage to top it off.

All things aside, you might be better of checking the ASUS X509, before deciding on buying. It has a lot of better design, which is more orthodox and far sleeker.

Pros

  • Very affordable
  • Decent battery life
  • Service lid for RAM upgrades
  • Doesn’t use aggressive PWM for brightness adjustment (Innolux N156HGA-EA3 (CMN15F5))


Cons

  • Heats up quite rapidly during heavy load
  • TN panel has naturally poor viewing angles (Innolux N156HGA-EA3 (CMN15F5))
  • Poor contrast ratio and only 53% of sRGB color coverage (Innolux N156HGA-EA3 (CMN15F5))
  • Cheap build quality
  • You have to do a lot of work to get to the M.2 storage slot

You can check the prices and configurations in our Specs System: https://laptopmedia.com/series/asus-x507/

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Sebastian
Sebastian
2 年 之前

They got rid of the access-ports for RAM in their X507UB-model. I have one and can confirm all the negatives you listed here (especially the lack of cooling), but the service-lid is not a thing in some models and in around 2 years my battery life is less than half of what it used to be. Changing the battery will be a nightmare, as was changing the SSD. The screen also had to be repaired once by now (backlight did no longer work). From personal experience: Cannot recommend this laptop. What it saves in purchasing cost, it easily costs when… Read more »