ASUS ExpertBook P2451 Review

The pandemic has changed the world, now most of the professionals are working from home and their best companion is a powerful business machine. Asus brings ExpertBook P2451, a slim and light business laptop, upgrade over the previous-gen (P2440).

I have been using the ExpertBook for the past few weeks, so, herein we’ll see how it performs in the real world.

Build Quality

The notebook is built with aluminium alloy, which makes it light as well as strong. Graded with MILSPEC 810-G certification, it is durable enough to handle accidental drop and spills. It has a thin profile only 19.9mm and weight around 1.5 kg. It can be easily carried around in a bag or hand.

It got a matte finish on the top which gives a premium look and protects from fingerprints and smudges. Asus uses ErgoLift hinge that can lie back in 180 degrees.

Being the business book, it has hosts various ports. On the right, you have a MicroSD reader slot, a headphone jack, a USB A (2.0), a USB A (3.2, gen 1 type A), a VGA dock, and a Kensington lock slot. On the left, it has a power port, an RJ-45/ Ethernet socket, a USB-C (3.2 gen 2, with fast charging support), an HDMI display port, and a USB A (3.2 gen 1 type A). It is equipped with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 for wireless connectivity. Asus included a nice backlit keyboard, ergonomically designed for long working hours.

14-inch FHD display

The slim and light laptop has a 14-inch FHD screen, but that’s not meant for content creators. The screen is fine but not what a professional would like to work upon. It comes with colour accuracy (only 46% sRGB), average brightness level (~190 nits) and a contrast ratio of 70:1.

The black images go faint on it, from any angle you can try for that. Being a business laptop, it should have an FHD with wide viewing angles but again disappointing. Even if you slightly turn the screen left or right, the image goes dull.

Performance

Packed with powerful specs, the ExpertBook is a fast laptop with more than enough performance for the average professional tasks. While using the PC for more than a month, I run various applications which we typically use to perform our day-to-day tasks. No doubt, it manages all the applications perfectly without any performance lag while surfing the Internet, watching videos and playing games.

It is built to deal with even more heavy applications, thus I loaded it with various high graphics-intensive apps, including Adobe Suite. We opened two chrome browser with 10 tabs in each with applications like MS Word, Excel and Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. While operating the machine with all these applications running on the background, we didn’t notice any performance lag. We were able to switch between applications.

I used the PC to edit various images as well as videos. Also, I run some games that consume a whole lot of power, such as and games like Shadow of Mordor and Thief. Though it’s not a gaming machine, yet these games can help us to understand the real-world performance when a professional will use it with high graphics-intensive applications. The laptop did well, in terms of gaming performance as well. I didn’t see any visible lag while playing games.

Further, I opened 10 Tabs in Chrome and Mozilla, MS Word, Excel, PPT, etc, plus run Adobe Photoshop, Premiere and CS. Even then there was no noticeable performance. We edited a sample video and rendered that then switched between apps, still no performance lag. But going beyond that with two browsers with 10 tabs in each and other productivity apps, we notice a little performance lag.

Benchmarks

PassMark - 2174

CPUMark - 6943

3D Graphics Mark - 1585

PCMark 10 - 3478

Keekbench

Singlecore - 575

Multicore - 1892

The laptop has a giant 3 Cell 48W Lithium battery that provides more than 8 hours of battery backup when on moderate usage. With some heavy usage, you can get over 4 hours of battery life while with heavy graphics usage it can last for over 3 hours. While using the Imtec Battery Mark it resulted with 2 hours 30 min, which I can expect when using 100 per cent CPU.

The ExpertBook holds a webcam with physical privacy shutter as most of the new business books. It also comes with SensePoint nub that works great. The keyboard is a joy to type on, and it’s backlit. The speakers are fine, but not very loud. There’s also a fingerprint sensor.