It's always fun to check out

the $5,000 laptops of the world,

but in reality, this is what you should buy.

At $500, this ASUS Vivobook F510UA,

which is a wonderful, easy-to-remember name,

has a lot going for it.

Inside, there's an Intel 8th Generation Core i5 8250U,

and that's kind of a big deal at this kind of price point.

These new U series processors

are a huge step up in performance,

and it's really nice to see them trickle down

to even fairly affordable laptops like this.

With a full quad-core CPU on board,

you're getting so much better performance

than any kind of older budget option.

That Core i5 can boost up to 3.4 gigahertz,

which should be more than enough

performance for most people.

The only real downside is that you're not going to have

any kind of dedicated graphics for gaming,

but if that's something you're interested in,

the Acer Aspire 5, which I've talked about many, many times,

is going to a better option.

Remove a few screws on the back of the laptop,

and you're going to get access to, well,

basically everything you might want, including the memory,

which is going to come with eight gigs by default,

but it's going to be super-easy to upgrade that to 16 gigs,

assuming you didn't have to pay $90

to pick up another stick of RAM,

but, I mean, the option's there.

The base model of the laptop, which is what I have here,

is going to run you $510 on Amazon.

Now that's going to get you

a standard one terabyte mechanical hard drive,

but there's also going to be an empty M.2 slot

if you want to upgrade with an SSD.

Now interestingly, Amazon actually does sell

another SKU of this laptop

which just has that SSD installed.

It's going to be 128 gigs

as well as the one terabyte hard drive.

It's going to cost you $600.

That doesn't sound crazy,

except that you can actually do it yourself

for a lot cheaper, which is exactly what I did.

This is a 128-gigabyte ADATA SSD

that I was able to pick up for just under $40.

Now if you don't mind opening up the laptop

and reinstalling Windows,

it's going to be an easy way of saving yourself 50 bucks

if you want the extra speed.

And trust me, if you're buying this laptop,

spend the extra $40.

It is going to be so, so much faster.

With the SSD upgrade paired with that eight gigs of RAM

as well as quad-core CPU,

you're looking at a very reasonably powerful computer,

especially considering the price.

Now I know especially when it gets

into creative applications such as video editing,

that's going to make this a lot more usable.

I know especially if it was me a few years ago

when I was first starting out,

I would've absolutely killed to have a laptop like this

that was going to be so cheap.

While we've got the laptop opened,

you'll also be able to see the Wi-Fi card,

which is not only easy to upgrade if you ever want to,

but it's a pretty solid card in itself.

You're going to be getting dual-band AC Wi-Fi,

and that speaks to a lot of my thoughts on this laptop.

The ASUS engineers did a good job

of picking a pretty solid list of components,

and they didn't really cut any major corners

with the laptop design.

The only real issue here

is actually going to be with the battery life.

With only a 42 watt-hour cell,

it's going to give you a decent battery life.

ASUS claims about eight hours,

and while that's going to be a little bit ambitious,

it could be better, especially considering that

there's all this space up here

which could totally be used for battery,

although I assume that that's probably

for some higher-end version

where they would stick the dedicated GPU.

At this price, the design is going to be all plastic,

and that's not really necessarily going to be a bad thing.

It's pretty well-built.

There's going to be a little bit of screen flex,

but there's not a whole lot if you actually go ahead

and press down the keyboard.

It is a fairly well-built laptop.

Port-wise, it's a good selection.

You're going to be getting three USB-A ports,

a USB-C, as well as HDMI, a headphone jack,

and an SD card reader.

If you're not catching the trend yet,

it's not going to be spectacular,

but there's really no corners cut.

It's going to be a good selection

of pretty much everything you need.

Like most laptops in 2018,

you are going to be getting a Windows Precision Touchpad.

As you expect, it works well, there's solid tracking,

and you're also going to be getting

support for all the different Windows gestures.

Essentially at this point,

most of these Windows Precision Touchpads

are going to be very equivalent.

There's going to be minor differences

in the actual surface area and stuff,

but it's going to be totally fine

and so much better than old-school trackpads.

A really nice touch is the addition

of a fingerprint sensor built into the trackpad.

Now I'm not a huge fan of the positioning.

It's going to get a little bit in your way here,

but the good thing is is that it's going to have

full support for Windows Hello,

which makes logging in much, much simpler.

Honestly, this is something I like to see on any laptop,

so it's especially nice to see it

on something that's going to be so affordable.

The keyboard is going to be classic ASUS,

so it's going to have a fairly light touch

without a lot of feel, but importantly,

they completely nailed not only the layout,

but also the spacing between the keys.

Now it would be nice to see some backlighting,

but again, we're talking about a $500 laptop here.

While it might not look impressive on paper,

the display on this guy is actually pretty nice.

It is a 15.6-inch panel with a 1920 by 1080p resolution.

Now that resolution might not sound all that impressive,

but especially when you put it

compared to other laptops in this price range,

especially a lot of the Acer panels,

this is going to look so much better.

It might not be the brightest thing in the world,

but the color and especially the contrast

are a lot better than what you would expect

at this sort of price point,

and that even includes the bezel.

Even though it's going to be a 15.6-inch display,

the actual overall footprint of the laptop

is actually pretty small.

- But it's not exactly going to be the best solution in the world.

- What's also not the best solution in the world

are going to be the speakers.

So they sound okay,

but they especially get tinny at higher volumes,

and a lot of that is because

not only are they not all impressive in the first place,

but they're also going to be on the underside of the laptop,

which means that you should probably

just get a pair of headphones.

At around $500, this really does feel like

a solid sweet spot.

Spend even $100 less, and you're going to be

seriously sacrificing on performance,

whereas when you start to spend more,

you're going to get nicer things

like build quality and stuff,

but you're not going to see

any kind of massive performance gains

until you get into a much more expensive system.

The main thing is, though,

is that you should definitely upgrade with the SSD.

It's going to make a huge difference

over the stock hard drive, but beyond that,

there's no wonder that so many people

are picking this guy up on Amazon.