Asus ExpertBook B1 B1500 in review: Many ports on the business laptop

[Redaktion]

Due to its low price, Asus' ExpertBook B1 does not only seem suitable for office and business use, but also for private use. We will clarify whether this impression is true in our review.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ExpertBook-B1-B1500-in-review-Many-ports-on-the-business-laptop.580301.0.html

[ColomboGMGS2]

Well, it's a GoOoOod laptop from the outside, but it's also piece of junk with its generic drivers. I'm talkin' about the Video and Audio drivers. Formerly this thing is not that much good for late versions of premiere pro if you want to utilize Hardware acceleration. Why? the CURSE of Gen 11. The hardware acceleration for IRIS Xe on Gen 11 processors is still broken. No custom resolutions, you'll get a skinny letterbox image if you plug in some good old 4:3 CRT display to this jack-of-all-trades VGA port. This thing doesn't even try to detect the optimal resolution of any given ecternal display. All it does is simply downscaling a full 1080p60 output into a smaller resolution! Many folks suffer from QR Code generation issues when logging in to WA web due to that. Another pile of web rendering issues are yet to come. No matter what, Iris XE surpasses the dedicated MX330 so it's a must to enable HAGS. How arrogant!

Also the audio driver is the worst I've ever met. They have crammed an audio driver that's more suitable for some amateur desktop rather than a laptop. The speakers are always separated from this now new device of headphones even though all I want is to simply get rid of the built in speaker pair and switch to whatever headphones I'm using. The gain of microphones and stereo mix is too low. Due to that, I'd use a separate USB audio card to retain the gain level I needed using a separate microphone. But, Intel's stupid SST driver (that shamelessly lies on top of a heavily stripped down version of Realtek Audio) overtakes the generic USB audio driver leaving me with zero mic gain! So my workaround went on reinstalling Realtek Audio driver many times and eventually uninstalling "Intel Smart Sound Technology for USB Microphones" thingy going through Device manager. At the end of the day, whatever the software high pass filter for inbuilt speaker was gone due to this relentless driver upgrade routine of mine and that's fine by me but I'm not sure whether is it bad for the speakers themselves despite passing those so called military standard testings.

[Knuto]

So I bought more economic model B1500CEAE with i3 and no Thunderbolt port and here is my experience:
1. Dealer wrongly declared an IPS panel - it is TN WV in reality
2. Notebook is silent until the fan kicks in - than it produces high frequency unbearable sound that drives you crazy - you can only use it in quiet environment in whisper regime that heavily restrict performance
3. Keyboard backlit is a joke - it has only one really weak intensity - you can just turn it on and off - no several brightness levels that you can find even on cheaper multimedia notebooks.
4. Keyboard font is thin-line - with ridiculous backlight a true disaster in light-difficult work conditions, if you also have other than english special characters - well good luck.
Summary - I work late night, so I wanted silent laptop with IPS panel and solid keyboard backlit - instead I got ASUS ExpertBook...