Gaming Tablet | ASUS Transformer 3 Pro | Review

This Article is about Asus Transformer 3 Pro . Now, it looks very similar to the Surface lineup and particularly the Surface Pro 4 It's obviously been inspired by that lineup, but this is one big difference. 

ASUS TRANSFORMER 3 Pro

This device has a Thunderbolt 3 port so it allows external GPU connections. Now, as of right now, this is the only tablet that allows that. 

Future Surface products and future tablets might allow it, but right now, this is the only one. In terms of its build, it feels pretty similar to the Surface Pro 4. 

Click To Check Surface Pro 4 on Amazon

Glass upfront, magnesium shell, The kickstand on the back can be adjusted to any position. It's stiff. It will hold its position, but I'm not sure about long-term durability.  The mechanism looks like it works through friction between two metal parts and I don't know if it will wear down over time, but it's been working great for the past couple of months so, yeah, I think it should be okay. 

Using it as a tablet, it feels pretty comfortable to use. It's a different shape from the Surface products - those kind of have a bevel on the edge. This doesn't have that. It's a different feel, but it's still very comfortable to use. 

Now, I prefer to using these 2-in-1 devices with the detachable keyboards, I find that... I mean there are devices that have the flip-around keyboards, like the Yoga products and the new XPS 13. I mean this is just personal preference, but I like being able to use my tablet one hand without feeling the bottom of the keyboard underneath. I like that. Some people are going to be different. It's just a matter of personal preference. 

Port selection on tablets is never amazing. On one side you have your standard Micro-SD slot and a volume rocker and on the other side, we have USB 3, HDMI port and that Thunderbolt 3 port. This model  includes a stylus and the attachable keyboard. The Surface Pro 4 has a slightly stronger connection - I think with the magnets are stronger, but this is still pretty secure.

The keyboard is backlit. It has a great layout, like, I wouldn't change a thing on it considering the smaller real- estate it has to work with. You can have it go flat or you can have it tilted on an angle. Both are comfortable to use. It's actually really comfortable to use on your lap as well.

Everything feels solid. The typing experience is good - not amazing. Decent key-travel, but the keys are a little softer or just spongier that I'd like it to be. And when you close it, there's no magnets on the other end to keep it closed like on Surface products. The track-pad can be better. It uses Windows precision drivers so I had high hopes. 

It's glass and the texture is good, but the cursor jumps around sometimes. Not often, but enough for it to be a little bit annoying. I don't think it's hardware - I think a software update would fix it but as of right now, in early January 2017, it's still an issue. The stylus feels really similar, if not identical to the stylus for Surface products.

It doesn't attach magnetically, though, so you've got to bring it around with you like a regular pen. The screen is 12.6", 2880X1920 - pretty high res. There's letter boxing in most videos, because of the aspect ratio. That's just the nature of tablet screens. It has very good color gamut and color accuracy out of the box.

It's not as bright as I feel like it could be or should be. I mean, it's bright for a laptop, but because it's a tablet as well, I kind of feel that in some environments, like if you're outdoors, it can feel a little dim. It's running a Skylake CPU. You can get it in either an i5 or an i7, both with Intel HD 520 graphics 16GB of RAM and solid-state drives. The 512GB drive in my unit isn't particularly fast. I think it's a SATA drive, but I have seen units with newer manufacturing dates that had NVMe drives in them. 

You can't upgrade the RAM or the drive. I mean, you can configure it at purchase but you can't open it up and upgrade it yourself. Performance for regular use is good. It feels pretty snappy, particularly with the i7. Now, if you stress this thing hard, like on benchmarks, or if you want to edit videos, there is noticeable CPU throttling, and gaming performance on the integrated HD 520 isn't that good.

But when you connect it to an external GPU using the Thunderbolt 3 port, that is where this thing shines. So, if you're not familiar with an external GPU, it's a box, and you basically stick a desktop-grade GPU in there so anything from NVIDIA and AMD, and then you get desktop GPU capabilities in your device.

So, the Asus Transformer 3 Pro was originally designed to work with the ASUS XG Station 2. That's not out, yet. It will be soon, but in the meantime, it actually works quite well with the Razer core. You've got to install some Thunderbolt 3 drivers and you need to get some software to run the whole Razer Synapse thing, but, it works. Depending on the card you put in here, you can get some amazing performance. It's a pretty standard performance drop - around 10% to 15% less than a desktop because of the Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth limitations, but it's still good. 

Remember, though - that performance drop - that 10% to 15% number is only if you're using an external monitor. If you don't want to use a monitor and you want to pipe it back to the display on the Transformer 3 Pro, you'll lose even more performance. We're looking at 20% to 25%. And, if you're curious, that Thunderbolt 3 cable will power and charge the tablet, so it's a pretty sweet setup.

Something like Overwatch doesn't have great performance on the integrated HD 520, but I connected a GTX 1080 and you can get some ridiculously good frame rates. One thing to keep in mind: this is a 2-core CPU. There's plenty of games that will run great on a 2-core CPU, but there are games that are more CPU-dependent that would do better on a quad-core. So you've got to research your game if you want specific benchmarks. Now, in terms of a GPU recommendation, because this is a 2-core CPU and because it doesn't get to clock full speed because of the CPU throttling, I'd recommend maybe a GTX 1060 or even a GTX 980 if, you know, your budget is a little bit lower.

But you don't want to just spend money on a card that you can't really make proper use of. VR also had problems working. I tried connecting an HTC Vive - had issues. I'm not sure if it's like because like a port limitations - there is only one USB port on the tablet. The keyboard is actually not bad for gaming.

It's kind of strange because it's not even a real keyboard. It's a keyboard cover. I mean it's not going to cut it for a 400 APM Starcraft player, but it's a very usable keyboard for games. There's an exhaust up top. It doesn't interfere when you're playing games, but if you're using some more demanding applications, while you're holding it in Portrait as a tablet, it gets pretty warm up there.

The fans don't spin when it's idle, but when it kicks in, it's audible. It's not super annoying or super loud or anything, but you'll know when it's on. Speakers are up front - Harman Kardon-branded, but they're very average-sounding. They don't get too loud and the bass is pretty weak.

The front webcam is 1080p and it has infrared, so it supports Windows Hello for login, which is pretty cool. The back camera is 13MP. It doesn't look great, but I doubt many people are going to use this anyways so, whatever. Battery life on this thing is relatively short.

It's a 39WA battery. Normal use - like, doing work - we're getting around 5 hours of life with the screen at 250 nits. Watching movies, you'll get around 3.5 hours, which is enough to finish most movies, but for a tablet, the battery life is definitely on the lower end of the spectrum.

Now, overall, I really like this setup. I don't think that this particular model, like the Transformer 3 Pro, is the perfect version of this, particularly the battery life, but this is the only one you could do it on right now. I love the fact that it's a tablet when you want it to be. You can connect a keyboard when you want to type or just go ham on a keyboard. You have an external GPU if you want to play games. It's a super modular system. I think this is a really good direction for mobile computing. 

ASUS TRANSFORMER 3 PRO

Want to buy Nintendo Switch [ 2017] ? | Before You Buy, Get Review on Everything You NEED to Know!

Since the inception of the Wii Nintendo has gone down a different design paths with its consoles rather than wage a war of processing power with Microsoft and Sony the company sought to fundamentally rethink hardware.

Nintendo switch continues this out-of-the-box thinking with its hybrid form factor. 

After using it for a week I'm glad to say that the hardware has a lot of potential and makes strong return to form for the company like the Wii-U gamepad before the switch offers a 6.2 inch touchscreen with a joy con controllers attached. 

Its frame make it significantly smaller than the gamepad. All the dimensions of the display of the same the switches screen look far better it's bright glossy 1280 x 720 p screen certainly isn't the sharpest panel on the market but it offers a moderate 236.8 pixel per inch density above the touch screen. 

The switch houses its power button, volume rocker, game card slot and 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. 

Under the device that there's a USBC power port on the back of the unit, there's a kickstand that you can pull out this also reveals the micro SD card slot underneath the kickstand itself only offers one angle it also feels a bit flimsy. 

I tested the neon red and blue switch variant have to say that the joy conflict surprisingly bright and charming in person it's easy to attach the joy constants which they generate a very satisfying snap when you slide them in place removing them requires a little more care as you need to press down on a small button on the back of both controllers to release them left and right icons are somewhat myriad forms of each other both controllers offer face and directional buttons along with a joystick the sticks themselves are pretty short and can't match the travel distance of Microsoft solution but they are much taller than the Nintendo Ds's sticks and are serviceable. 

Whereas the Wii–U gamepad looked and felt a bit like a fisher-price the switch feels sturdy overall, this is even more impressive when you consider that at 0.9 nine pounds with the joint controls attached the switch is slightly lighter than the gamepad having spent several hours playing with the switch on the go.

I can say that it never felt uncomfortably heavy the switch is also more portable than I imagined with a icons attached to the device can fit into large pants pockets though will most likely jut out a little. 

The switch is ideally suited for backpacks but on some loose fitting slacks get most likely get away with putting both joy conned into one pocket and the console into the other. 

when you want to play the switch on your TV you need to insert it into the included switch dock fitting the switch on the TV you'll probably want to connect the joint controllers to include grip peripheral which feels surprisingly comfortable and ergonomic underneath the hood switch uses a heavily customized Nvidia Tegra system-on-a-chip that's based on the arm instruction set.

In layman's terms that basically means the console uses a souped-up tablet processor because the switches based on a mobile SOC it's not a processing powerhouse legend of Zelda breath of the wild they are jag is an occasional frame rate dips when the console is docked and rendering the game at 900p intends to dips when it's too much happening on the screen.

Interestingly, I didn't notice the same performance issue when I played Zelda on-the-go this is not to say that the switch is incapable of delivering beautiful graphics despite its occasional technical hiccups, birth of the wild is a beautiful game with lush colors and expensive vistas. 

It's far and away the most beautiful game I’ve ever seen rendered on a mobile processor the switch uses a tiny fan and it's super quiet and never got obscenely hot either switches power efficient design is most likely white steps are so moderate switch comes with 32 GB of storage when you factor in operating system overhead this leaves you with 25.9 gigabytes of usable space, that's not a lot but the concept does support expandable memory via micro SD cards up to 2 TB. 

For its battery the switch user rechargeable 4310 milliamp hour lithium-ion cell this is a pretty big battery and it's more than double the size of an iPhone 7 solution.  

The switch can last over six hours depending on usage. For Zelda the company says users should expect around three hours of battery life.

For my testing this seems pretty accurate the system sleep mode itself seems to be very power efficient.

After a full charge I took the switch out of the dock and set it aside for 5 hours when I woke it up it's still reported a hundred percent charge as it is right now the operating system is very simple and bare bones currently there is no video player Nintendo said that video streaming applications are being considered for a future update.

At the moment the OS allows you to do simple things like calibrate your control sticks that's your internet connection and want to airplane mode and attendance which feels like the culmination of years of hard work growing pains from both Nvidia and Nintendo unlike the Wii-U gamepad you no longer have to worry about being tethered to your TV because the switch has all the processing power insupportable form factor it really allows you to carry console power with you wherever you go.

The switch isn't perfect but it offers multiple ways to play games all of which are viable as silly as the commercials may seem I can definitely see myself bringing the switch to social gatherings as much as I can see myself playing Zelda sitting alone in front of my TV.

You can find more powerful consoles like the ps4 and Xbox one for cheaper than 300 or switch you’re paying for the form factor here.

There's something special about being able to play breadth of the wild on the big screen in the living room and then continue where you left off outside.

Should you make the switch the answer should largely depend on whether you think the system's library of games will satisfy your needs?

A Nintendo has undoubtedly laid the groundwork for a great gaming device.

Check this Nintendo Switch on Amazon :

Nintendo Switch