Earlier this year AMD has refreshed its low power platform with mullins and beema. In previous generation very few vendors designed ultraportable laptops with AMD cpu. While hoping more OEM designing ultraportables with the new generation of AMD APU and SoC, today we look at Asus Vivobook U38N, a rare modern design around AMD's trinity platform.
Released in 2012, Asus U38N remains one of the very few recent AMD ultraportables. U38N is designed with ultrabook in mind, despite the term being defined by Intel so using AMD platform technically disqualifies it. Clearly it shares quite a bit design cues with Asus ultrabook lines.
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| Unscrew the bottom cover: single 2.5" SATA, no mSATA |
After removing bottom cover, one can clearly see the 2.5" 7mm SATA hard drive. U38N is equipped with 24GB SSD cache, so the hard drive should feel more snappy than a typical laptop hard drive.
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| Zoom in the single SODIMM slot |
Even though there is a single SODIMM slot, on ASUS's spec sheet it only supports up to 4GB RAM max. 2GB is soldered on board, so the SODIMM only takes 2GB RAM. It appears that ASUS really means it. An user's attempt in installing 8GB module had reportedly run into problems with Linux, which is likely due to the lack of BIOS support of such memory configurations.
On the connectivity side, it provides 3 USB 3.0 connections but dropped ethernet port. User would need a USB 3.0 to Gigabit ethernet adapter for ethernet connectivity.
Bottom line:
A flashy design that compromises upgradability and serviceability, which gives a rather short serviceable life. It should have been very easy for Asus to include 2 SODIMM slots in the design without any impact to its thinness and weight, which could then support a max of 16GB RAM and extend U38N's usable life a lot longer. Soldering RAM and limiting total RAM to 4GB is typical bad sport of modern ultrabook designs.
Score card:
Upgradability: 2/10
Serviceability: 4/10
Portability: 8/10
Connectivity: 7/10
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