Asus U46E-BAL6

The Asus U46E-BAL6 has an excellent keyboard and a well-designed frame, and comes packed with a fast processor, ample connectivity features--WiMax and USB 3.0 included--and plenty of hard-drive space and RAM for an aggressive price.

The bad: The laptop doesn't have dedicated graphics, and the battery life is good, but we've seen better.

The bottom line: A strong design, tons of features, and plenty of performance make the Asus U46E-BAL6 one of the best 14-inch laptops we've seen all year.

In an era of thin laptops and Ultrabooks, to be thin is starting to feel like less of a novelty and more of a requirement. Thin, however, is relative: are you talking about the razor-thin world of Ultrabooks, or the not-quite-as-slim world of thin full-size laptops? In the case of the Asus U46E, thin means "normal-size, but pleasingly compact"--like the Dell XPS 14z, this is a full-fledged 14-inch laptop with an optical drive, but it's only about .1 inch thicker than a MacBook Pro.

The U46E is part of a family of thinnish Asus laptops that I've been bullish about for years, going back to the UL30A. The U46E-BAL6 continues the trend while throwing in tons of power under the hood of a pretty compact computer: a dual-core Core i7 processor, a 750GB hard drive, and a whopping 8GB of RAM.

What price would you pay for such a laptop? The U46E-BAL6 goes for $829 at retail, and that's a pretty good value for what you're getting--especially compared with the similar 13-inch MacBook Pro, which starts at $1,199, or the $999 Dell XPS 14z, which has a slower Core i5 processor, 6GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive. In the word of Windows laptops, $600 is becoming a more commonplace midrange price. Still, this Asus has extras that make it well worth the extra investment. Really, all it lacks is dedicated discrete graphics.

A sturdy keyboard, Bluetooth, and a WiMax antenna round out the package. Even in a crowded market, the Asus U46E-BAL6 manages to stand out from the pack as an excellent powerhouse 14-incher.

Read more: http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/asus-u46e-bal6/4505-3121_7-35035010.html#ixzz1ch1TSqwb