ASUS Malaysia yesterday announced its latest ASUSPRO notebook lineup, designed specifically for business professionals and SMBs. Featuring exceptionally tough chassis paired with minimalistic design, the ASUSPRO notebooks may just be an interesting addition to an area where Lenovo’s ThinkPad laptops have long held dominance.
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For the time being, ASUS Malaysia currently has two models in the new ASUSPRO lineup: the ASUSPRO B Advanced Ultrabook and the ASUSPRO P Essential laptop, with the former being the more premium of the two. Both the ASUSPRO Advanced BU400V and the ASUSPRO Essential P45V surpass the company’s in-house standards for durability, featuring spill-resistant keyboards, anti-shock hard drives that stop spinning when the laptop drops, and even a chassis made from reinforced carbon that protects the LCD (ASUSPRO Advanced only, which also exceeds the US MIL-STD 810G standard for durability).
On top of that, the ASUSPRO notebooks also feature user password protection and security lock on both the HDD and BIOS. The notebooks’ BIOS also supports Intel Anti-Theft technology as well as Computrace Lo-jack for Laptops, which can detect the location of the laptop when it is stolen, as well as remotely delete sensitive data in the hard drive. On top of that, the ASUSPRO notebooks also feature Secure Delete, which ensures deleted files are permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.
At only 20mm thick and weighing 1.64kg, the ASUSPRO Advanced BU400V sports an impressive array of connectivity options. There are 3 USB 3.0 ports, HDMI-out, LAN, VGA-out and a 2-in-1 card reader. The BU400V is powered by a third-gen Intel Core i5-3337U processor with 4GB of RAM. Interestingly, the storage available on the BU400V is broken into three drives: a 500GB 5400rpm hard disk, a 128GB mSATA flash memory, and a 24GB SSD cache, totalling 652GB of storage. Being a commercial Ultrabook, the BU400V also sports a business-grade NVIDIA NVS 5000 GPU, which performs roughly at the same level as the consumer GeForce GT 620M.
The display of the ASUSPRO Advanced BU400V is a 14-inch, 1366 x 768 anti-glare non-touch LCD panel with an HD webcam on top of it. The spill-resistant keyboard has also been tweaked to allow greater click ratio and travel for superior typing comfort. Finally, the BU400V also sports a fingerprint scanner for another layer of security.
On the other hand, the ASUSPRO Essential P45V laptop is designed for the more budget-oriented commercial user, and features a significantly larger and heavier frame at 33mm thick and weighing 2.3kg. But, having a larger chassis also allows the P45V to pack in more powerful hardware, such as an Intel Core i7-3520QM processor and an NVIDIA GeForce 635M GPU. There’s also 8GB of RAM, and storage options on the P45V is a more traditional 750GB 5400rpm hard disk with a 24GB SSD cache.
Connectivity wise, the ASUSPRO Essential P45V sports three USB drives (2x USB 3.0), LAN port, HDMI-out, VGA-out and SD card reader. The display is also similar to the BU400V, with a 14-inch 1366 x 768 anti-glare panel with an HD webcam on top. The greater height of the P45V also allows ASUS to slot in a DVD multi-drive.
Both the ASUSPRO Advanced BU400V and the ASUSPRO Essential P45V are now available in Malaysia, and will retail for RM3599 and RM3099 respectively. The BU400V also ships with Windows 8 Pro, while the P45V will only come with Windows 7 Professional installed.
Also, both models will also have slightly different variants available in stores, such as a BU400V variant with an Intel Core i7-3517U CPU and a sharper 1600 x 900 resolution display. More importantly, there will also be a refreshed ASUSPRO lineup expected to arrive in Malaysia as early as the end of September, which will feature Intel’s fourth-generation Haswell CPUs.
For more information about the new ASUSPRO lineup, check out their official international website here, and stay up to date with ASUS Malaysia via their official Facebook page here.
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