Asus X200MA Netbook Review

Since space is at a premium, the chiclet-style keyboard is about a centimeter narrower than a regular desktop keyboard. The width of the flat keys with their rough surface is pretty standard, but the space between the keys is restricted, which takes some time getting used to and which can hamper typing speeds. The layout offers no surprises. The keys offer very short travel and the keystroke is well defined, but the overall feedback is a little on the soft side in our opinion. The keyboard is recessed slightly and yields to pressure very easily in the middle.     

The clickpad features a usable size, but in our case, the unit was not inserted cleanly into the base unit during the manufacturing process. The surface of the pad, which is not touch-sensitive all the way at the bottom as well left and right edges, slightly protrudes above the base unit in some areas and rattles when touched. Response and precision are OK, although drag & drop didn't always work as intended. Because of their rather weak and inconsistent feedback, the mouse buttons are also a point of criticism and reinforce the impression of only moderate quality.

A plus: the average brightness distribution of 91 %. The color accuracy is less impressive, although the DeltaE-deviation of 6 (as shipped, not calibrated, profile linked below) happens to be quite decent for a TN panel and not something that should be taken for granted at the given the price point. Color space coverage is decidedly unimpressive at 38 % for AdobeRGB and 59 % for sRGB. These values are typical for very inexpensive notebooks, but about as low as they can get.

Asus decision to use a TN panel with decent viewing angle stability pays dividends during mobile use. Viewed from the side, both the brightness as well as the contrast decrease quite a bit, but the colors still look pretty natural. In the vertical plane, we encountered the usual deteriorations like a paler picture or colors that appear inverted - but these changes are a lot less noticeable and occur later than they would with many other TN panels.

The Intel Celeron N2830 (2 x 2.16 - 2.41 GHz, TDP 7.5 W, Silvermont) is suited very well for small netbooks, convertibles and tablets. The SoC is based on the Bay Trail M platform, which improves upon the per-MHz performance of previous Atom platforms significantly, but lacks hyperthreading. 

The performance of the SoC meets our expectations. As far as pure CPU performance is concerned, the X200MA has no problems keeping up with the competitors listed below during the single-core portion of the Cinebench benchmark, but of course loses a lot of ground during the multi-core test compared to systems equipped with the quad-core Celeron N2940 (4 x 1.83 - 2.25 GHz, no hyperthreading, TDP 7.5 W) or Pentium N3530 (4 x 2.16 - 2.58 GHZ, no hyperthreading, TDP 7.5 W). We didn't encounter any bottlenecks and the cores remained at the maximum of 2.41 GHz during the benchmark test.

No surprises here, either: the system performance is low, but not unexpectedly so. The user needs to accept more or less frequent lags and slowdowns and excessive multi-tasking is also not a good idea. Once an application is loaded into the - admittedly sparse - RAM, load times are reduced significantly. We had no problems working with MS Office programs once they were loaded and surfing the web was also mostly stress-free.

The integrated Intel HD Grafik (Bay Trail) offers very little performance and ranks almost at the bottom of the range. The fact that DirectX 11 is supported doesn't help much, since the combination of very few EUs together with a low clock speed simply prevent the fluent game play of DX11-titles. Users looking for better performance in this price range should probably try to find a netbook with AMD APU, although there aren't many available at the time of writing. A comparison: the ARM Mali-T760 MP8 in the new Samsung Galaxy S6 Smartphone exceeded the performance of our review unit by 60 % when running the 3DMark (2013) Ice Storm benchmark.

To keep a long story short: even moderately current games with some demands on the hardware are out of the question. Even titles like Diablo III and Fifa 15 at the lowest settings completely overwhelm the system. For more details on the benchmark performance please take a look at the dedicated page for the HD Graphics (Bay Trail).

At distances of half a meter and above, it's hard to hear the fan - which is always on - even under load conditions, but the clicking of the hard drive was audible. Compared to the other netbooks which we have tested in the last twelve months, the noise level of the Asus is about average during idle, but it's among the more noisy ones under load. Netbooks generally don't get very loud, however.

Potential buyers of the Asus X200MA probably don't have high-load marathon-sessions in their mind, so it doesn't really matter that the netbook gets a little warm - we measured up to 44 degrees C in one area on the bottom. Normal use (idle, low loads) results in average surface temperatures of only about 27 degrees C. 

The X200MA was almost not able to handle our stress test with Prime95. The system either crashed completely or it slowed to the point where HWiNFO64 was barely able to refresh properly and display the stats. Waiting around payed off though since the netbook usually recovered after a few minutes and resumed with the CPU cores at maximum speed just like during our benchmark attempts with Cinebench.

The two speakers are located on the bottom towards the front edge. Although the maximum volume level is sufficient and the sound is quite clear most of the time, the speakers sound tinny and over-emphasize the middle frequency range. Many titles start to sound rather piercing at higher volume levels as well. The more instruments are in play, the harder it is to differentiate them and the limited frequency range of the speakers becomes more and more apparent. In addition to the limited dynamic range, the sound stage is also far from three-dimensional. At the given the price point, better performance can't really be expected.

If we once again compare the X200MA to the other netbooks (many of which actually have more powerful SoCs or CPUs) we've reviewed in the past 12 months, it becomes apparent that the review sample is definitely among the more power-hungry ones - at least under load. That hampers the mobility, which is of course very important in this class. Like we said earlier, it's rather unlikely that the netbook will be subjected to high load levels though.

The small 33 Wh battery of the X200MA lasted for 285 minutes during the WLAN test (our test criteria). It's hard to evaluate this result since we lack a sufficiently large number of comparable entries in the database, since the previously-used WLAN test was less resource-intensive. It's a given though that netbooks with similar hardware and similar battery capacity sometimes last significantly longer, so the run time of the Asus X200MA doesn't really deserve any accolades.