Pros
- Good battery life
- Good speakers
- Inexpensive
Cons
- Poor screen
- So-so keyboard and touchpad
- Slow hard drive
- Headphone jack static
Quick Take:
The ASUS S400CA is an attractive Ultrabook priced at $699 but doesn't deliver a great user experience.
This 14-inch Ultrabook offers a Windows 8 experience complete with a touch-enabled screen for $699. Read on to find out what's forgivable and what's not at this price point.
Overview
At $699 the ASUS S400CA represents one of the least expensive Ultrabooks on the market, especially considering this model has a touch-enabled screen. Highlights of this model aside from the touch screen include solid battery life, metallic surfaces, a clean design and good speakers.
Build and Design
The S400CA has a clean uncluttered appearance. The stark silver aluminum palm rest contrasts nicely with the black lid and chassis bottom. The corners are rounded just the right amount.
The build quality is above average; the chassis is reasonably stiff and resists flexing. The lid is impressively strong and noticeably better at resisting flex and pressure than most Ultrabooks that have gone through our review process. Fit and finish is good; there are no unfinished areas or sections that seem to be of better quality than others.
Note that the aluminum on the S400CA is decorative; it certainly adds support but isn't the main source of chassis strength. A full aluminum shell is too expensive at this price point.
The S400CA wasn't designed with user upgradeability in mind but it is user upgradeable; remove the eight Phillips head screws on the chassis bottom to get at the 2.5" storage drive, mSATA slot, wireless card and one open RAM slot. That's not bad at all for an Ultrabook.
Input and Output Ports
Port selection is one of the S400CA's highlights; it offers many ports other Ultrabooks leave out including VGA, Ethernet, a media card reader and a full-size HDMI out; this is in addition to three USB ports (one USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0). A small detail I appreciate on the S400CA is its inclusion of status lights along the front. I always miss the storage drive activity light when it's left out. All picture descriptions are listed from left to right.
 Left: Kensington Lock slot, 2x USB 2.0, headphone/microphone combo jack, SD card slot |  Right: USB 3.0, HDMI out, VGA, Ethernet, AC power jack |
Keyboard and Touchpad
The S400CA has a full-size keyboard with Chiclet-style keys. It's not my favorite part of the notebook. Unlike the keyboards on most Ultrabooks, this one has noticeable flex which doesn't translate to a solid feel. The limited key travel doesn't allow for much tactile feedback.
Something I definitely don't appreciate is the fact that the chassis has a slight rattle while typing; this is unacceptable and I see it too often. One last complaint is the key surfaces; they're granular plastic which will in all likelihood wear shiny over time.
The ASUS clickpad lacks dedicated physical buttons; press down anywhere to produce a click. It has a pleasantly smooth surface and relatively quiet clicks but the praise stops there. The clickable surface isn't properly anchored so it has a small bit of give, translating into a rattling sound while tapping to click. Furthermore physical clicks take too much effort. Overall ASUS could have scored higher in this section of the review.
Screen and Speakers
The 14" screen is another sore point of this review. Its redeeming factor is the touch capability; it works well but is more of a novelty. The primary issue with the touch functionality is usability; the display hinge provides plenty of resistance to prevent the screen from moving backward while touched but can't stop it from wobbling which makes for an awkward experience. I found myself supporting the display with one hand while touching with the other.
The screen is otherwise utterly unremarkable. It has the lowest resolution offered on a mainstream PC, 1366x768; it looks grainy compared to higher resolution screens (1920x1080, for example) because the pixels are physically larger; there are less of them per square inch. Windows 8 scales so well across resolutions that the old "the text is too small" excuse is no longer valid; save for price reasons it makes little sense to get a resolution this low.
Compounding the resolution issue is the panel's picture quality; contrast and especially saturation are well below average. The display looks washed out and dull and has poor viewing angles; there's a narrow 10-15 degree vertical window that's 'optimal'; pass that and the picture washes out or darkens from above and below, respectively. Even the brightness is suboptimal.
The speakers are a step up from "normal" tinny notebook speakers. The pseudo surround sound effect is actually impressive. The speakers get sufficiently loud but lack low bass notes. Normally I'd say use the headphone jack but the S400CA's has some background static; this is not a good thing.
Performance and Benchmarks
Our ASUS S400CA-DH51T Touch Ultrabookhas the following specifications:
- 14-inch touch-enabled screen(1366x768 resolution)
- Windows 8 64-bit
- Intel Core i5-3317U dual-core processor (1.7GHz, up to 2.6GHz Turbo Boost, 3MB cache, 17W TDP)
- Integrated Intel HD graphics
- 4GB DDR3-1600 RAM (8GB max.; 4GB onboard, 1x open slot)
- 500GB 5400RPM hard drive (Seagate ST500LT012, 7mm thickness)
- 24GB SanDisk SSD i100 cache
- Qualcomm Atheros AR9485WB-EB wireless LAN
- Integrated Bluetooth 4.0
- Integrated HD webcam
- No internal optical drive
- 1-year limited warranty
- 44WHr li-polymer battery
- Weight: 3.96 lbs.
- Dimensions: 13.4 x 9.4 x 0.82 inches
- Price: $699
These are ordinary specifications for an entry-level Ultrabook like the S400CA. The S400CA is only available in this configuration at the time of writing. The 500GB hard drive is notable; Ultrabooks typically come with a Solid State Drive (SSD). The advantage of the hard drive is storage space; SSDs in Ultrabooks top out at 256GB. The disadvantage is performance; a hard drive is much slower at reading data so anything involving disk access takes a lot longer -- booting up, starting programs and so on. SSDs are up to 20x as fast as a hard drive -- see our SSD upgrade guide for more info.
The slow performance of the hard drive is somewhat alleviated by slaving a small 24GB SSDto it for use as a cache. It's hard to say exactly how much of a difference it makes but it is better than having just a hard drive.
Otherwise there's little to complain about the S400CA's specifications for "normal" usage including web surfing and office productivity. The Intel Core i5 dual-core processor has plenty of power and 4GB of RAM is sufficient for multitasking. Something the S400CA (or any Ultrabook for that matter) isn't good at is 3D gaming -- integrated graphics just don't cut it.
wPrime processor comparison results (lower scores mean better performance):
PCMark 7 is a newer benchmark that measures overall system performance in Windows 7(higher scores mean better performance):
3DMark 11 measures overall graphics performance in games using DirectX 11 (higher scores mean better performance):
CrystalDiskMark storage drive performance test:
Heat and Noise
There's a small fan at the back right of the chassis; it's nestled behind the display hinge. In general I like to see cooling systems that exhaust air directly outside the chassis instead of deflecting it but I can't complain about the results. The S400CA's chassis barely reached above room temperature during our stress testing. The fan is quiet and has no whine.
Battery Life
Something the S400CA can do well is run on battery. We use Powermark in Balanced mode to measure battery life; it's a combination of automated web browsing, word processing, gaming and video playback workloads. It's far more demanding than our previous battery life test and better simulates real world usage scenarios.
Powermark battery life test results (higher scores mean better battery life):
The ASUS S400CA Touch Ultrabook ran for three hours and 51 minutes on its 44WHr li-polymer battery (on our old test this is 6-7 hours). This is a respectable time for a 14-inch Ultrabook.
Conclusion
The ASUS S400CA Touch Ultrabook seems like quite a good deal on the surface: $699 buys a touch screen, Windows 8, an attractive design and good battery life. We found it also bought a solid selection of ports, reasonable build quality and relatively good sounding speakers. What it doesn't buy is a satisfactory user experience.
The touch screen works well but is more of a novelty due to the notebook form factor; there's no getting around the display wobbling when touched. The quality of the screen is abysmal; it's washed out and doesn't have enough resolution. The keyboard has a so-so feel and the chassis has a distinct rattle while typing; the touchpad also rattles. The headphone jack has background static which obviously isn't good. Lastly the performance isn't as snappy as we'd like; the hard drive offers a lot of space but just isn't fast.
We'd recommend spending a bit more for a computer with a better quality display before recommending the ASUS S400CA. There's not enough substance here to allow us to give it a full recommendation.
Pros:
- Good battery life
- Good speakers
- Inexpensive
Cons:
- Poor screen
- So-so keyboard and touchpad
- Slow hard drive
- Headphone jack static
Individual Ratings: *
Software & Support 
Upgrade Capabilities
Usability
Design
Performance
Features
Price/Value Rating
* Ratings averaged to produce final score
Upgrade Capabilities
Usability
Design
Performance
Features
Price/Value Rating
* Ratings averaged to produce final score
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