The Asus Laptop L410 is the one of the true super-affordable Windows 10 systems, even by the standards of other budget laptops. We consider budget laptops to cost under $500, and the L410 model we reviewed (L410MA-DB02) is just over half that, at $264.99. Only a select few Win 10 models (like the HP Stream 11) cost any less than that new, and for this price, you do get a functional Windows 10 system with a surprisingly sturdy build, useful ports, and decent battery life. The screen quality leaves a lot to be desired, though, and anything other than basic tasks will be a tough ask for the Celeron CPU, 4GB of memory, and 64GB of storage. If you have more wiggle room in your budget, we recommend the MSI Modern 14. Still, compromises are expected, and this is among the better picks out there under $300.
Savings in Style
This laptop’s design may not be the most thrilling, but you may not guess it’s a $265 laptop at first glance. Part of this is thanks to the paint job, blue with a sparkling finish, which adds a touch of style to the budget lineup. Many of these laptops are black or grey rectangles, so I’m all for a splash of color. You’ll also note a single standout key: The Enter key is highlighted in a yellow-green color, just for fun.
The build itself is made of plastic, which can’t be a surprise at the price, but the overall quality is actually pretty good. Being plastic, it’s lightweight at 2.87 pounds, and the chassis has a trim footprint at 0.72 by 12.8 by 8.5 inches (HWD) with a 14-inch display (measured diagonally). This combines for a very portable laptop, something easy to throw in a backpack or bag without much thought about space or weight.
I expected the chassis to flex more when I applied pressure to it, but the lid and keyboard deck are surprisingly sturdy. There is a bit of flex if you push down in the center of the keyboard, but it’s not egregious, and it doesn’t really occur in normal use. The materials may not feel particularly high-quality, but the system doesn’t feel like it’s going to fall apart and is solid overall.
The keys themselves are less impressive, but functional. The press is rather shallow—the keys don’t travel very far when tapped, before hitting bottom—and they’re a touch mushy. Again, not something that’s surprising for the price (and really, acceptable), but it is important to note where the compromises are coming from for something that costs this little, because there will certainly be some.
Much of what you’re compromising will involve the components, and we’ll get to that in a moment, but let’s move on to the touchpad. It’s built as many budget touchpads are: When you press down, the whole pad tilts down low at the bottom, moving as one unit. It feels a bit flimsier than more-premium touchpads, which have little to no discernible movement and feel very sturdy. It still works fine, though, and I’ve endured much looser touchpads than this one.
The other obvious facet is the number pad permanently drawn on to the touchpad. Obviously there’s no room for a full, real-keys number pad on a laptop this size, and on more expensive systems, Asus uses an LED number pad on the touchpad, whose visibility you toggle on and off with a button. Here, the numpad is always visible, and you simply toggle the numpad function on and off. You can still use the touchpad normally, too, if the numpad is turned on, but you can avoid accidental inputs by turning it off when not in use.
This is presumably a cheaper solution than the hideable LED setup, and it does work. If you’re a heavy numpad user, you’re in luck here, especially because most laptops in this price range don’t even attempt to include one.
A Poor Display, But Plenty of Ports
The biggest downside to the physical build is, unfortunately, the display. It bears a standard full HD resolution (1,920 by 1,080 pixels), so it’s not the on-paper spec that disappoints. Like the recently reviewed budget Asus VivoBook 15, the quality is below average, and this one is worse.
Their issues differ slightly. Where the VivoBook 15’s screen was washed out, the maximum brightness here just isn’t very bright at all, and even head-on, the picture quality isn’t sharp or clear. The viewing angles are poor—darkness and discoloration appear quickly if you start to look at the screen from a slight angle, and it’s not even fully consistent when viewed head on. Overall, it’s a poor panel that mars an otherwise reasonably good build for the cost.
Last but not least, the port options. The left flank holds one USB 2.0 port, a USB-C port, and an HDMI connection. The right edge holds one USB 3.0 port and an SD card slot. This isn’t a huge array of connections, but it’s more than the basics, and the days of super-restrictive ports on budget laptops may be behind us if even a system at this price meets more than the essentials. The system also supports 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
One important thing to note: The laptop ships in Windows 10 S mode, a setting for less-powerful laptops that’s more friendly for running Windows Store apps. If you want to install other applications (as you would on any full Windows PC, and likely desire to do on this system), you’ll have to grab the free upgrade to normal Windows 10 from the Windows Store.
Components and Performance Testing
I mentioned the other compromises come in the component choices, and indeed, this is a very modestly equipped laptop. Operating as a full Windows 10 laptop for under $300 is arguably a feat enough, but don’t expect a lot of speed or performance above the basics. As noted earlier, this unit is equipped with an Intel Celeron N4020 processor, 4GB of memory, and 64GB of eMMC flash storage.
Before even looking at the results, I can warn that that processor will be sluggish—note that it’s not even an Intel Core chip, but part of the low-power Celeron line. You’ll see some Core i3 units in the other budget systems we’re comparing the L410 against, but the Celeron will still be noticeably slower than those. Check out the table below for the names and specs of the competition. (See more about how we test laptops.)
These are all inexpensive machines, too, falling right in the same price range (with some variation). The most affordable is the aforementioned HP Stream 11, a tiny, low-power notebook that costs just $199.99. The VivoBook 15 ($399.99) and MSI Modern 14 ($449.99) are similar to one another in terms of components, both good deals for what they offer but at different sizes. The Dell Inspiron 15 3000 (3505) is another 15-inch laptop, priced at $369 as tested, making it the second-cheapest alternative here next to the Stream.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL. The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both tests yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
The PCMark 10 result sets the expectations for this system. It is not a miracle machine, somehow in line with the other systems’ performance at a lower price, so you can see where the compromise comes in. The Celeron chip, 4GB of RAM, and fanless design just can’t keep up, not even with AMD’s low-grade Athlon solution and definitely not with the Core i3 chips. It is, at least, faster than the other Celeron chip in the HP Stream 11, and the lack of fans means it’s quiet. As far as doing actual office work, it’s at best serviceable, but far from ideal.
On a more anecdotal basis, I found the basic functions (using Windows Explorer for files and simple web browsing) perfectly operational, with a very slight hang while navigating. Expect some wait times if you start opening up a lot of applications or browser tabs, but not much from simple use of a single undemanding application.
The load and boot times are also not as quick as the others because this system uses slower flash storage instead of an SSD, which is also why it could not complete the PCMark 8 Storage test. I wouldn’t describe load times or boot times as slow, just not as quick as on an SSD-equipped system. For the price, the L410 is overall serviceable, and avoiding lockups during very simple and normal use is really the goal, which it meets. Adding a significant workload makes it a matter of when, not if, you’ll see some slowdown.
Next come the media tests, which I’ll analyze all at once. First is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better.
We normally also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark, but the L410 was unable to complete this test because the system lacks enough RAM.
I think the results speak for themselves here—the media test results are not as passable as the PCMark 10 score. The L410 lags behind all but the Stream 11 significantly, showing just how much extra processing power is being left on the table with the dollar savings. At least it was able to complete our Handbrake workout, albeit in more than an hour, which couldn’t be said for HP’s system.
Unless you want to leave it running all day or overnight, video encoding is a no-go, and most media-creation and -editing tasks will leave you waiting for some time. For absolute essentials where you have no alternative or time is no object, the L410 could finish the job eventually. But you are better off using a different machine.
Graphics Tests
We run two tests apiece in two gaming simulations. The first, 3DMark, measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. 3DMark’s Sky Diver and Fire Strike subtests are both DirectX 11 benchmarks, but the former is more suited to midrange PCs with integrated graphics, while the latter is more demanding and made for high-end and gaming PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
Another graphics test, Unigine’s Superposition, similarly renders and pans through a complex 3D scene but measures results in frames per second (fps), with 30fps generally desirable for smooth animation while serious gamers prefer 60fps or more. We run the test at 720p and 1080p resolution with low and high visual quality settings, respectively.
Similarly to the multimedia tests, no serious 3D or graphics work should be done on this system, which uses the dated Intel UHD Graphics 600 integrated into the processor. In our deep-dive testing of laptop integrated graphics a few weeks back, we noted that some laptops based on integrated graphics can play games adequately. But this is not among them. That’s not unique in this price tier, clearly, but even among this batch, the L410 lags behind (save, again, for the Stream 11).
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the same Tears of Steel short we use in our Handbrake test—with screen brightness set at 50% and volume at 100% until the system quits.
Many of these results have not made positive viewing, but that can’t be said for the battery life. More than eight hours on our rundown test is solid, giving you enough juice to get through the day or at least be used while traveling before you plug it in later. Most of the budget systems fall in this range, so it isn’t out of the ordinary, but it is still much better than if it lasted only three or four hours.
Reasonable Compromises for the Cost
The Asus Laptop L410 is a little tricky to sum up in a one-sentence conclusion. It poses a lot of considerations.
The build is reasonably solid, there’s a good mix of ports, battery life is long enough, and it can perform basic everyday tasks. On the flip side, the screen is poor, anything other than basic tasks is a tough ask, and it has little memory and even less storage.
But then you remind yourself that it costs just $265, and those compromises look a lot more reasonable. If you are absolutely set on spending less than $300, this is almost as good as it gets, and some pitfalls that could have been easy to fall into (build quality, battery life) are strengths. The Lenovo IdeaPad 1 14 is also worth a look in this budget zone, with similar pricing and different trade-offs.
If your budget is a little more flexible within that $300-to-$500 range, though, we would recommend spending more for a marked improvement in speed and storage. The MSI Modern 14 is our top pick for those budget shoppers.
