Notebook Hunter

Harvey Norman’s 40% off sale on all AMD A-Series equipped notebooks is the first major sale of the New Year, and one of the choicest bargains is the 15.6in ASUS A53TA-SX080V for $658.80. This allrounder uses one of the mid-range AMD A-Series A6 processors, which together with 4GB of RAM will easily handle all your common daily computing. What's more impressive for the price is the graphics performance. The AMD Radeon HD 6720G Dual Graphics (AMD Radeon HD 6650M dedicated graphics card and AMD Radeon HD 6520G integrated graphics) can easily run modern games at medium to high settings. For a sub $700 allrounder this is impressive, and as a final tick the HDD storage is 750GB, a pleasant surprise given that normally for this price the best available is usually around 500GB.

Processor
The A53TA has the AMD A-Series A6-3400M (1.4GHz), a mid-range AMD processor which can run productivity applications and some intensive software. It can speed up to 2.3GHz if a more demanding program is running.

Graphics
It has AMD Radeon HD 6720G2 Dual Graphics, which is a combination of an AMD Radeon HD 6650M dedicated graphics card and AMD Radeon HD 6520G integrated graphics. It will be able to run most modern games at medium to high settings.

RAM
4GB of RAM is enough to run several programs at once smoothly. This will be sufficient for moderately intensive image and video editing tasks as well.

Storage
A 750GB hard disk drive is large for a notebook, and is plenty of room for a reasonably large collection of files including movies and music.

Screen
The A53TA sports a 15.6in (1,366x768 resolution) gloss screen. The gloss screen does make outdoor usage a bit of a struggle, but stay out of direct sunlight and it’s still fine.

Portability
The portability is average, because the A53TA weighs 2.6kg and is 34.9mm thick. It's straightforward to carry around but not one of the lightest notebooks.

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