Vizio CT14-A2 Ultrabook Review: Elegance in Minimalism - cotemecer2002

If Walter Gropius could understand the new Vizio CT14-A2 Ultrabook, he'd probably approve. It sports a sleek, metallic elegance, like many of the quintessential Bauhaus designs. And as the Bauhaus school would do, Vizio stripped out apparently essential features, but the last result is a impacted, whippersnapper, usable laptop that performs well and looks good. Information technology also sells for a very reasonable $1199.

Lean and Stripped Down

At first bloom, the CT14-A2 seems generally distinguished by its lack of features. Just now two USB 3.0 ports are included, one on each side. A lone HDMI port is on the right side, providing the only video output port. The system lacks a wired ethernet laborer, and doesn't let in a USB-to-ethernet adapter, American Samoa likewise thin Asus Zenbook UX31E. Perhaps the unmatchable away feature that people power real miss, though, is a flashcard reader.

Stripping away those features allowed Vizio to create a very thin, shapely laptop that looks equally good winking Oregon open. The organisation looks thinner than it really is, thanks to its beveled, colored rubberized base, but it's still very thin, at 0.63 inches. Vizio even out left out keyboard backlighting in pursuit of slenderness—the hardware needed to integrate backlighting

would have added 1.5mm.

As with the Macbook Publicize, the CT14 and its bigger sibling, the CT15, is built using Al unibody construction. However, a black bezel surrounds the display, which tends to bring your eye to the LCD empanel sort o than to the surrounding bezel.

The keyboard is equally striking in appearance. The keys are big, every thusly slightly sculpted and beveled. The large touchpad is one in a newfangled, unified style with no in sight buttons, and supports multitouch gestures.

Performance

Looking good is one affair, but does the CT14-A2 deliver on performance? This particular CT14 is the A2 model, which ships with a Core i7-3517U processor. The dual-heart and soul 3517U includes 4MB of L3 cache, supports hyperthreading (so it can handle iv coincidental threads), and ships with a base clock of 1.9GHz and a maximum turbo speed of 3GHz. As with many similar Ultrabooks, it has 4GB of DDR3 retentivity, some of which moldiness glucinium used Eastern Samoa the frame buffer for the integrated Intel HD 4000 GPU.

Performance is hand-to-hand to a dead heat with the extremely rated, but pricier, Acer Aim S5. The Vizio has an overall performance score of 81 on PCWorld's demanding entourage of tests, versus an 82 for the S5.

A thin-and-light system like this is often used for office applications and on-the-go Web duty. To that end, the Vizio posted very good scores in the PCMark 7 office productiveness tests compared with other systems in its class, eking out a slight deliver the goods over the Acer Aspire S5.

Then again, it looks like the Vizio's solid drive is a moment slower than the Acer's, but it's still an SSD, so it's speedier than Ultrabooks that use traditional hard drives.

As you might expect, gaming is not the CT14's strong suit. Intel's HD 4000 integrated nontextual matter is improved over past Intel efforts, but that still translates to subpar scores in most demanding 3D titles. We saw playable frame rates at only the lowest point levels, and at 800-by-600-pixel resolution.

In the end, the CT14-A2 maintains parity with the more expensive Aspire. Patc it costs much equivalent Core i5-equipped Ultrabooks like the Toshiba Satellite U845-S406, the Core i7 Central processing unit combined with the 256GB SSD makes for a speedy user experience. Note that lower-cost models of the CT14 are available with small SSDs and depress accelerate processors. As with many extremely thin and light systems, tested battery life is less robust, at 5 hours, 17 minutes. While this is impendent to the Acer's 5 hours, 28 minutes, it's below the moderate of 6-plus hours for other Ultrabooks.

Connectivity and Usableness

Having only two USB 3.0 ports, no physical ethernet connection, and just one output signal port puts the CT14 squarely in Macbook Air territorial dominion. Apple at the least includes a photoflash memory card lector for the Air, something the CT14 lacks. However, the CT14 is Bluetooth capable, sol you can use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse if you want external stimulation capability without consuming a USB port. Dual-band 802.11n support is enclosed, a receive increase. If a system is going to rely only on Wi-Fi connectivity, dual-band is a must for best throughput.

The lone HDMI-output port supports HDMI 1.4a, so it can handle even high-bandwidth devices. A dual-purpose earpiece/microphone port is made-up into the left side. The headphone adenosine monophosphate tends to distort a bit at superior volumes, regular with rattling soundly headphones. The made-up-in speakers are the weak point, hearable a little thin and inaccurate. Vizio includes SRS Premium Sound, but the equalizer settings seem a lowercase away. In a switch from my normal preferences, I liked the sound from the built-in speakers better with SRS off, though audio through my Sennheiser HD 580 headphones sounded bettor with SRS enabled.

Video quality is something of a heterogenous bag. While color interpretation appeared fairly high-fidelity, the overall printing seemed slightly muted in tone. The presentation can buoy be dialed busy eyeball-gouging light, should you call for it. I saw telescopic shifting of colourize and line when viewing off-bloc to one side, though the shifts were non unfortunate. Vertical viewing angles vary—sounding from the top downwardly results in severe image degradation, but bottom-up screening is little washed out. Convention office use and picturing redaction worked swell, and the 1600 away 900 pixel screen and its 14-column inch (diagonal) size were welcome.

I took a little sentence to adapt to the keyboard. The depth of the Florida key presses are very shallow, something I generally don't like, just the overall tactile feedback and sheer phyicsal size of the keys substantially made up for the shallow keystrokes. There is no visible PgDn / PgUp cluster, but the Fn + pointer keys handled this feature, as is the case with many ultraportables. The F1 key default state is to take you to Vizio's support site. When I launched it, I was immediately notified that an update for the touchpad driver was available. That driver update better touchpad usability a bit, facultative stronger palm tree detection and few wild cursor swings. Total, typewriting and pointing were positive experiences, but a little more than texture to the keys would have been welcome.

The touchpad also supports edge detection, fashioning it ready for Windows 8. Sliding your finger off the edge will bring up the charms bar in the Windows 8 interface.

Traveling with the CT14

The CT14 sports a 14-inch screen, and is exceptionally light for that class of display. The Vizio weighs a scant 3 pounds, 7 ounces without the business leader brick. With the PSU, it weighs in at 4 pounds, 4 ounces. That's well lighter than a number of Ultrabooks with littler screens. The might connector is an oblong shape, which connects at right angles to the system and lights up when charging.

The Vizio is besides exceptionally quiet. A give vent is built behind the hinge, thusly warm air exhausts neat out the back, not onto your lap. I fired up Google Chrome with all over 20 Flash-heavy tabs running play, and the fan didn't kick in. When the machine was running PCMark 7, the lover finally fired up, just overall noise levels were pretty low—far Thomas More muted than the Sandy Bridge-equipped Macbook Line I often use.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the Vizio CT14-A2 is a razor-sharp pleasure to use, but it's not double-dyed. I would still like to see a shapely-in retentivity card reader. The deficiency of an ethernet jack isn't a deal breaker, and we're likely to see more of these compact systems that eschew wired connections. The keyboard and touchpad are quite operable, though at that place's still some room for improvement in pointing behavior. The exhibit is dandy, non fabulous, just its size up and resolution are welcome. Perhaps most disappointing is the overall valid upper-class of the speakers, given Vizio's background as a consumer electronics provider.

Still, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of the parts. Vizio's first entry into the PC job makes a overreaching design financial statement, getting many things right, and the misses are near-misses, rather than thuds of disappointment. The whole social occasion feels solid, looks good, types well, and performs like a champ. What much could you deprivation in a PC?

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/460508/vizio_c14_a2_ultrabook_review_elegance_in_minimalism.html

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