Cheap Asus & Evolve Laptops - Back to Home
Recently, I got an offensively cheap Chinese laptop from Micro Center, with the intent of dual booting Linux on it & using it for various basic stuff. This is actually the 2nd cheap laptop I've gotten from Micro Center, the 1st being an Asus that I got as a Christmas gift back in 2022. Neither of these PCs are particularly remarkable, but I figured they'd be nice to get on the site anyways.
The Asus is the better of the 2 laptops, both in specs & build quality. If I remember correctly, it sold for only 99 dollars.
- Dual-Core Celeron N4500 @ 1.1GHz (2.8GHz Turbo)
- 4GB RAM
- 64GB SSD
It was very hard for me to get used to a trackpad with no buttons, since I've used laptops with physical left/right click buttons my entire life. Other than that, it's a decent laptop. It can even play 1080p YouTube without lag, which surprised me.
The 2nd machine, as you might expect, is a little more sketchy. Evolve, or "Evolve III" as it seems to be branded, is a company that manufacturers all sorts of questionable quality electronics. This one was even cheaper than the Asus, coming in at only 79 dollars. A few months ago, I saw them on sale for less than 60 bucks.
It has almost identical specs to the Asus, but the CPU is much different.
- Quad-Core Celeron N3450 @ 1.1GHz (2.2GHz Turbo)
- 4GB RAM
- 64GB SSD
The Celeron in the Evolve is far weaker than I thought. Despite supposedly having CPU turbo, I've never seen it get above 1.1GHz at all. Thus, it's essentially 4 terrible cores in the N3450 versus 2 decent cores in the N4500. If you look at some benchmarks, the N4500 has almost double the performance in single thread.
Since web browsing is mostly single threaded, things like YouTube are much slower on the Evolve. Some of the lag is definitely caused by Windows 10 though, which is why I'll be installing Debian or Q4OS on it soon.
The Evolve will probably end up as just a Linux test machine, but the Asus will be the future replacement for my aging Toshiba Satellite that I use when travelling. That said, if either of these go on sale again for under 70 dollars, they might be worth your money if you need a dirt cheap laptop to screw around with.