ASUS ZenBook 3 Deluxe UX490UA
Super-thin and light, but stumbles if heavy lifting.
Ultrabooks may have been with us for over six years now, but it still feels like we haven’t quite hit the perfect balance of performance in a slimline package. The ASUS Zenbook range gets close with bang up-to-date components, and an even sleeker chassis.
The headline component on the spec sheet is the processor, and in this machine that’s just half an inch thick, you’ll find a quad-core, eight-thread Core i7-8550U (Kaby Lake R). This chip has a base clock of 1.8GHz, but generally runs quicker, thanks to the joys of turbo boost. But how much it boosts is a bit of a contentious affair: Intel says it’ll peak at 4GHz, ASUS says it’ll run at anything up to 3.7GHz, while in testing we witnessed it reach 4GHz under heavy workloads (our benchmarks).
This does lead to our biggest problem with the ZenBook 3 Deluxe, though — that 4GHz peak saw the processor temperature hit 100°C, which lead to it throttling back to keep the thermals down. Run benchmarks multiple times in quick succession, and your figures quickly tank, with subsequent results coming in far lower than the last — we recorded a Cinebench R15 score of 450 after a particularly hard benchmarking session; over 20% lower than its highest score. Obviously, you’re not going to push a machine like this so hard on a day-to-day basis, but by the same token, you’d be better off settling for a lesser CPU that isn’t constrained by the thermal envelope it finds itself operating inside.
Test the storage, though, and you’ll see that this thing flies. There’s nothing new about PCIe NVMe SSDs, but laptops still tend to go for SATA drives to keep prices down, so it’s refreshing to throw files around on here. Installations are speedy, file copying a breeze, and Windows is smooth in operation. ASUS doesn’t brag about what drive is being used, although a bit of snooping reveals that it’s a Samsung PM961 hiding inside. 512GB is plenty of room for most uses, although you may need to grab an external drive for some workloads, but don’t forget that this is USB-C territory (though a USB-A/ HDMI dongle is included).
The rest of the specification is reassuringly punchy, with 16GB of LPDDR3 RAM giving your applications plenty of room to work with. The screen is worth spending a bit of time with, because it looks incredible whether you’re working, playing back a movie, or trying to enjoy some low-powered gaming. (You’re going to be hard pushed to hit playable frame rates in modern games, even with everything set as low as possible.) The Harmon/ Kardon audio is reasonable enough, given its thickness, although it isn’t going to challenge a decent set of cans. One oddity here is the webcam — it’s merely a VGA model, which seems a bit off given the rest of the specs.
All up, this is a terrifc machine, and one of the most impressive Windows laptops you can currently lay your hands on.