ASUS ZenBook 3
Has ASUS’s search for incredible uncovered the sublime?
We’ve had our eye on the sleek ZenBook 3 since ASUS first showed it off at Computex back in May. The elegantly coloured rose gold or royal blue chassis is honed from premiumgrade aluminium to a 11.9mm profile. Yet it isn’t just the body that’s thin — the display’s 7.6mm bezels marry a wellproportioned screen border to deliver a class-leading 82% screen-to-body ratio.
It might only have a 12.5-inch 1080p IPS LCD display with sRGB colour, but ASUS has covered it in Corning Gorilla Glass 4 and boosted the screen’s 1,000:1 contrast ratio using its Tru2Life image processing engine which makes images and videos look clearer and richer than any other screen we’ve seen with these specs. Hidden neatly above the keyboard and underneath the trackpad are two sets of discrete ASUS SonicMaster Premium speakers tuned by the audio masters at Harman Kardon. The audio volume and quality from such tiny speakers is surprising. Not only is it louder than most laptops we test, it’s also extremely good quality, producing full bassy lows and crisp highs.
Non-Apple laptops have a known blindspot when it comes to trackpads, and though we’ve seen a few that get close, the ZenBook 3 is the first we like equally as much as Apple models. The 3’s trackpad even adds in a fingerprint sensor. Add to this an exceptionally designed keyboard that offers standard 19.8mm key spacing and an impressive 0.8mm key travel distance and you end up with a compact keyboard and trackpad setup that doesn’t feel like a compromise to type or swipe on.
At present, it’s only possible to get the Intel Core i7-7500U CPU model in Australia, which is paired with either Windows 10 Home or Pro, an Intel HD Graphics 620 GPU, 8GB of 2,133MHz DDR3 memory and a 512GB SATA3 M.2 SSD. For this ‘thin and light’ class, that spec sheet is impressive but when you weigh-up that you can get a 1440p MacBook with the same size hard drive for $250 less, we wondered if the UX390UA achieves the performance to command such a price tag.
Despite ASUS’s customdesigned 3mm-thick fan to help cool that Core i7 processor, not everything runs as smoothly as it should. When it comes to CPU-heavy tasks like web browsing, video transcoding and general office applications, the 7500U holds up, netting best-inclass scores on PCMark’s Work and Home tests. However, its GPU scores are suspiciously low. Across all of 3DMark’s graphics tests, it did worse than ASUS’s $1,099, Core M-powered UX305FA from last year and, moreover, seemed to be capped at around half the performance of the almost identically specced) Dell XPS 13, opposite.
A middling 40Wh battery combined with a powerful CPU means that battery life was a bit less than we’d hoped, lasting only 2 hours and 40 minutes in PCMark’s Home test and around 5 hours during 1080p media playback at 50% brightness.
That said, as long as you don’t plan to do any gaming on it, there’s really no glaring speed problems with the ZenBook. Considering it comes in at about the same price as a 512GB Core m7 MacBook, it’s fairly-priced for a top shelf ultrabook.