Asus ZenBook UX305F
The ZenBook UX305F is a 13.3in ultraportable, a near clone of the 13in MacBook Air in terms of its chassis shape, profile and all-metal solid construction. It differs in its smaller but higher-resolution screen, which benefits from IPSlike AHVA technology and a matt anti-glare finish. This display has 1920x1080 pixels, and this fullHD resolution in a 13in frame is arguably the best compromise for a Windows computer display, since the operating system does not scale reliably beyond 150 percent.
Powering the UX305F is an 800MHz Intel Core M-5Y10c processor, built on a new smaller 14nm process. This can be overclocked in short bursts by Intel’s Turbo Boost technology, up to 2GHz.
It’s a dual-core chip with Hyper Threading like the popular Core i5 and i7 processors, so can work on four threads like a quad-core processor. Most notable is its low thermal design power (TDP) figure of 4.5W, allowing its use in laptops without a cooling fan. That in itself is an incredible breakthrough, making for a silent design with no moving parts apart from the keyboard, trackpad and screen hinges.
The UX305F is relatively wellequipped in ports and connectors by the standards of ultraportables, featuring three USB ports, all of USB 3.0 specification, plus MicroHDMI video output, headset jack and SD card slot.
Its wireless capabilities run to the now-ubiquitous Bluetooth 4.0 and dual-band 11ac Wi-Fi. This is a twostream solution too, with maximum signalling speed of 867Mb/s and potentially better range than the most basic single-antenna cards found in budget laptops.
Working with the Core M processor is 8GB of low-power 1600MHz memory and a 128GB SSD from SanDisk. This latter part is one of the new generation M.2 types and here connected to a regular SATA Revision 3 bus.
The keyboard has the same keys and general layout as the MacBook Air, with the Ctrl and Fn keys reversed, as are the Alt and Windows keys. The trackpad look similar, about the same size at 104x73mm (76mm for the Air) but is a lower grade component without the same precision in mouse steering and multi-touch control.
The display is unusually good for a Windows laptop though, using IPs-like technology that gives wide viewing angles and better colour gamut. This AHVA (advanced hyper viewing angle) display is made by AU Optronics, and lived up to the manufacturer’s spec with a measured 860:1 contrast ratio, and an sRGB colour gamut of 93 percent (69 percent Adobe RGB). It does have poor listed response time of 25ms, although we did not notice significant blurring in the limited game benchmarks we ran.
It colour accuracy was good, with a spread from 0.25 to 5.95 Delta E, and an average of 0.92 Delta E. The overall performance of this AHVA technology screen is quite impressive when you consider it is only a 6-bit per pixel panel, specified with only 262,000
colours rather than the millions of colours we find with most of today’s 8-bit panels.
The Geekbench 3 benchmark scored the ZenBook US305F with its Core M processor with 2188 points single-core mode, and 4323 points multi-core mode. Those are far from record-breaking scores, more in line with the iPad Air for example, which was slower in single-core mode (not benefitting from an overclock to 2GHz) at 1815 points; but slower than an iPad in multi mode, where the tablet scored 4516 points.
It is the graphics processor in the Core M that stands out as rather competent, given the wound-down nature of the main CPU. This is an Intel HD Graphics 5300 integrated engine, with 300MHz base clock and 800MHz maximum.
In our Batman: Arkham City test at 1280x720 resolution, it averaged 25fps at Medium detail, rising to 28fps with Low detail. That’s borderline gameable, which we weren’t expecting from this 800MHz CPU with integrated graphics.
With its SanDisk 128GB SSD, we recorded sequential reads and writes at 446- and 349MB/s – decent results for this capacity of drive. Looking at smaller transfers, 4kB random reads and writes measured 24.9- and 48.4MB/s, rising to good results of 293- and 237MB/s at queue-depth 32.
In our battery run down test playing HD video over a Wi-Fi link, with screen set to 120 cd/m2, it survived for close to 10 hours – nine hours, 58 minutes in fact. That’s approaching the kind of battery life we want to see – around 12 hours in this looped video test would be better, to allow for more challenging moments of use and then still able to last through an eight-hour working day.
Verdict
At £650, the UX305F is an attractive package.