Hey, how it's going guys? This is Dave 2D. And this is a review of the Asus Zenbook 3.
Now, I feel like that this laptop is kind of in a class of its own.
It's similar in size to something like the 12 inch Macbook.
But, it's got a much more powerful processor than the Macbook does.
And then if you take something that has a similar processor like the Razer Blade Stealth,
the Zenbook 3 is just so much more compact in comparison.
It's similar but quite different from both of these.
But, throughout this video, I'm going to be referencing the Macbook.
Just because it has the most similarities in terms of ergonomics and design to the Zenbook 3.
Now, it starts at $1100 for the base model, but the unit I have here is $1600.
Specs wise, you are getting a lot more power under the hood than the Macbook.
So it has a full aluminum build with that brushed, radial pattern up top,
it's got three colors: this dark blue, a silver and a pink. And they all have this gold trim.
I don't mind the trim, I actually like it and personally I also like the blue,
but I think there's a lot of people that would want something more subtle like a black or a grey.
And there isn't that option. But DBrand has skins that you can use to give us a more stealthier look.
The bottom panel comes off easily, but when you're in there, the only thing you can upgrade is the drive.
The 512 gig stock drive in this model is a PCIe stick from Toshiba and has great performance.
The battery down here is 40 watt hours.
Now, Asus claims up to nine hours, I was getting just short of six hours with normal use, screen at 250 nits.
It supports fast charging so you can juice it up to 60% battery life in 50 minutes.
In terms of the build quality it feels very rigid.
The screen is rock-solid, the chassis is also very good,
the hinge is great: one-hand openable and it doesn't flop open or close. I think Asus nailed the build.
It's still not as good as a 12-inch MacBook.
I still think this is like the gold standard of build quality, but the Zenbook 3 is pretty darn close.
It's very limited on ports, it has an audio jack on one side and a USB 3.1 type-C on the other side.
There's no Thunderbolt 3 support, but the good news is that Asus includes an adapter.
The display is a 12.5 inch 1080p panel covered in Gorilla Glass 4.
It's glossy, but it's not a touchscreen.
It measures in with really good color accuracy and contrast, but it could be a little brighter.
Compared to the 12-inch MacBook... yes this is a lower resolution screen,
but at regular viewing distances you can't really tell the difference that easily.
It is a better screen on the MacBook, but not by that much.
Now, the webcam on this thing is pretty terrible.
It's just as bad as a potato on the MacBook. I don't know why they did this.
The keyboard is backlit and typing feels okay.
It has 0.8 millimeters of travel, so it's not as tactile as I'd like it, but it's spacious
and for the most part, I think it's a decent keyboard and most people will get used to it quickly.
The spacebar feels a little spongier than the rest of the keys, but it's not a big deal.
The trackpad is pretty good. It has a smooth glass surface even though it feels a little plasticky.
Tracking is smooth and pretty accurate. The buttons, however, don't feel great.
It feels kind of dainty and there's not much travel when you click, so it's not a very satisfying action.
There's a fingerprint sensor up here and it works with Windows Hello,
so you can log into Windows using just your fingerprint pretty quickly.
The Zenbook 3 has four speakers. There's two up here and then there's two on the bottom.
They have Harman Kardon branding and they sound better than expected.
Now, I think the king of Ultrabook speakers is the 12-inch MacBook.
If you've seen my review of it or you've heard it in real life,
it just sounds so much better than you think it would considering how small the laptop is.
The Zenbook doesn't sound as good.
It's not as clean and there's distortion at higher volumes, but they're still really solid.
This unit here is running an i7 KabyLake 6700U and three big benefits of KabyLake over SkyLake:
first, it's more energy efficient, second, it's got hardware encoding and decoding of certain video codecs
and third thing it's got a slightly faster clock speed.
And in terms of lightweight gaming,
the HD620 will let you play stuff like CS:GO at low settings with good frame rates,
but even moderately demanding games run pretty poorly,
so Overwatch will run at around 45 frames per second at the lowest possible settings and resolution.
It only has a single fan and fan noise isn't loud,
but it's audible when it comes on and it's on pretty regularly even when you're doing light tasks.
Under load the fan noise is also relatively quiet for a Core i7, but because it only has one fan,
it gets pretty hot on the inside.
And because of those high temperatures, there is significant CPU throttling.
The average user won't care about this at all.
They won't even notice it, like if you just do regular tasks on your laptop you literally won't notice it,
but if you want to render videos or play heavy games, this isn't the machine for you.
But that's the problem of having an i5 or an i7 in something this thin.
It's hard to cool it properly, unless you throttle down the CPU.
Okay, so with the Zenbook 3 you're getting excellent build quality.
This is one of the best made Asus devices I've used to date.
The 1080p display is not a touchscreen, but it's color accurate and it looks pretty nice.
The backlit keyboard is comfortable to use for its size,
the trackpad has a fingerprint sensor and has great tracking, but the clicks feel shallow.
The speaker system is surprisingly good for the size of the laptop.
Inside the KabyLake Core i7 and the integrated graphics have good energy efficiency,
but there is noticeable throttling when you push it hard.
The 16 gigs of RAM is soldered on, but the solid-state drive is upgradable.
And then there's a 40 watt hour battery that will last you around six hours of battery life.
As for who this laptop is for...
you want to make sure that you're buying it for the right reasons, because this is not a cheap device.
If you're a university student or you want to use it for work and you want something that's thin and light,
and just a productivity beast, this is a really good option.
It's... well... it is what it is...
But if you're looking for something that you can just run the CPU full-tilt all the time,
like you want to play games on it for whatever reason, no this is not that device,
get something that's a little more appropriate.
But if you're looking for ... well... a productivity machine... this is a good one.
Thumbs if you like this video, subs if you loved it, it's been nice, I'll see you guys next time.