- Hey guys, this is Austin.
Take one look at the ASUS ZenBook S13,
and you will see that there is a lot going for it.
I want to give a real shout-out to ASUS
for hooking us up with the ZenBook a little bit early.
This won't be going on sale until around March or so,
so we have a slightly pre-production unit,
but beyond that, this thing looks dope.
This is a 97% screen-to-body ratio,
which means that you're essentially getting
a 14-inch screen in a 13-inch laptop size.
Now the way they do this
is with very thin bezels on the sides
as well as a little bit of a anti-notch?
A reverse notch?
You got a little tab, maybe.
Instead of moving the webcam down below the screen
or onto the keyboard, this actually seems to be
a pretty decent approach.
It gives you a little bit of something to grab
when you're opening up the laptop,
and it means that you still do have a decent-quality webcam.
Don't get me wrong, it's not amazing with a 720p resolution,
but this is so much better then if it was like this.
The other key to this is the bottom bezel.
It's there but you just can't see it,
so that's thanks to the Ergolift hinge.
So when you actually open up the laptop,
what happens is is that it slightly elevates the keyboard,
and that has a couple of advantages
including making it a little bit more comfortable
to type on, giving you more cooling,
and importantly, totally making it look like
there's not a bottom bezel of the screen at all.
It's a really clever piece of technology,
and engineering, and it's just smart.
It also helps that this is a solid display.
Now it's not a touchscreen, it is only 1080p resolution,
but honestly, I prefer that for battery life,
and importantly, the panel itself is very high quality.
It's very accurate and it's one of
the brightest laptop displays we've ever tested.
Bezel-less smartphones have kinda taken over,
and laptops are starting to take that trend,
but what's cool about this
is that it actually makes a big difference, right?
I mean, you're getting a legitimately bigger screen
in a chassis which is just as small
as a lot of the other 13-inch laptops
that we've been using the last few years.
It's one of those things where there's no real downside,
there's no real gimmicks here.
It's just some smart ideas and a cool way of making a laptop
just that little bit much better.
That brings us to the second claim to fame
for the ZenBook S.
This is the world's thinnest laptop with dedicated graphics,
and, yeah, that's pretty thin, 13 millimeters.
The NVIDIA MX150 inside
is hardly the most powerful GPU in the world,
but it is a huge step up over integrated graphics.
This is enough power to play most games
as long as you don't mind turning down
the settings a little bit.
So, for example, here in Fortnite,
I've got it at 720p Medium.
We're able to get a pretty consistent
50 to 60 frames per second.
The only issue is is that because
this is so much power in such a thin light laptop,
it means that it does run a little bit warm
especially on the keyboard,
and the fans, they can spin up a little bit.
It's not crazy loud, but it's definitely much louder
than most Ultrabooks.
Open it up, and we see that's act, wow, okay.
So, first of all, it has a dual fan setup,
which does make sense considering we do have
not only a CPU but we also have a GPU.
Also, I just realized, this says Unstoppable.
What are they, like, trying to keep JerryRigEverything out?
(cheesy pop music)
So it does look like you can swap out the NVMe SSD,
but what's really impressive is just how big of a battery
they were able to fit.
This is a full 50 watt hours.
So usually when you add a GPU to a laptop,
it means that not only is it pulling more power
so you need that bigger battery,
but on top of that, there's less room for an actual battery
as far as the physical space.
You've gotta add room for the cooling, the GPU,
but here they've got pretty much a full size cell,
and you've got the power to back it up.
So in addition to the MX150,
you have a Whiskey Lake 8th-Generation Core i5 or Core i7.
You also have up to 16 gigs of RAM
and all the way up to a one terabyte PCIe SSD.
Build quality is solid.
So not only is the keyboard deck very rigid,
but even the screen really doesn't have any flex to it.
A big reason for that is because
unlike most other laptops out there,
this starts life as a single block of aluminum
which is then CNC milled down to get what you see here.
That's usually reserved for very expensive laptops
such as Razer as well as Apple options,
so it's nice to see on a ZenBook,
and I think it's probably part of the reason why
they're able to get so much power
into such a small and thin form factor.
The fundamentals are all here.
The keyboard feels great thanks to the Ergolift design.
The touchpad is a little bit on the small side,
but it works and it does have a fingerprint sensor,
and you have a decent selection of ports.
No Thunderbolt 3, but you do have two USB-C,
a micro SD card reader as well as a full-size USB-A.
I'm really impressed with the ZenBook S.
Not only is the bezel-less display nice,
but more importantly for me,
you're getting a lot of performance here
without sacrificing the form factor.
I don't have to carry around a heavier laptop
to have to my GPU as well as have my 14-inch screen.
Now the only downside here
is that price is not announced yet,
so as long as this is reasonably priced,
I think that they've definitely got a winner here.