Hey guys, Jarrod here and today we’re going to check out the ASUS ZenBook Pro and see
what it’s got to offer, as well as how it performs through a number of benchmarks to
help you decide if it’s a laptop you should consider.
Inside the box we’ve got the laptop itself, manual and warranty information, power brick
and power cable.
To start let’s look at the specs of the model I’ve got here.
There’s an Intel 7700HQ quad core Kabylake CPU which runs at 2.8GHz and can turbo up
to 3.8Ghz.
There’s 16GB of DDR4 memory running at 2,400MHz here and for storage there’s a 256GB SATA
M.2 SSD and it’s got support for PCIe based storage so you can upgrade if needed.
For the graphics we’ve got Nvidia’s 1050 in combination with a 15.6 inch 1080p 60Hz
IPS panel, we’ll see how this performs later in the benchmarks.
For the network connectivity there’s 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2, no ethernet port here
unfortunately unless you use a USB dongle.
I’ve got the matte black version of the laptop here, but it’s also available in
blue.
There’s a nice circular brushed metal look on the lid, and inside is where you’ll find
the matte black.
The entire body of the laptop is solid metal, so the lid, keyboard area, and even the base,
and there’s a silver accent around the edge.
The physical dimensions of the laptop are 36.5cm in width, 25.1cm in depth, and 1.89cm
in height.
The total weight of the laptop is advertised at 1.8kg on the ASUS website, and when testing
mine it weighed it weighed a bit more, just under 2kg.
When including the power brick and power cable for charging the total increases to around
2.5kg, so it’s fairly lightweight and portable for a 15 inch laptop.
As mentioned the screen here is a 15.6 inch 60Hz 1080p IPS glossy panel.
ASUS say that the panel can be viewed at 178 degrees, and I found that no matter what angle
I looked at it from, up or down, side to side the colours still looked great.
Although the glossy screen does look good, one of the downsides is of course that it
shows all reflections.
It’s also a touch screen, so all those fingerprints will be clearly visible.
I don’t have too much experience with touchscreens, but I found it to work well.
I’ve also measured the colours produced by the screen using the Spyder 5 Pro, and
my results returned 96% of sRGB, 67% of NTSC and 73% of AdobeRGB, so in terms of colour
reproduction it did pretty well.
I’ve also performed my usual backlight bleed test on the display, which involves having
the laptop show a completely black screen in a dark room to help emphasize any bleeding
around the edges.
I then take a long exposure photo with my camera to help display any bleed, so basically
this is a worst case scenario test.
The results were pretty good, interestingly there’s extremely minor bleed shown in the
photo that I wasn’t able to see myself, this is the first time that’s happened in
over 15 laptop reviews.
As I couldn’t actually see it even with the lights off, I’m going to say it’s
virtually non existent and not a problem practically, though of course this will vary laptop to
laptop.
While moving the display there was almost no flex, it’s really solid owing to the
metal construction and the hinge which runs along most of the base.
You can almost open the laptop with one finger, but it’s not quite heavy enough for that.
Above the display is a VGA camera, so it’s only capable of 480p video at 8 frames per
second and uses a 4 by 3 aspect ratio.
As you probably expected the video is kind of garbage, I think the microphone sounds
alright but I’ll let you judge for yourself.
The keyboard is backlit with white LEDs which can be adjusted between three brightness levels,
no options to change the colours unfortunately.
There’s plenty of spacing between the keys, but in order to get that there’s no numpad
available.
I personally prefer this as I never use the numpad myself, so if you do it’s something
to be aware of if you do.
Overall I liked typing on the keyboard, I’d describe the key presses as slightly mushy
and quiet.
There was some flex while pushing down hard on the keyboard but this wasn’t noticeable
under normal typing conditions, overall it feels fairly solid.
I also found the touchpad to work pretty well, it’s got a very smooth surface and I had
no problems using it.
Moving onto the available I/O on the left we’ve got the power input, HDMI port, and
two USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C ports with Thunderbolt 3 available.
Over on the right there’s a 3.5mm headphone and mic combo jack, a micro SD card reader
slot, and two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports.
On the front there’s just a couple of LED status indicators, while on the back there’s
nothing except some subtle ZenBook branding.
Up on the lid there’s the ASUS logo which is lit by white LEDs while powered on.
Both the lid and matte interior showed fingerprints very easily, but they were pretty easy to
wipe away.
Underneath there’s basically nothing other than two speakers towards the front, as well
as some rubber feet which help prevent the laptop from moving around on flat surfaces
when in use.
There are two more speakers on either side of the keyboard for a total of four speakers,
and I thought they sounded quite good for laptop speakers, there was some bass and they
sounded clear even at higher volumes.
Powering the laptop is a 73 Watt hour 8 cell battery, and with a full charge and doing
basic tasks such as browsing the Internet and watching YouTube with the screen on around
half brightness, keyboard lighting off and background apps disabled, I was able to use
it for 4 hours and 2 minutes.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for an hour and 4 minutes.
The laptop did pretty well here owing to that fairly large battery and lower powered 1050
graphics, and it’s one of the best 15 inch laptops I’ve tested in terms of battery
life.
During normal use with an ambient room temperature of 24 degrees celsius, the CPU idled at 38
degrees celsius while the GPU idled at 39 degrees celsius so fairly cool, and here are
the external temperatures of the laptop where you’ll actually be putting your hands.
With the CPU and GPU maxed out for half an hour with the same room temperature, the CPU
reached a maximum of 83 degrees celsius, while the GPU peaked at 79c.
No CPU throttling was observed, however GPU throttling was present as the core clock dropped
from 1,709MHz down to 1,506MHz in just a few minutes.
Despite this considering there are no fan vents underneath it ran fairly cool, though
this seems to be because of the throttling.
We can see that the keyboard area has warmed up quite a bit more, mostly towards the middle
and it was quite noticeable while typing, but wasn’t too bad.
I also found the laptop fairly quiet when not gaming, at idle it sat around the 36 decibel
mark and I could barely hear it, this is what it sounded like.
While maxing out both the CPU and GPU it went up to 47 decibels, which was a fair bit quieter
than other laptops with similar specs that I’ve tested, and here’s what that sounded
like.
Finally let’s take a look at some benchmarks, we’ll first cover some real world gaming
benchmarks followed by tests with various benchmarking tools.
While I’m aware that the 1050 isn’t meant to be a serious gaming graphics card, I wanted
to test some of my usual suite of games against it to see how it held up, also I don’t personally
have many low demanding titles, I didn’t bother with the most resource intensive titles
though.
All tests were run at the 1080p resolution with all Windows and Nvidia updates to date
applies.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was tested with the latest 1.0 version.
I’ve used the new replay feature to perform this testing, so the results between each
test should be more accurate as I can now consistently perform the same test run, however
with that said the performance of the game will vary quite a lot depending on what’s
going on in the game, so take these results with a grain of salt.
The game actually ran alright at minimum settings, but it’s not an ideal experience for an
FPS game.
Again The Witcher 3 ran fairly well at the lowest settings, not quite 60 FPS but it still
felt alright while playing.
Ultra settings in comparison felt very stuttery, as illustrated by the 1% low frame rate.
Shadow of war was similar, in that the higher settings were around the 30 FPS mark, however
at low or below the laptop was able to average around the 60 FPS point.
Although these are fairly intensive games, the 1050 didn’t do too bad when using lower
settings.
If you’re looking at a laptop purely for gaming though you’ll probably want to run
with higher settings, I generally recommend a 1060 as I’ve found that a great sweet
spot for 1080p 60 FPS gaming, otherwise a 1050Ti would probably be the minimum I’d
personally consider for gaming.
Of course it depends on the games that you’ll be playing and how demanding they are, you
can definitely still have a great experience with less demanding games on the 1050.
Now onto the benchmarking tools, while a useful indicator note that these results are less
practical compared to the real world gaming results previously shown.
We’ll start with the Unigine benchmarks, this is how the laptop performed in Heaven
benchmark with the tessellation set to extreme, and anti-aliasing set to x8, here’s how
Valley benchmark performed with anti-aliasing on x8 at various graphics settings, and finally
these are the 1080p results from their newest Superposition benchmark.
For the final graphics benchmarks I ran Fire Strike and Time spy from 3DMark and got scores
of 5,267 and 1,791 respectively, so a bit lower than other laptops with similar specs
that I’ve tested.
In Crystal Disk Mark the 256GB SATA3 M.2 SSD performed around 550 MB/s in sequential reads
and 260 MB/s in sequential writes, so pretty typical for a SATA based SSD, although a little
lower on the write speeds.
With these exact specs at the time of recording the laptop can be picked up in Australia for
$2,899 AUD.
That’s about $2250 USD for my international friends, with tax included, so it’s a little
on the more expensive side, which is to be expected as I think this is a fairly premium
laptop.
So what did you guys think of the ZenBook Pro from ASUS?
Overall I’m pretty impressed with the build quality, the whole laptop feels nice and solid.
It’s also got great battery life, and the specs are pretty decent considering the size
and weight.
You won’t be doing any serious gaming with the 1050 graphics, but it should be enough
for plenty of games.
It does cost quite a bit, but so do Razer and Apple laptops and I feel like the build
quality is similar.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments, and leave a like on the video
if you found the information useful.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this
one.