The ASUS StudioBook 17 is a laptop for creative professionals and has some interesting components
that I’ve never tested before.
For the specs my config has a 9th gen Xeon processor, Nvidia Quadro T1000 graphics, 16gb
of memory in single channel, however I installed dual channel for all testing, a 16:10 17”
IPS screen and two 1TB NVMe M.2 SSDs in a RAID 0 array.
For network connectivity there’s WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5, and it comes with a USB to
ethernet adapter if you prefer a cable.
The finish is called Star Grey, the lid is all metal with a brushed finish.
Inside the keyboard deck area appears to be metal, while the wrist rest is a grooved plastic.
The overall build quality felt excellent, and there were no sharp corners or edges anywhere.
ASUS lists the weight as 2.4kg and mine was a little above this.
With the 180 watt power brick and cables for charging included the total rises to around
3kg.
The StudioBook is definitely on the larger side, particularly in terms of depth, the
16:10 screen increases this but the screen still has a chin.
That said it’s not too thick at 1.8cm.
It’s also available in a 15” model which should be a bit more portable, so it will
depend on how much you need the larger screen when travelling.
The screen is one of the unique points of the StudioBook, that 16:10 aspect ratio gives
us a 1920 by 1200 resolution, so you get more vertical viewing space compared to most other
16:9 1080p laptops.
It’s got a matte finish and uses Optimus.
As for colour gamut, we’re looking at 100% of sRGB, 86% of NTSC, 89% of AdobeRGB, and
96% of DCI-P3, so quite good results.
ASUS claims that it’s got a Delta E of less than 1.5, unfortunately I’m not able to
measure this.
Brightness was fine at just above 300 nits maxed out, though the contrast ratio was a
bit lower at 700:1.
The backlight bleed in my unit was not great, the bottom left corner in particular was noticeable
when viewing darker content, but this will vary between laptop and panel.
There was a little screen flex when intentionally trying to move the metal lid, but overall
it felt quite sturdy, the hinges were on the stiffer side and the whole act of opening
and closing the lid felt solid.
The keyboard flex was on the lower side and it felt strong enough.
The laptop couldn’t quite be opened up with one finger, it’s more back heavy though
it still sat fine on my lap, and the screen goes the full 180 degrees back allowing you
to share it.
Despite the thinner bezels, the 720p camera is found above the display in the center,
there’s no Windows Hello support though.
This is what the camera and microphone look and sound like on the ASUS StudioBook.
There’s a fingerprint scanner on the left hand side below the keyboard which I found
to work well and quick enough.
The keyboard has white backlighting which illuminates all keys and secondary key functions,
and brightness can be adjusted between three levels or turned off with the F7 shortcut.
Despite all the available space the function keys up top still felt a little small, and
the arrow keys were on the smaller side too, and unlike the rest of the keys they have
the same grooved texture as the wrist rest area.
Typing went well, the keys have 1.4mm travel and felt a little clicky to press, here’s
how it sounds to give you an idea of what to expect.
The power button is up the top right and is separate to the keyboard keys, and there’s
also some air vents up the top above the keyboard.
The glass precision touchpad feels nice and smooth, it clicks down anywhere and works
well, though I would have preferred it if it was a bit larger given how much space is
available.
Although there’s no regular numpad, you can hold down the top right corner of the
touchpad which will turn it into one, and you can still use the mouse normally in this
mode.
Fingerprints don’t really show up on the interior due to the grooved finish, the matte
keyboard deck and lid were a bit more susceptible but as a smooth surface it’s easy to clean.
On the left from the back there’s a lock slot, air exhaust vent, power input, Type-C
Thunderbolt 3 port with 4 lanes and DisplayPort 1.4 support, HDMI 2.0 output, USB 3.1 Gen2
Type-A port, 3.5mm audio combo jack, and an SD card slot.
On the right from the front there are two USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A ports and another air
exhaust vent.
The majority of the I/O is on the left, presumably to keep cables out of the way of your mouse
hand if you’re right handed.
Both the Type-C and HDMI ports are wired directly to the Nvidia graphics.
The back just has some air exhaust vents, while the front has an indentation in the
middle with the status LEDs.
Underneath is pretty clean, there are just air intake vents towards the back along with
two speakers along the front.
The bottom panel came off easily once you remove 11 Phillips head screws of 3 varying
sizes.
Inside we’ve got the two M.2 storage slots on the left in the center, battery down the
bottom, two memory slots in the middle which have ECC support with this Xeon model, and
that’s it.
WiFi is soldered to the motherboard just to the right of the battery, it’s WiFi 6 so
there will be no need to replace it for a while at least.
The front speakers sounded pretty good, they were clear at higher volumes with a little
bass, I’d rate them as above average for a laptop.
They got very loud at max volume, and this did result in a little wrist rest vibration
which was occasionally audible, though honestly I doubt you’d keep it in excess of 100 decibels
anyway.
Otherwise the latencymon results weren’t looking ideal.
Despite the larger 17 inch form factor, there’s just a 3-cell 57Wh battery inside.
I’ve tested it with the screen brightness at 50%, background apps disabled and keyboard
lighting off, and in my YouTube playback test it lasted for just over 5 hours.
For the gaming result, normally Nvidia GeForce experience caps FPS to 30 with battery boost,
however the Quadro Experience app we have here doesn’t seem to do this.
Despite running at 50 FPS on average which would use more power, we’re still able to
play for over an hour.
The MyASUS software lets you swap between the lower Dynamic and higher Velocity modes
which modifies fan speed and performance.
I’ve tested thermals in a 21 degree Celsius ambient room temperature, at idle it was on
the cooler side.
The rest of the results aim to represent worst case scenarios where both the CPU and GPU
are active, and were tested with the Aida64 CPU stress test with CPU only checked and
the Heaven benchmark at max settings.
In dynamic mode the temps are quite good, though CPU thermal throttling was taking place
once we go into velocity mode, even when we undervolt the processor with Intel XTU.
Adding a cooling pad on top of this was enough to remove it though.
These are the clock speeds for the same tests just shown.
The clock speed reported by the Quadro graphics was unchanged regardless of mode, otherwise
the processor speed saw a nice improvement by enabling velocity mode.
Undervolting boosted us further and was only just below the full 4.2GHz all core turbo
boost speed of the Xeon processor, while the cooling pad was able to get us all the way.
These are the power levels for each part, the processor seems to cap out at 55 watts
while under combined CPU and GPU loads which is a fair limit, though this is probably made
possible owing to the Quadro T1000 graphics only running up to 40 watts.
When we look at CPU only workloads though, we can see that this same 55 watt limit is
achieved in the lowest dynamic mode, while velocity can run in excess of 65 watts depending
on the cooling.
The clock speeds aren’t quite as high as what we saw in the combined workloads earlier
as this test has more options enabled that hit the CPU hard, however we’re still able
to hit 4GHz over all 6 cores which is a fair result, and the temperatures were sitting
in the low 90s.
Here are the Cinebench scores during these different modes to give you an idea of CPU
only performance, the multicore scores are similar to what we’d see with a 6 core i7
9750H or 10750H, though the single core results are up a bit as the Xeon chip has a higher
4.7GHz single core boost speed.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, it was barely
getting to 30 on the keyboard at idle, so quite cool.
With the stress tests going in dynamic mode it gets to the high 30s in the middle which
barely felt warm.
In velocity mode the hot spots were actually a little cooler despite performing better
as the fan speed increases, let’s have a listen to how loud they get.
At idle it sounded silent, with the stress tests going in dynamic mode it was still relatively
quiet at around 40 decibels, and didn’t get too much worse in velocity mode.
Given the processor performance was better than many other louder machines I’ve tested
I think this seems reasonable, but will likely in part be due to the lower tier GPU adding
less heat.
The ASUS ProArt series laptops are ISV certified, which apparently means apps from Adobe like
photoshop and premiere, autocad and 3d studio max from autodesk, solidworks and more should
work well.
I’ve used Adobe Premiere to export one of my laptop review videos at 4K.
The StudioBook was on the lower side out of the options tested, most likely due to the
graphics holding it back.
I’ve also tested Premiere but with the Puget Systems benchmark this time, and similar results
where it was behind many other cheaper laptops.
Adobe Photoshop was also tested with the Puget Systems benchmark, and this test seems to
rely more on processor performance, and it seems to be competing with the Ryzen 4800H.
Davinci Resolve wasn’t doing too well here, as a workload that seems to benefit from GPU
power, our lower quadro graphics is only a little above MSI’s Alpha 15.
While not a gaming laptop, I thought it would be interesting to test a few titles just to
get an idea of how the Quadro T1000 stacks up compared to other options out there.
In Battlefield 5 I’ve got the StudioBook 17 highlighted in red.
It’s closer to the bottom of the stack due to the lower powered GPU, but it is available
with higher powered options, should you need them.
These are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built in benchmark.
The results are similar to many of the 1650 machines tested due to similar wattage and
VRAM.
These are the results from Shadow of the Tomb raider with the built in benchmark at highest
settings, and again it’s around the same sort of GTX 1650 area, so while not really
capable of max settings gaming, low to medium settings should go ok, similarly to the 1650.
I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test the storage, and the RAID 0 array made up of two
1TB NVMe M.2 SSDs was performing extremely well.
The UHS-II SD card slot was also performing quite nicely, the card clicks in and only
sticks out a little when inserted.
For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.
At the time of recording, I haven’t been able to find the exact configuration I’ve
tested with here.
In the US you can get the i7 version with better GPU for $2000 USD, however the price
can vary significantly based on hardware selection.
So basically, the StudioBook 17 is a larger yet still thin laptop for professional use,
it’s available with the option of Xeon CPU, ECC memory and Quadro graphics, though I thought
it was a bit strange that mine came with single channel memory.
The keyboard and touchpad worked well, though given the size the numpad within the touchpad
seems like a strange choice, I feel like they could have fit a normal one, but they must
have wanted to keep it well spaced out.
The port selection is great, Thunderbolt, fast SD slot, and USB 3.1 Gen2, no slower
Gen1 at all.
The build quality was excellent and overall the machine felt solid.
The 16:10 screen looked good in terms of colour, though brightness was average, contrast below
average, and the bleed patch wasn’t good, though that will vary.
The exterior thermals remain cool regardless of the workload being run, and you’ve got
the option of limiting how hot the internals get at the expense of some performance.
In terms of raw performance for the dollar can get better with, say a cheaper gaming
laptop, it really comes down to how much you value the professional aspects such as 16:10
screen, quadro graphics and nice build quality for instance.
I haven’t tested too many of these professional workstation style laptops out yet, but I’ll
be looking at MSI’s WS66 soon so stay tuned if you’re after more.
Let me know what you thought about the ASUS StudioBook 17 down in the comments, is it
something you’d consider for professional workloads? and if you’re new to the channel
get subscribed for future laptop reviews and tech videos like this one.