Amazon.com: ASUS ZenBook 15 Ultra-Slim Laptop 15.6” FHD NanoEdge Bezel, Intel Core i7-10510U, 16GB RAM, 512GB PCIe SSD, GeForce GTX 1650, Innovative ScreenPad 2.0, Windows 10 Pro, UX534FTC-AS77, Grey

I really, really wanted to like this laptop. 10th Gen i7, 16GB, 4K LCD, NVIDIA GTX1650, 512GB SSD? Where else can you get a laptop with those specs under $1200? I couldn’t find one.

At first I was totally impressed with the styling of the laptop, the Screenpad, USB-C port, etc. but once I started using it, things started to go downhill from there.

Screenpad:
The Screenpad is cute but is just a gimmick that we can all live without. I like that I can have a YouTube video playing music while I work on the main screen, nice to have but not necessary. I also like that I could have a calculator launched and that you can switch between using it as a second monitor and touchpad as the click of a icon. But that is where the good ended and the bad begins. The Screenpad at times became unresponsive, and I could not switch back to the touchpad. It appeared to cause my system to lockup as well. Like any touch pad the sensitivity level is also very important since mouse buttons have all but been eliminated. Due to the multi function design of the Screenpad/Touchpad it does require a little but more pressure as if the buttons were still there. I found this to be problematic to my work flow if I was not using an external mouse as it sometimes didn’t register my click, forcing me to push down on it as I would a mouse button. I also notice that if I used it as a second screen placing a browser tab or even a video there, I would be spending a lot of time looking down, which quickly became uncomfortable to my neck, reminding me of the pain I have previously suffered due to poor posture and flaws in ergonomic designs of some computers.

Keyboard:
They keyboard is simply too cramped for my liking and has been shrunk down in order to squeeze in a 10-key numeric pad. The placement of the up/down – left/right arrows is completely awkward, and the color of the keys are silver. While this isn’t a huge problem, it is an issue due to the light color of the letter and numbers due to their being back-light capable. When you are in a brightly lit room, they can be difficult to see if the back-light is enabled, and when you are in a dark room, the back-lighting isn’t really that bright. The keys are also not textured in other words they are slippery which is not good when typing aside from the fact that the keys are slightly smaller than normal laptop keyboards due to being shrunk down to fight in a 10-key pad. Worst of all is the placement of the power button which is on the keyboard right in line with the rest of the keys. I accidentally hit it several times which activated the sleep mode before I changed that function in the control panel under power management. The more I used it, the less I liked this keyboard and the more it seemed to bug me. Looking back, I recall having a similar issue with a keyboard in an older multimedia HP laptop, same lighting issues and slipperiness with the paint eventually coming off the keys in under 3 years of use.

GPU/CPU:
The GPU in this laptop is a fairly decent model, and while I did not purchase this laptop for playing games, the included NVIDIA card should be adequate as an entry level graphics accelerator. My chosen use for this laptop was for Adobe Lightroom. I figured the Intel Core i7-10510U, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 4GB GPU; 16GB RAM would be a major improvement in processing time over my Surface Pro 4 with a 7th Gen i5, integrated Intel graphics card and only 8GB RAM. I was surprised to find that this was not the case. The performance using LR was about the same as if not worse that I had experienced using my Surface Pro 4. I thought maybe it was the a fluke, but I did a side by side comparison using the same catalog and image files and to my surprise, I found no noticeable increase in processing speed using the ASUS over my beloved Surface Pro 4 tablet. I disabled all background applications and while that did improve performance, it was anything to write home about. The one thing that did stand out was the fan noise. Not a defective fan noise, but the sound of the fan accelerating to keep the system cool. This was fairly loud when compared to the fan in the smaller, less powerful Surface tablet. So loud that it was distracting.

LCD:
Great 4K Screen, vivid colors, images and movies looked great, but it seemed just a bit dim for my liking but not a deal breaker since I normally use an external monitor or two as part of my process.

USB-C:
I purposefully sought out a laptop that had at least one USB-C port so that I could use two external monitors, only to find out that I can’t do that with this model as it us only USB-C Gen 2 and not Thunderbolt. This was a deal-breaker for me since the listing did not disclose the which generation USB-C was on-board.

I checked the ASUS website and found that none of the available models with the configuration I needed (i7, UHD, 16GM RAM, NVIDIA Geoforce GTX 1650 or higher was available with Thunderbolt. Perhaps it was due to the Screenpad being on-board. The only one I found that did have the configuration I needed was the Zenbook Duo. Which was roughly $2000 more in price, and again, having a screen that I had to look down at to view was a non-started due to neck pain it will cause although I did initially like the idea.

I ended up initiating a return as I could not find a configuration I was looking for in a 15″ lightweight form-factor made by ASUS. I have previous ASUS 15 inch laptop with a 3D NVIDIA card that served me well that I really enjoyed but it too had it’s own issues, A 1-TB HD and an integrated 128GB SDD where the OS resided that required a complete disassembly to change. The SSD failed, I had to send it back for replacement, and the realized I needed a bigger SSD drive as applications were getting larger and larger with every new release. But I thought I’d give ASUS another chance with this new design, but unfortunately this was not the laptop for me.

I replaced it with a Dell XPS 15 (paid $600 more with 3-yrs customer support and 3yrs anti-virus), slightly heavier, same configuration except that it has a 9th Gen i7 and USB-C Thunderbolt. The Dell has an OLED screen that is much brighter, text and graphics are crisp, the case is silver but the keyboard is a carbon fiber Charcoal black with no 10-key pad allowing for full-sized laptop keys except for the arrows with is quite noticeable when using them but I can live with that. Performance was noticeably faster which was quite surprising and fan noise was not as loud as the one on the ASUS and the fans did not run as fast when running LR with no other apps running in the background indicating that the heat dissipation on the XPS was better overall (could be the difference between the 9th and 10 Gen due to the additional cores). In contrast, the 10 Gen i7 and the 9th Gen i7 are comparable processors without a huge difference in design but the 10th simply has more cores, however they say for gaming and particularly Lightroom, the 10 Gen should be noticeably faster. This was not the case in my side-by-side comparison between the ASUS Zenbook 15 and the XPS 15. The 9th Gen i7 in the XPS ran faster and the laptop ran quieter than the ASUS Zenbook 15 with the 10 Gen i7. I happily returned the ASUS the following morning and have never looked back on that decision. The Dell has it’s own little quirks, but they are things I can live with.

SUMMARY:

If you need USB-C Thunderbolt, this laptop is not for you. USB-C Gen 2 does not have display port capabilities, meaning you cannot use it to connect external monitors to your laptop. Thunderbolt has faster transfer speeds. It’s speed allows for quicker access more data when compared to USB-C Gen 2. If you are looking for a gaming laptop, get one of their dedicated gaming laptops instead, skip the Screenpad and upgrade to the RTX processor over the GTX, you’ll thank me later.

If you don’t need to hook up more than one external monitor in additional to the the one you can connect via the on-board HDMI port, you can live with the keyboard issues I pointed out and don’t require or anticipate heavy processor use, this is a cute laptop that might be for you. It really looks good, especially the Screenpad if looks are what you are after, this one will get a lot of looks at the coffee shop. YMMV