Asus ZenBook 15 Review – Price, Pros and Cons | Compsmag

Asus knows for sure how to make a perfect laptop. The company also knows how to turn gimmicks into bona fide functions. Asus combines both talents on the latest ZenBook 15 (UX534F). Priced at $1,399, the laptop bucks the silver/rose-gold trend and comes with an enchanting blue chassis that is just as durable as it is attractive. The company also brings ScreenPad back into a larger space, with even more functionality. Use an Intel Comet Lake processor, discrete graphics, and a longer battery life, and you have an excellent laptop for mobile professionals who don’t want to spend on the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Here is our Asus ZenBook 15 Review.

1. Asus ZenBook 15 Review – Design

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Like most Zenbooks, the UX534F is a feast for the eyes. The aluminum royal blue chassis covered with the revealing concentric circle pattern from Asus evokes images of a beautiful but restless sea. The Asus logo in the center of the lid shines like a golden retreat in the rough waters. The metal lid feels cool, but it is a fingerprint magnet, which I discovered as soon as I tried stroking.

Opening the lid offers even more of that blue and gold motif. The whole of the deck is made of royal blue aluminum, crowned by a golden opening with the Asus ZenBook in the middle. The keyboard is also blue with golden letters. Directly below is a huge touchpad that also serves as Asus’ own ScreenPad 2.0 (more on that later).

As you open the lid, you implement Asus’ ErgoLift hinge, which slightly raises the keyboard deck, providing a more comfortable typing experience. The raised deck also provides better cooling, leading to better performance. It also places a little space between the speakers at the bottom and a flat surface for better audio.

The ZenBook 15 offers a large number of ports that are suitable for different displays and peripherals if necessary. On the right, you have a USB 3.1 Type-A port (Gen 2), a USB 3.1 Type-C port (Gen 2), HDMI, an SD card reader, and the power connection. On the left, you will get another Type-A Gen 2 port and the headset connection.

2. Keyboard and TouchPad

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Spacious and above all comfortable, Asus did very well with the keyboard of the ZenBook 15. My fingers never bottomed out, and I never had to worry that I accidentally hit the wrong key because of the reasonably large keys. It is also pretty impressive that the company has added a numeric keypad without shrinking the main keys and still had room to add arrow keys. My biggest complaint is the background lighting, which I wanted to let shine through the letters, which would help to type in the dark.

The 5.1 x 2.6-inch laptop’s touchpad has more than enough real estate to navigate through documents and web pages and execute Windows 10 gestures. Performing pinch-to-zoom, scrolling with two fingers, and tapping with three fingers, was fast and responsive. The bottom corners of the pad gave springy feedback, accompanied by a gentle click.

3. Asus ZenBook 15 Review – Display

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Ah, the wonders of engineering and design. In one way or another, Asus succeeded in refining a 15.6-inch, 1920 x 1080 screen in a 14-inch chassis. And to make the pot sweeter, the laptop has super thin edges. Not as slim as the Dell XPS 15 with its InfinityEdge edges, but still pretty impressive. It also helps that the screen looks good. The marigold dress by actress Issa Rae watched the 1080p trailer for The Photograph and sparkled against her mocha-brown skin and red-brown hair. It gave the effect of living, breathing sunlight. Details were so sharp that I could see the soft waves in her long, draping ponytail.

As beautiful as the screen may seem, I was shocked to see that the ZenBook 15 represented only 103% of the sRGB range. It is higher than our 100% minimum, but nowhere near the 123% premium laptop average or the 157, 159, and 210% produced by the Spectre x360, Prestige 15, and XPS 15 respectively. It was within the range of the 16 -inch MacBook Pro, which received 114%.

Another area where the ZenBook 15 failed was the brightness, with an average panel of 279 nits. It beat the 247 nits of the Spectre x360. But it is far removed from the average of 358-nit or the 418, 428, and 429 nits of the XPS 15, Prestige 15, and MacBook Pro, respectively.

4. ScreenPad 2.0

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It’s back! The ScreenPad technology from Asus is bigger and better than ever and returns as ScreenPad 2.0, with more functionality than its predecessor. Powered by the ScreenXpert software, ScreenPad 2.0 is designed to complement Microsoft Office, to improve productivity. The LCD touchpad has a resolution of 2160 x 1080, with a refresh rate of 60 Hz.

ScreenPad 2.0 is in the giant touchpad, and to turn it on or off, press F6. When activated, to switch between touchpad and ScreenPad, you must press the X button in the upper right corner of the touchpad to go to ScreenPad and press the touchpad icon in the lower left to switch. When activated, ScreenPad 2.0 has nine pre-installed apps, including the number key, that turns the pad into a large digital number block; Handwriting, in case you need to write something down; and Spotify, when you need a little work music.

My favorite ScreenPad app remains Quick Key, which allows you to create shortcuts that can be used in certain apps. The standard quick keys of Quick Keys, for example, correspond to Windows 10 shortcuts such as cut, paste, and copy. Speaking of Microsoft, utilities such as Slide, Doc, and SheetXpert work together with PowerPoint, Word, and Excel. As cool as that is, I rarely use Office 365 anymore, so I hope Asus has something to do with Google.

You can also add third-party apps such as Spotify to ScreenPad for easy access. These apps can be used in ScreenPad 2.0, or you can communicate with them via the main screen with the App Switcher function. And if you want quick access to an app in ScreenPad, you can pin it, the reby dragging it to the Add icon.

5. Asus ZenBook 15 Review – Graphics

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You are not going to play Red Dead Redemption 2 (at least not well) with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q GPU of the ZenBook Pro with 4 GB VRAM, but you can expect many AAA titles. But the discrete graphics card is there to help with the hard work when it comes to content creation at medium level and multitasking.

However, the notebook scored 153 frames per second on the Dirt 3 benchmark and easily beat the average of 60 fps. Equipped with their own 1650 Max-Q GPUs, the Spectre x360 and Prestige 15 reached 61 and 181 fps respectively, while the XPS and it’s full 1650 produced 80 fps. For those moments when you work in a spreadsheet or watch a video, the ZenBook 15 switches to the integrated Intel UHD Graphics GPU.

6. Audio

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I must say that I was surprised by how good the ZenBook 15 speakers sounded. Backed by a smart amplifier and the Asus Audio Wizard software, the Harmon / Kardon speakers in my small bedroom bathed in the warm singing of Donell Jones on his cover of “Knocks Me Off My Feet.” Of the three presets (bypass, music, and films), music became my mainstay, because it provided The Best overall performance. That means that although it has no subwoofer, the low end was a bit heavy without distorting the mid-tones and treble.

7. Asus ZenBook 15 Review – Performance

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Asus is one of the first laptops that gives the world its first taste to Intel’s 10th generation Comet Lake processors. The ZenBook 15 has a 1.8 GHz Intel Core i7-10510U processor with 16 GB RAM. Comet Lake processors are a chip of 14 nanometers and are the next step compared to the 8th generation of Whiskey Lake chips. That said, it’s all about high performance, especially with heavy workloads and multitasking. Intel even claims that Comet Lake chips generally offer 16% better performance than the chips of the previous generation.

The laptop did pretty well during my multitasking test. I launched 30 tabs in Google Chrome, half of which streamed video from YouTube or Twitch while working in a massive spreadsheet in Google Docs. I did not see any signs of delay, even when I started using formulas.

However, the Asus ZenBook 15 was less impressive during our synthetic benchmarks. When we were running Geekbench 5.0, which measures overall performance, the ZenBook 15 scored 4,410, surpassing the average of 4,367 premium laptops. The MSI Prestige 15 and its Core i7-10710U CPU, however, reached 4,390. The Dell XPS 15 and Apple MacBook Pro with their Core i9-9900HK CPU achieved 7,584 and 7,201, respectively.

During the File Transfer test, the 1 TB PCIe NVMe SSD of the ZenBook took 15 6 seconds to duplicate 4.97 GB of multimedia files. That is a transfer rate of 771.1 megabytes per second, which was sufficient to surpass most of the competition, including the average of 538.8 MBps, except for the MacBook Pro, whose 2 TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD delivered no less than 1,017.9 MBps.

8. Asus ZenBook 15 Review – Heat

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For all purposes, the Asus ZenBook 15 must be a cross-incinerator, with its two screens and relatively robust specifications. But after 15 minutes of playing a YouTube video in full screen, the touchpad only had 84 degrees Fahrenheit. That is well below our comfort limit of 95 degrees. The center of the laptop reached 88 degrees, while the chassis rose to 90 degrees.

9. Battery Life

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Two screens are better than one, except when it comes to battery life. The Asus ZenBook 15 lasted 8 hours and 34 minutes during the battery test (continuous internet browsing via WiFi with 150 nits screen brightness) with ScreenPad 2.0 switched off. That is better than last year’s ZenBook Pro 15, which lasted only 5:14. However, it should be noted that my iteration of the Asus ZenBook 15 only has a 1080p panel compared to the 4K screen of the Pro. And while the time of the ZenBook beat the Prestige 15 (7:55) and Spectre x360 (8:09), it was a few minutes less than the average of 8:37 premium laptop and not nearly the 10:55 of the 16 -inch MacBook Pro.

10. Asus ZenBook 15 Review – Conclusion

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The Asus ZenBook 15 is not a story of reinvention. It’s a story of making small adjustments here and there and polishing up what was already a great laptop. The ZenBook 15 retains the glamorous appearance of its predecessor and adds MIL-SPEC durability to the mix. It keeps the surprisingly useful ScreenPad 2.0, makes it bigger and adds more valuable apps. The keyboard now has a numeric keypad, and the edges are considerably smaller. Well, the battery life is now almost twice as long.

The most significant addition to the ZenBook is Comet Lake from Intel, which is powerful enough for multitasking, but this chip is no match for the Core i9 processors in the Dell XPS 15 and 16-inch MacBook Pro. The Dell and Apple laptops also benefit from brighter screens, while the more expensive MacBook Pro lasts much longer for a fee.

For $1,399, the ZenBook 15 has a lot of profit, although in particular, ScreenPad 2.0, which the company is yet to prove, is more than just a gimmick. And to be honest, the more I use it, the more inclined I am to believe Asus. In general, the ZenBook Pro is an excellent choice for mobile professionals who want to get all the functionality out of their notebook.