Awards
WHAT IS THE ASUS ZENBOOK UX305 ?
The Asus UX305 is quite simply one of the most exciting laptops we’ve seen in years. It continues Asus’ long line of Zenbook ultrabooks, but really sets itself apart by bringing the same level of build quality and design we’ve come to expect, at a price many more people can afford.
Starting at £649, the UX305 undercuts the majority of ultrabooks by some £350, while it’s £200 cheaper than the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Air. There are a few areas where compromises have been made, but for the most part this is a phenomenal machine.
ASUS ZENBOOK UX305 – DESIGN
Asus has long been the nearest competitor to Apple when it comes to ultrabook design. Right from when it launched its first model, the UX31E, it absolutely nailed the premium metal look and feel, and it’s steadily refined it since.
The UX305 actually takes a slightly different tack to those earliest efforts, largely eschewing the shinier brushed metal look for a more matte-looking etched finish. All, that is, except for the lid which retains the brand’s signature concentric circle pattern. It’s not quite as angular, either, with the corners rounded off like on the MacBook Air.
Regardless, the overall effect is stunning. In some ways the dark mauve colour takes away
a little of the immediate ‘premium metal’ vibe when viewed from a distance but up close it’s a marvel, though it does pick up fingerprints easily, so you may want to keep a cleaning cloth to hand.
What’s most striking is its slimness. Thanks to the use of Intel’s latest ultra-low-power Broadwell chips, this laptop is passively cooled, eliminating the need to fit in a fan. This allows the base of this laptop to be just over 7mm thick while the whole thing is only 12.3mm at its thickest.
What’s more it weighs just 1.2kg. This compares to 1.36kg for the 13-inch MacBook Air, while that model is also a fair bit thicker at 17mm.
ASUS ZENBOOK UX305 – FEATURES
What makes this thin and lightness doubly impressive is that Asus hasn’t skimped on connectivity, indeed it’s better than many ultrabooks.
Whereas many ultrabooks have only two USB ports, the UX305 has three, and they’re all USB 3.0. There’s also a full-size SD card reader, a microHDMI and of course a headphone jack. A couple of pin-prick lights on the right edge indicate that the laptop is charging and if it’s on.
You don’t get a wired network connection, but Asus includes a USB Ethernet adapter and there’s inbuilt 802.11 b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi.
You also get a 13.3-inch 1080p IPS screen above which sits a 720p webcam. A QHD (3200 x 1800 pixels) option, which we previewed here, was set to arrive too, but it looks like nowhere is going to stock that model any time soon.
The headline feature here, though, is the Intel Core M-5Y10c processor. This is a fully-fledged Broadwell part in terms of its power saving features, so it positively sips power, but performance wise it is a far cry from Core i5 or i7 branded models.
The most obvious limitation is clock speed, which is restricted to just 998MHz. It can boost up to a maximum of 1.9Ghz but this is can only achieved temporarily in some single-threaded applications.
It also only features Intel HD 5300 graphics, which is much slower than the HD 5500 or HD 6000 used in the higher power chips.
The upshot is that performance is down compared to the likes of the MacBook Air 13-inch and other more premium and thicker notebooks.
Conversely, because the chip is so frugal it has a TDP of just 4.5W compared to the 15W of a Core i5/i7 product. Not only does this mean Asus can get massive battery life from a smaller battery, but it also allows the laptop to be passively cooled so its thinner and has no fan noise.
ASUS ZENBOOK UX305 – SCREEN AND SOUND QUALITY
For the most part the Zenbook UX305’s screen is a triumph. To have a 1080p IPS display on such an affordable laptop is quite something and the general advantages you’d expect shine through. The relatively high resolution ensures everything looks sharp, while viewing angles are excellent – something which is helped by the reflection-killing matte finish. However, it isn’t perfect.
The two main problems are that there’s a bit of backlight bleed along the bottom edge. This will vary from unit to unit to a certain extent so you may be lucky and get one where it’s less obvious but on our unit there are streaks of light coming up from the bottom edge. You'll hardly notice them in normal use but when the screen is dark – such as when watching a movie – you can just make them out. There’s also a very slight graininess to the display such that pure blocks of colour – particularly white – look less solid than on the best displays.
One final issue, that’s actually more of an oddity than an actual problem is that the auto brightness setting is all over the place, randomly brightening and dimming the display every now and then. It seems to be reacting to ambient light but it does so in a very on/off, rather than linear, fashion and you don’t seem to be able to override it.
In all instances, though, we’re being particularly picky and this is still a good display that is ample for general work and entertainment purposes. This is something that’s backed up by our dispcal calibration tests which report the display as having brightness of 313 nits and an impressive black level of 0.23, making for a contrast ratio of 1351:1 – only a handful of laptops do better.
Colour temperature is decent too, coming in at 6692. The DeltaE is also excellent, with a measurement of just 1.07. Coverage of the sRGB colour space is not outstanding, at 83%, but it’s well above average and plenty good enough for casual photo and video editing. Only the most discerning would be anything other than very happy with this display.
ASUS ZENBOOK UX305 – PERFORMANCE
As hinted at earlier one of the key limitations of this laptop is its very low-power processor and sure enough this comes through in our benchmarks. A PC Mark 7 score of 4144 may not sound too bad but it is propped up by the fast SSD. Instead the Geekbench 3 score of 4098 really shows how relatively lowly the performance of this machine is.
This also comes across in real world use where we particularly found the machine was that much more prone to freezing up when a rogue advert on a website caused the web browser CPU usage to ramp up. Obviously anything computationally intensive was also noticeably slower so editing video, for instance, is really going to be noticeably slower on this machine compared to your average laptop.
ASUS ZENBOOK UX305 – BATTERY LIFE
The reason for all this compromise in performance is the expectation of getting great battery life from such a slim and light machine, and sure enough Asus has managed this with aplomb.
Using our standard PowerMark battery test where we run a test simulating a loop of 10 minutes web browsing and 5 minutes watching video, the 45Wh battery lasted a whopping 11 hours 50 mins. That’s second only to the 13-inch MacBook Air, which managed 12 hours 50 mins but that’s from a larger 54Wh battery and using a slightly different test.
It really is a phenomenal score and goes a long way to justifying any other compromises. Of course real world usage will be slightly lower than this but you can still realistically expect to get upward of 10 hours of use from a single charge. You’ll also get back up to 30% charge from 30 mins of charging, giving you well over 3 hours of use.
No comments:
Post a Comment