Of late, I found an increasing likeliness towards sleek and portable laptops which is the reason why I called dibs on the newly launched Asus ZenBook UX430 as soon as it arrived in India. There was a time when all I wanted was a powerful laptop that could satiate the hunger for games in me. That phase was followed by the hunt for a laptop that was easier to carry around and could help me throughout the day without a hitch.
This is when I got fascinated with ultrabooks and laptops with a smaller footprint that didn't compromise on performance. Now, the ZenBook UX430 is a laptop that offers portability with panache but at the end of the day, isn’t a gaming notebook. That is because when a company goes with such a form factor, it has to compromise on various different levels which ends up as a disadvantage for the said product.
The UX430 isn’t a perfect notebook and leaves much to be desired for but it is a great experience just using it for your day’s work and consuming content on that gorgeous display to end your day.
Price and availability
So, the Asus ZenBook UX430 is available in India and its price starts from Rs 74,990 for the base variant. The ZenBook UX430UA which is the base model has been outfitted with an integrated Intel HD graphics chip and is the only differentiating factor.
The UX430UQ, on the other hand, is the high-end variant of this ZenBook starting at Rs 93,990 bringing in a discrete NVIDIA GeForce 940MX to the table whereas the UX430UN variant comes with NVIDIA GeForce MX150, starting from Rs 95,990.
We got our hands on the ZenBook UX430UQ which I have reviewed here.
Design
Right after I unpacked the laptop and picked it up in my hands, most of us were wowed by the fact that how light and sleek this ZenBook was. Just then I knew that it would be perfect for the kind of work I did, which is typing endlessly and binge-watching occasionally. The laptop weighs just 1.25kg and is on par with its sleek design which measures 15.9mm thin, something along the lines of Dell’s XPS 13 or even Apple’s MacBook Air. But that wasn’t the only reason I went gaga over it.
The Asus ZenBook UX430 is crafted out of aluminium, the finish of which is so exquisite that I felt amazing holding this laptop in my hand. The aluminium lid features an engraved Asus logo with a concentric-circle design which gives the laptop its premium feel. If you get your hands on the Royal Blue or Rose Gold color variants, they come with a special nano-imprint lithography coating which essentially looks like glass but is glossy in look and feel. It is also a fingerprint and smudge magnet so you might want to keep that cleaning cloth with you at all times, in case your OCD kicks in.
The base of the laptop has a brushed finish which along with some information, two speaker grills (something, I'm not a fan of) and four rubber feet that help it maintain the grip on the table. The ZenBook has a clean and minimalistic design which makes it elegant and captivating to look at.
The IO ports on the ZenBook UX430 are fairly normal but one will have to endure the dongle life if they want to use HDMI and Ethernet. Thankfully, Asus provides both of them in-the-box, so brownie points for that. The left edge of the laptop has a power-in port followed by a USB 3.1, Micro HDMI, headphone jack and USB-C while the right edge houses a USB 2.0 and an SD card slot.
Display
Asus ZenBook UX430 has a chassis size of 13-inches but the company has managed to outfit it with a larger, 14-inch Full HD (1920x1080 pixels) panel. The result is that the display holds a whopping 80 percent screen-to-body ratio and just 7.18mm bezels on the sides.
It is a treat to watch the display in action as the anti-glare coating on the display with matte finish dismisses the reflections entirely making it worthwhile. Watching content such as movies and shows on this laptop is a really amazing experience.
The display panel on the ZenBook has an ultra-wide sRGB color gamut of a full 100 percent making the color representation on it pretty accurate. With this, the display is capable of reproducing a high range of vivid colors along with a more sharper, brighter, punchier and life-like pictures. Also, because of the matte coating on the display, viewing angles on the laptop are more than decent enough but not what the company claims (178 degrees).
Asus has also built in an Eye Care technology which reduces blue-light by up to 30 percent.
I would like to give it up for Asus for their choice to fit in this display. It is the perfect display to consume data on. The panel just adds to an already carefully crafted laptop and ensures it of the premium status.
Keyboard and Trackpad
Asus ZenBook UX430 comes equipped with a full-sized backlit keyboard which I really liked. The keyboard is a delight to type on. It provides a nice feedback which is important when you're typing all day long. The keys are at an average distance of around 1.4mm and in my usage, key travel was not a problem. There are three levels of backlit brightness one can choose from. The keys are well built and the overall feel when typing on the keyboard is amazing.
Below the keyboard lies the trackpad which is made out of glass resulting in a glossy finish, different from the chassis. The trackpad accepts touch input accurately and smoothly, although one could need to get adapted to sliding fingers on such a surface. A fingerprint sensor is embedded into the trackpad which in my opinion is just the right place to place one in a laptop. A nifty little feature through which a user can log into Windows quickly and securely. The sensor recognises fingerprints in a jiffy and in my usage it never lagged in unlocking the laptop.
Performance
Asus ZenBook UX430UQ packs in Intel’s Kaby Lake 7th generation Core i7-7500U processor clocked at 2.7GHz with Turbo Boost up to 3.5GHz. A variant with Core i5-7200U is also available which costs tad a bit lower.
The UX430UN comes with a discrete NVIDIA GeForce MX150 2GB graphics chipset while UX430UA just has Intel HD Graphics 620 integrated onboard. Our review unit, the UX430UQ came in with a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 940MX graphics.
This setup is backed further by 8GB/16GB DDR4 RAM soldered on the board along with 256GB/512GB M.2 SSD. Ours was the variant with 8GB of RAM and 512GB SSD, a perfect combination in my opinion for the kind of tasks we needed to carry around with this one.
In my daily usage, the UX430 cut through anything and everything that is thrown at it. Be it multitasking, switching between apps, writing or editing photos on Photoshop, the laptop fared easily throughout the day.
As for the onboard NVIDIA GeForce 940MX GPU, it performs moderately but wasn't be able to handle too much gaming needs and you will be disappointed if that's a requirement. Part of that has to do with the fact that this GPU is not quite the powerful beast one can expect to run some high-demanding titles. The benchmarks confirmed the same. The other thing is that the metallic body gets really hot, hot enough that you might refrain from keeping it on your lap. This is when I didn't run some graphics intensive game; I played the good ol’ humble Need For Speed: Most Wanted.
The ZenBook UX430 also comes with two stereo speakers placed below the deck, something that I personally am not a fan of. The speakers are backed by Harman Kardon and are above average in performance. The sound output, if listening to in a noise-free room is good but isn’t audible much when placed in a bit of a noisy environment.
The 720p HD webcam present on the ZenBook is pretty decent if put in well-lit conditions. In low-light, the pictures are marred by grains which is a bit of a low-point.
Battery life
The ZenBook UX430 draws power from a 50Wh battery which isn't that bad. In normal usage, the battery performs well but anything close to gaming, it will only disappoint. On an average, the ZenBook lasted me throughout 8-9 hours and then some. This usage includes WiFi switched on all the time, heavy browsing, occasional video streaming and music playback.
Bringing in gaming into the picture, the battery life on the ZenBook dropped severely to just 1 hour 30 minutes-2 hours.
The laptop comes with a 65W power adapter which was able to fully charge it in around 2 hours. The adapter is lightweight and carrying it around isn't a hassle.
We liked
The display on the ZenBook is beautiful. One could just put up landscape shots on it and watch endlessly. It's that good. As the company has given preference to portability, the laptop's sleek profile and lightweight come as a plus to the overall design and feel.
We disliked
Call it my pet peeve or something else, but the heat management could have been a lot better. This is an area Asus should seriously consider revamping. The ZenBook falls short of a powerful GPU as well and even though it is not portrayed as a gaming laptop, when you're spending that much on a laptop it better let you play occasionally.
Final Verdict
Asus ZenBook UX430 is for anyone looking to buy a premium laptop without gaming as a priority. Students, professionals, and people who spend a lot of time with in front of their machines, case in point yours truly, it's for them. Asus has done a great job creating one fine looking laptop that oozes glamour and carries good enough hardware to get power hungry tasks done. Its flaws are something that personally, I would have ignored in lieu of the premium build quality, portability, and a good performance if I were buying one.
from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/2xCwh9e
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