[Laptop Review] The Asus Zenbook UX305UA Review

[Squarq]

Asus Zenbook UX305UA Review

Note: This review is a first for me, so if you like it or have any other questions. write them down in the comments.

 

 

Okay, so I just recently bought the Asus Zenbook UX305UA, god I hate product names, and I’ve been using it for about a week now. So I thought for a minute, and said,”Hey, why not put out what I think of this laptop?” Now I’m here writing this article on my Google Drive.

The 305 is a 13.3” laptop with an i5-6200u, 8GB of Ram, 256GB SSD, and a 1080p (non-touch) display. The special part about this laptop is that it gives you all of these features with a price of $750! Yep, this is basically a device made to beat out other ultrabooks, yes, it’s an ultrabook at only 2.9lbs. The body has a decision extremely reminiscent of the dying Macbook Air, with shockingly accurate bezels and feel.

The 305’s keyboard is not backlit, which I guess is a bummer for a growing number of people, but being honest I no longer look at the keyboard when I type, so I don’t really understand the use case for the backlight, so I guess to each his own. The track pad however, is complete cancer. It’s surface is not glass, and is neither smooth nor good feeling. My finger constantly feels the friction as I use the track pad, and just feels like I’m using a more fragile feeling version of my 2007 Toshiba Laptop. I actually found myself taking out my old Alienware mouse and plugging it into the laptop so I wouldn’t have to use the track pad. I’ll be honest here, My $200 trackpad on my school loaned chromebook feels better and smoother than this one.

The display. . . is nothing special. Just a simple 1080p display that’s a little cool out of the box, like most other laptops. Non-Gloss and all that other stuff. . . 95% sRGB and 71% AdobeRGB. The main missing feature with the display is the fact that it doesn’t include a touchscreen. Yeah, I get that touchscreens are becoming more and more necessary, but if you honestly needed a touch screen display, you should just buy the Zenbook 303 for $70 more if you’re truly dying.

The battery is a 54 watt hour cell that lasts about what you’d expect. I get about 7-8 hours of usage from 100-0% at about 50% brightness. The wifi card is an intel 802.11 A/C, nothing special but it gets the job done. The card is supposed to be a little slower than the newer wifi cards found in newer ultrabooks, but I don’t really notice the difference day to day. The laptop, being an ultrabook, comes with intel hd graphics 520 which, surprisingly, managed to get an average of 45 fps on my Minecraft usage benchmark. For all you other people, it got a score of 821 on the 3DMark Firestrike Benchmark. The SSD is made by Micron, which is connected over a SATA 3 interface that’s 256 GB strong. I get about 460 Mbps read. The boot time is less than 10 seconds to boot up the first app, and use smoothly.

The laptop also comes with another configuration for $70 more that comes with a backlit keyboard and touch screen display, and $400 more for a 512 GB SSD, 12Gb of ram, a Quad HD Display (2560x1440), and a gtx940m with the exact same body as before. The Laptop has 3 USB 3.0 Ports, an SD-Card Reader, a mini hdmi port, and a headphone jack. No USB-C, but I guess we can’t expect future proofness with a budget of $750. Fun fact, I didn’t know that a mini hdmi port was a thing until I checked out a review of this laptop. The world’s adding so much random crap.

There’s little no no noticeable keyboard flex that I can detect as I write this review on my bed, but the power jack isn’t quite as good. It’s a thick style design that takes up two spots on an outlet because of how fat it is, and the jack just seems a little too far out of the laptop when it’s plugged in to feel safe and secure. The 305 comes with no actual software that I felt the need to remove, other than one or two that I usually do, but those are just because I don’t see the use for them, not because their bloatware. The Speakers are bottom firing and are muffled whenever they're in use, I can’t really say much more as I usually use headphones, but expect what you’d get from bottom firing speakers. Finally, the hand rest area seems to show sweat quite easily as I am beginning to notice as I type this review, but don’t leave any mark, just a little odd. To conclude, the UX305UA is what you'd expect from an ultrabook, a premium feel, oddly mac like design, better than average display, light weight, no dvd drive, and other premium things. What makes the 305 special is that it gives you all of this, aside from a decent trackpad, for less than $750. It's truly an amazing price point.

 

*Update - 11.02.16 - Once battery drops below 10% and battery saver starts kicking in, it pretty much becomes unusable until you put it into a wall charger. Asus' low power mode is wayyy to strong. Other than that, everything in the review is about right.

 

 

[BiscuitMassacre]

On 04/09/2016 at 10:27 AM, Squarq said:

~snip~

Do you still recommend this product? (you kept referring to it as "303".. was that a mistake?)

 

EDIT: oops, I thought it was dated April 9, not September 4. (4/09 vs 9/04)

 

Nice review.

[Ifree2pay]

I HOPE you have no problems with the hinge mate. There have been quite a few problems on asus-es line. But nice review.

[Squarq]

1 hour ago, Ifree2pay said:

I HOPE you have no problems with the hinge mate. There have been quite a few problems on asus-es line. But nice review.

Really? I haven't noticed anything about the hinge yet. . .

 

[Ifree2pay]

2 hours ago, Squarq said:

Really? I haven't noticed anything about the hinge yet. . .

 

On mine happened 2 years after usage so its not something immediate thats why asus did not really do much about it. But I know that at a certain point they changed it in order to resolve the issue. Yours could be one of the good ones, but i don't know.

[WINcon_Gaming]

Great content mate! Just work on your formatting to make things pop out more and to categorize topics.