Asus Zenbook 3 Review (UX390UA) : Great Design & Performance

Asus computers a leading computers manufacturer recently introduced a premium notebook laptop to the world. The laptop is a 12.5-inch ultraportable laptop. Asus Zenbook 3 redefine the ultra portability. The laptop is very sleek and powerful. If you want to know more about the laptop here’s the link to it – Zenbook 3

Design and Build – Asus Zenbook 3

Asus ZenBook 3 is stunning. Weighs just 910g and just 12mm thick, this isn’t just portable; this is 12-inch MacBook territory. It’s better than the slightly larger HP Spectre 13 as well, with less of that over-the-top high-end styling and a greater focus on subtlety.

Asus couldn’t help but inject just a little, ahem, ‘class’ into the ZenBook 3, with this Rose Gold model getting gold highlights around its edges and gold-tinted keyboard backlighting. It won’t be for everyone, but the additions are subtle enough to feel stylish rather than ostentatious – something the HP Spectre didn’t quite manage.

There are other technical marvels at play here. The 12.5-inch screen is surrounded by a thin bezel that pulls your eyes into the screen. The additional benefit of this is a smaller footprint than you might expect from a laptop of this size. It’s the perfect antidote to the Razer Blade Stealth, which had an outrageous bezel surrounding its 12.5-inch panel.

While the ZenBook 3 looks great, it doesn’t feel quite as well built as one might want from an ultra-expensive premium laptop. The wrist rest has a little flex to it, which highlights its predominantly plastic construction. I’m not sure this sort of plastic has a place on a device this pricey.

Asus ZenBook 3 has only one Type-c port. The laptop doesn’t come with an adapter as well which might be a problem when you want to charge and use multiple USB devices at the same time. There are adapters available in the market and aren’t expensive but the laptop should have come with an adaptor to make things easy for the consumer.

By comparison, the HP Spectre has three of these ports and came supplied with a USB-C-to-USB-A adapter in the box.

SCREEN – Asus ZenBook 3

The Asus ZenBook 3 comes with a 12.5-inch display with a Full HD resolution. It’s larger 13.3-inch rivals often opt for higher-res panels, the Full HD panel is put to good use in this laptop. The maximum brightness of 270 nits, which is actually a little lower than expected. It still looks great, though, with high contrast at 1161:1 and deep, 0.23-nit black levels. The color coverage was a little down on expectations, with my measurements detecting just 85% of the sRGB color gamut. This is middle-of-the-road for a laptop, and its key rival, the HP Spectre, is significantly better.

Webcam and Audio – Asus ZenBook 3

The Webcam is definitely one of the cons of this laptop. The image from webcam are poorly processed and even a well-lit room is shown dark and uninviting. The webcam shows blurry and unclear videos.

The Microphone is great and catches the sound from a distance as well, but it delivers a pretty low-fidelity sound and won’t do anybody’s sultry tones justice.

Asus ZenBook 3 comes with Harman Kardon speakers which are a highlight: music has some depth and dialogue is well served. The software-based audio enhancements do a decent job of artificially adding a little bass to drum beats, but not so much that it starts to sound silly. For such a thin laptop, they’re pretty great and amazing.

Performance – Asus Zenbook 3

The Asus ZenBook 3 comes with 8GB of Ram along with intel core i7 (7th Gen) – 7500U is an excellent processor that can handle video and photo editing with relative ease. It’s only a dual-core chip and therefore takes longer than its quad-core brethren to perform intensive tasks such as video rendering, but for most daily computing tasks it feels snappy and responsive. The laptop can handle intensive tasks well but tends to get heated.

Unsurprisingly for a laptop of this size, its fans get noisy even under moderate load, and the right side of the keyboard and wrist rest get very warm, too. Neither are huge problems, but they do slightly take away the joy of using this device.

The 512GB SSD is fantastically fast, with 1351MB/s read speeds matching those of the Dell XPS 13. The lower-end model gets a slower SATA SSD, whereas the model on test here gets a full-speed PCIe-based drive.

Don’t expect a hardcore gaming on this laptop. The intel HD 620 comes on the board of this laptop but its shared chip and wouldn’t be able to handle latest games except for Counterstrike Go and Minecraft rest will be too much for it.

It beat the Dell XPS 13 marginally in the GeekBench 3 benchmark and managed a much better result than the Core i7-6500U-powered HP Spectre as well. However, this comes at the cost of both cool running and battery life (see below). It’s also much more powerful than the 12-inch MacBook, but that machine is also completely silent thanks to a lack of fan cooling.