The Zenbook lineup from Asus is the premium laptop series from the Taiwanese manufacturer. With great emphasis on chic designs, this series of laptops have proven to be excellent performers in the past.
The company has expanded this series with the launch of the ZenBook UX430. We reviewed the high-end laptop of this series -- Asus ZenBook UX430UQ - that offers a pretty solid specs sheet and comes at a price of Rs 93,990.
We used the device for a couple of days and here is our review:
Design and display
The company has expanded this series with the launch of the ZenBook UX430. We reviewed the high-end laptop of this series -- Asus ZenBook UX430UQ - that offers a pretty solid specs sheet and comes at a price of Rs 93,990.
We used the device for a couple of days and here is our review:
Design and display
At first glance, the Asus ZenBook UX430UQ comes across as an extremely stylish and sleek laptop. The lid of the laptop is made of aluminum-alloy material and has Asus metal finish branding on it. The back of the lid has a concentric-circle design giving it a glossy texture, making it prone to smudges. The front of the lid houses an ambient light sensor, and an array of microphones engineered for Cortana-voice support and a HD webcam at the top. Asus branding can also be found at the bottom of the screen.
The Zenbook's chiclet keyboard comes with backlit keys and features a trackpad with built-in fingerprint sensor in the touchpad, which is capable of detecting up to four fingers. The touchpad supports Windows 10's multi-touch and multi-gesture such as placing two fingers on the touchpad and sliding horizontally or vertically will scroll the page up and down. By placing three fingers on the touchpad and swiping down you can access the desktop. The touchpad worked smoothly without any hiccups. Coming to the keyboard, the keys feel quite soft and comfortable during the use and almost soundless.
Moving on to the connectivity ports, the left side has the charging lot, USB 3.0 (1), micro HDMI (1), Audio jack (1) and a USB Type C port (1). On the right, you'll find a SD card reader and USB 2.0 (1). It also features Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1.
The Power button is placed at the top right corner of the keyboard. The bottom of the laptop has four rubber feet and two speaker grills. As for the exhaust and air intake grills, they are placed behind the hinge.
Coming to display, the Asus Zenbook UX430UQ has 13-inch chassis with a 14-inch Full HD NanoEdge display of 1920 x 1080p resolution with wide 100% sRGB color gamut. This was made possible thanks to the extremely narrow bezels of 7.18mm delivering a 80% screen-to-body ratio. The 14-inch display has an antiglare coating and uses the 178˚ wide-view technology.
In our experience, the display produced acutely sharp colours and offered excellent display brightness. As an additional feature, the laptop offers Asus Splendid that includes additional options, such as Eye Care, Vivid, Manual or Normal modes. Asus claims that Eye Care mode reduces the amount of harmful blue light emitted from the screen by up to 30%.
The laptop also comes with a video tuning system called Asus Tru2Life Video Technology that is said to enhance the clarity, colour and contrast in video.
Overall, we were quite impressed by both the design and display of the Asus ZenBook UX430UQ and can say that it will definitely grab some eyeballs. With a weight of 1.3kg and dimensions of 324 x 225 x 15.9mm, the laptop is really easy to carry around.
Performance
Asus Zenbook UX430UQ is powered by a 3.5Ghz 7th Generation Intel Core i7 processor, NVIDIA GeForce 940MX graphics card clubbed with 16GB of high-speed DDR4 RAM. Although the laptop is available in both i5 and i7 CPU variants, our test unit had an i7 CPU. The laptop is claimed to be the world's thinnest laptop to house a discrete graphics processor.
It also features 512GB of SSD storage and packs a 50Wh lithium-polymer battery that lasted us about 7 hours of regular use even though the company claimed it would last 9 hours. The usage included watching movies and videos, light gaming, and internet browsing.
The laptop runs Windows 10 out-of-the-box and has some Asus apps pre-installed such as the Asus Store. All the standard Windows 10 features like Cortana and Microsoft Edge are included.
With all this power under-the-hood, the Asus Zenbook UX430UQ had no issues handling day-to-day tasks. From multitasking between intensive programs to browsing the web to even a bit of gaming, the laptop worked great with everything. The laptop also has HD webcam which was average but still good enough for video calls.
The laptop comes equipped with 1.5W speakers certified by Harman Kardon with Asus SonicMaster stereo audio system with surround-sound which delivered great audio quality in our testing. The SonicMaster app lets you toggle from mode to mode such as music or movies for enhanced audio experience.
As for the benchmarks, the Asus Zenbook UX430UQ scored 5,789 and P7913 on PCMark7 and 3DMark respectively.
Verdict
The Asus Zenbook UX430UQ comes in two variants -- the Core i5 version bears a price tag of Rs 70,990 and the i7 processor version bears a price tag of Rs 93,990. The laptop's biggest competitors are Apple's MacBook Pro and HP Spectre.
After using it for a few days, we can say that we were quite impressed with the device. It checks all the boxes. The Zenbook UX43UQ is an ultra-portable device with a pretty design, excellent display, powerful specs and amazing sound. Besides this, the battery lasts you for an average work day which is good enough. It is certainly one of the most-powerful Windows 10 laptop and if money is not a constraint, then you should definitely go for it.
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