Asus ZenBook Pro UX501 review: An elegant desktop replacement, but comes at a premium

Asus’ ZenBook series is a relatively new line of laptops addressed at the more discerning buyers. Asus had released the Intel Core M sporting thin ZenBook UX305 last year and it has followed it up with the ZenBook Pro this year. So will this be the notebook to go for, for the multimedia user? We will find out in the review below. Build and Design: 8/10  Asus has constructed one elegant-looking notebook with the ZenBook Pro UX501. The concentric circle brush metal finish in gray colour on the top flap with the Asus logo in the centre adds a nice touch. On opening the flap, you are treated to a silver coloured keyboard and palm rest with the corners on both sides having speaker-grille like painted dots diverging out from the corner keys. The use of metal in the construction ensures that the build is sturdy.  The Asus ZenBook Pro has chamfered edges around the edge of the laptop. On the right hand side, you have the 3.5mm audio jack, an SD card slot and two USB 3.0 ports on top whereas on the left hand side you have the power port, a mini DisplayPort, an HDMI port and a USB 3.0 port from top to bottom. At the front edge, you have the hard drive, power and battery indicator lights. There isn’t any LAN port on the ZenBook Pro, but Asus bundles a USB to LAN port adapter in the box. The ZenBook Pro rests on four semi-circular rubber feet.  The base of the laptop has a slightly rounded off design and has a brush metal finish. The hinge mechanism of the ZenBook Pro is good, but we noticed that the display tends to wobble every time we mildly tap on it. The thickness on the sides is 21mm and at 2.27kg, it is not really a portable laptop. Overall we quite liked the build quality, as it gets the basics right while ensuring that the laptop looks good as well. If only the display wasn’t as wobbly, considering it is a touch sensitive one. Keyboard and Trackpad: 8/10  The Asus ZenBook Pro comes with a full size 6-row keyboard along with a number pad beside it. Business professionals will really appreciate this. The keyboard is a chiclet keyboard with the keys having a decent amount of travel. Backlighting is present for the keys thus enabling use in darkness. The keyboard lends itself well to fast typing. In fact this entire review and couple of others were typed on this keyboard. Thanks to just 1.6mm of travel, typing on the keyboard is quiet.  There is a single slab for the mouse trackpad and for most part we quite liked the way it performed. The trackpad supports multiple touch and pinch to zoom mechanism. The left and right hand side buttons have a good feedback and an audible clicking sound. Scrolling on the trackpad is fast using two fingers. A good overall experience with the input tools.     Features: 7.5/10 In terms of internal specifications, the Asus ZenBook Pro comes with some top end features. For starters it has the Intel Core i7-4720HQ quad-core hyper-threaded processor, clocked at 2.6GHz with the Turbo Boost speeds going up to 3.6GHz, which is paired with 16GB of RAM. It comes pre-loaded with 64-bit Windows 10 Home operating system. On the storage front, you get a 512GB SSD drive.  Asus has used the Nvidia GTX 960M graphics solution to power the 4K display on the ZenBook Pro. The display is touch sensitive as well. For a 15.6-inch laptop, the ZenBook Pro has thick bezels on all sides. Thankfully there are only a few pre-loaded Asus apps on the laptop. The audio section is powered by Bang & Olufsen which can also be paired with Asus’ own SonicMaster technology for a richer sound and more equaliser options.  In terms of connectivity options, you get Wi-fi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0. Display: 7.5/10 Asus ZenBook Pro comes with a 15.6-inch 3840x2160 pixel display which gives an effective pixel density of 282 ppi. It is an LED backlit LCD display with IPS panel, which ensures that the viewing angles are great. The display is certainly reflective, and this becomes quite prominent when there are dark scenes. In the lagom.nl tests, the white saturation test was excellent and so was the gradient banding test, which shows a gradual transitioning from black to gray to white colour. The black level test makes the display quite reflective and it was difficult to discern multiple levels of black. Because of this, movie scenes involving dark scenes turned the display into a mirror. The brightness levels are good and colours are vibrant. Thanks to the 4K display, the text looks sharp, but there are some apps which are not optimised well for the 4K display which show dithering on the text. In certain desktop apps such as Irfan View for instance, by default the icons look tiny. Movie viewing is a joyous experience and there was barely any backlight bleeding in dark scenes. Just ensure that there is no direct light source behind you. The touchscreen is quite responsive as well, but every time you touch the display, it tends to wobble a bit. Performance: 7.5/10  For testing the gaming prowess we ran Metro: Last Light at full HD resolution for Very High and Low presets, thereby getting 19.5FPS and 10.12FPS, respectively. So you will certainly need to tone down the graphics presets to get playable frame rates. Also the GTX 960M is just not equipped to handle 4K gaming. 3D Mark gave around 1959 points in the Fire Strike Extreme preset mode. With real life tasks such as transcoding, it took around 9 minutes to convert a 4.5GB MKV video file to an MP4 video format for the iPad using Handbrake. In terms of performance, it is quite close to the Acer Aspire V Nitro laptop which we had seen sometime back. The speaker section is sufficiently loud and thanks to the location of the speakers, just under the base on either sides, the reflection from the table helps. At no point during the use, did we notice the palm rest of the keyboard area getting hot. The bezel of the display close to the hinge does reach temperatures close to 40 degrees. Battery Life: 6/10  The Asus ZenBook Pro UX501J is not a laptop that you can carry around with you at all times due to its 2.27kg heft. It also houses an Intel Core i7 processor along with a GTX 960M graphics solution in addition to having a 4K UHD display. So the component that will take a hit is the battery life. In our Batter Eater Pro test, we got around 155 minutes whereas the PC Mark 8 battery life test gave around 3 hours 22 minutes. On regular usage involving web surfing, video streaming, a bit of gaming and working on office documents gave us around 4.5 hours after which you are required to charge the laptop. Verdict and Price in India Asus ZenBook Pro UX501J is a high end laptop targeted primarily at multimedia and business users. It has top of the line specifications which ensures that the laptop is capable of handling all the tasks you throw at it. The storage in the form of 512GB Samsung SM951 M.2 SSD which is attached to PCIe 3.0 x4 express port gives insanely high speeds (as compared to SATA ports) as can be seen in the charts above, going over 1300MB/s. It is priced around Rs 1,16,999 which certainly puts it in the rarefied space of high end laptops. More than a laptop you can carry around with you, the ZenBook Pro is a desktop replacement. While at this price it is certainly priced below the Rs 1.5 lakh you have to shell out for the Apple MacBook Pro, it is slightly higher than the Acer Aspire V Nitro. But with the kind of speedy storage and overall package it offers, it certainly edges past the Acer laptop. Those looking for a stylish 4K display sporting desktop replacement laptop, can certainly consider the Asus ZenBook Pro UX501J. You need to beware that with games, you will need to tone down the resolution to get playable frame rates.