Asus ZenBook S (UX391UA) - Review 2022

Which are the best-looking laptops? Some may vote for the swoopy stylings of gaming notebooks or the tapered slabs of desktop replacements, just most would agree that the prettiest portables are ultrabooks—elegantly thin, under-three-pound compacts like the rose-golden-and-white Dell XPS thirteen or the ceramic-finish HP Spectre xiii. Now at that place'southward a new contender for fairest of them all: With its radiant "Deep Swoop Blue" colour and rose-gold accents, the Asus ZenBook S is an ultra-slim stunner. Better all the same, the $1,499.99 car runs every bit good as information technology looks, matching a $2,049.99 configuration of the Dell. Those savings and its manner-forward design nearly earn the ZenBook S an Editors' Pick, but its battery life is lackluster.

Good equally Gold

The examination configuration (model UX391UA-XB74T) features a 13.3-inch touch screen with a 4K native resolution (iii,840 past two,160 pixels); a 1.8GHz Core i7-8550U processor; 16GB of RAM; a 512GB PCI Express solid-state drive; Intel UHD 620 integrated graphics; and Windows 10 Pro. As I said, y'all'll spend $550 more than to get an XPS 13 with comparable specs, though the Razer Bract Stealth matches the ZenBook's price.

The aluminum unibody features Asus' trademark concentric circles on the chapeau, whose dark-blueish hue is matched by the keyboard deck. The Asus logo centered in the lid, a thin stripe around the edges, and the keyboard lettering are tastefully done in gilt. What Asus calls an "ErgoLift swivel" is slightly frontwards of the rear edge, so when the chapeau is opened, the keyboard tilts upward to a 5.5-degree angle for comfortable typing and, the company claims, better cooling thanks to the airflow clearance underneath. The total packet is one of the most attractive I've seen, though the hat is decumbent to finger smudges.

At two.31 pounds, the S is lighter than its rivals the Spectre 13 (two.45 pounds), the XPS 13 (ii.68 pounds), and the Blade Stealth (2.98 pounds). It measures 0.51 past 12.2 past viii.four inches, a tad larger than the Dell ultrabook (0.46 by 11.nine past 7.viii inches) just super-piece of cake to slip into a briefcase—or the carrying sleeve Asus provides.

The ZenBook is too skinny to host standard ports along its edges, then all you'll find are i USB Blazon-C port (which works with the supplied Air conditioning adapter) on the left and two Thunderbolt 3 ports, plus an audio jack, on the right. Asus puts a USB Type-C-to-A dongle and a USB Blazon-C-to-HDMI dongle in the box. Flash cards will crave a separate, not-included one; the laptop'due south body has no SD or microSD card slot.

Simply Enough Bezel

Though its screen bezels are svelte, the ZenBook S makes room for the webcam in its proper identify to a higher place the brandish instead of the infamous below-the-screen, upwardly-your-olfactory organ angle of the XPS xiii. Webcam images are a little dark but nicely detailed and in focus.

Speaking of detail, the brandish's 4K resolution makes the finest, tiniest aspects of an prototype stand up out, fifty-fifty though some apps' default text may appear too small. (The system arrives with Windows ten'south screen-element zoom ready to 300 per centum.) You'll notice the common touch-screen problem of mirror-glass reflections in dark areas and at extreme angles, just otherwise the panel is a pleasure to utilize, with richly saturated colors and loftier contrast. Brightness is expert if not cracking (I stuck to the superlative two or iii backlight settings), with inky blacks on pure white backgrounds.

I idea the tilted keyboard would exist a gimmick when I get-go opened the ZenBook S, but soon pronounced it perhaps the best in the ultrabook segment. The angle helps relax your wrists, while the typing feel is shallow but snappy, with lively feedback and clicky sound furnishings. The layout features defended Dwelling, End, Page Upwardly, and Page Down keys, though their placement (F9 through F12) takes some getting used to; the F7 primal controls a gold-tinted keyboard backlight with adjustable effulgence.

My but gripe with the key arrangement is that the power push occupies the Delete central's place in the top right corner, so I put the arrangement to sleep several times before learning to aim a fleck to the left. The touchpad glides and taps smoothly, and it has a fingerprint reader in the corner for Windows Hello logins.

The speakers on the laptop's lesser front end produce authentic audio complete with a small thump of bass, but they aren't loud enough to fill a room—fifty-fifty with the book turned upward to 100, they're weaker than other laptops I've listened to. Asus has worked some pocket-size miracles with laptop sound in the past (see, for case, a review of the company'south VivoBook Flip 14), and then the output here is a smidge disappointing.

Worth noting: Asus backs the ZenBook S with a i-year warranty (which isn't rare) that includes accidental damage protection (which is).

"South" Is for "Swift"

With its quad-core, eight-thread Cadre i7 CPU and ample RAM and storage, the Asus went toe-to-toe with its peers in our performance benchmarks. Before in this review, I mentioned the Dell, HP, and Razer contenders charted out below. For performance context, I likewise mapped in a couple of other young man travelers, namely the latest iteration of the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro 13-incher (which was stuffed to the brim with top-shelf components), as well as Lenovo'due south winning Yoga 920 two-in-ane.

The ZenBook S was an insignificant 100 points shy of the 3,000 that we consider excellent in the PCMark 8 Piece of work function productivity examination, which can be attributed to that program having a dampening consequence if the laptop has a greater-than-1080p brandish (which the 4K ane hither surely is). It landed in the top half of our test set up in our Cinebench CPU measurement and Handbrake video-editing do, and information technology tied the Razer and Dell in our Adobe Photoshop image-editing workload.

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Graphics-wise, the ZenBook S and its rivals waved the "Productivity, Non Playtime" banner, finishing nowhere near the 30 frames per 2d required for smooth play in our Heaven and Valley gaming simulations. Like other slimlines with integrated graphics, these laptops are suited for casual or browser-based games but not the latest tiptop-tier titles.

The ZenBook's merely existent letdown came in our battery rundown exam, in which it lasted for merely 8 and a half hours of video playback. That's not terrible—information technology should go you through an boilerplate workday—but it's not competitive with systems like the Spectre 13 (over 12 hours) or the amazing Lenovo Yoga 920 (over 22 hours). Arraign the 4K screen and a relatively small four-cell battery, simply know that unplugged life is pretty much the simply blackness mark on this piece of work of fine art.

A Classy Contender

And "piece of work of art" isn't an exaggeration for the ZenBook S. Its slimness, screen, and keyboard are all impressive; it looks gorgeous; and it's fairly priced. Information technology's a winning argument against critics who say laptop design has been ho-hum lately, and it'southward a must-see for ultrabook shoppers who don't need double-digit battery life.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/laptops/29214/asus-zenbook-s-ux391ua

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