William E Daly
UPDATE 2/11/2019: So after using this laptop for a few months, Im appending my review. Overall, this is a solid performing laptop. Its a nice to use and the performance and battery life is great. But I have noticed some build issues. The trackpad will occasionally lose focus and not respond. It doesnt happen often, but enough that its noticeable. One of my keys started sticking after a couple of weeks of use as well. Theres also noticeable screen bleed from one of the corners. And lastly, the finish on the laptop is highly susceptible to the paint flaking off(picture included). For $1300, I expect better quality from ASUS. Im knocking off two stars and will be hesitant to buy an ASUS again without having reviews from other users. ------- This review is for UX533FD Signature Edition. This includes a I7 856U Whiskeylake cpu, 15 inch edge to edge display, 16 gigabytes of ram, and 512 Gb SSD, as well as a GTX 1050 Max Q gpu. This laptop is an amazing piece of work. Its very fast, while consuming little power when unplugged. Battery life has been between 6 and 9 hours depending on the tasks Im performing. The fan, in contrast to most Windows laptops, is very quiet, even under heavy cpu and gpu load. Its comparable to a Macbook Air in that regard. The keyboard travel is somewhat shallow, but comfortable. The keyboard is fully backlit and includes a mini numeric pad. The laptop is light and feels much smaller than its 15.6 inch screen. The screen is beautiful with a resolution of 1920x1080, very rich and bright. Its smaller by about an inch than my previous Yoga 15 inch laptop, but has the same screen size, due to the lack of bezels. It has 2 USB 3.0 ports, a USB C port, a full SD card port, and a microphone jack. The laptop also has a unique opening position, which tilts the keyboard up, away from the surface, allowing for better cooling and a more comfortable typing position. The sound is pretty good, with the speakers being just underneath the screen. Theres also zero bloatware installed on this machine. Just some ASUS assistant stuff. Im a software developer as well as occasional 3D artist, so I hit this thing pretty hard, and its performed flawlessly. If youre in the market for a high end Windows laptop, I cant recommend this enough. Its a spectacular piece of hardware and I commend ASUS for putting this out at a very competitive price.
