ASUS ZenBook 15 Ultra-Slim Compact Laptop 15.6” FHD 4-Way Narrow Bezel, Intel Core i7-8565U Up to 4.1GHz, 16GB DDR4, 512GB PCIe SSD, GTX 1050 Max-Q, IR Camera, Windows 10 - UX533FD-DH74, Royal Blue

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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.

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I needed a laptop that is blazingly fast, but not for gaming. It seemed all of the laptops that came with the good speed stuff also were bundled with expensive displays, graphics cards and other bloat that I didnt need. Then, I found this Zen Book. Quad Core processor that clocks up to 4.1 ghz. 16MB of DDR4 RAM. A 512MB M2-PCIe SSD drive. Windows 10. Very reasonable price. Sweet. Be advised, some features you may expect might not be on this laptop. Specifically, it is not a touch screen. It doesnt have the latest/greatest graphics card. The keyboard isnt laid out as nice as my old Sony VAIO. But, it is fast. Really fast. I was concerned at first because typically there is a "getting started" document in the box. Nothing in this box except the laptop, and a card that says to plug in the power source. However, when I opened the laptop, a rather pleasant voice came on reassuring me that the installation was going to be a snap. And it was! It found my home Wi-Fi, and walked me through the entire setup. It installed Windows 10. Took a pic of my face for facial recognition log-on. Since the disk is SSD, the install was very quick. I was up and running in less than 10 minutes. I dont have any complaints at all with the Zen Book. The processor clocks up to 4.1 just as advertised. Even with a CPU intensive application executing full bore @ 4.1ghz, I can breeze through other tasks without hesitation. All of my complaints surround Windows 10. Im coming from Windows Pro 7.1, and some of the little conveniences I have come to expect arent visible in Windows 10 by default. Like a start button, go to desktop icon, decent calculator, etc. After a few hours of searching and trial and error, I have been able to overcome all of the Windows 10 obstacles, and have my environment set up just the way I want. If you are running into frustrations with Windows 10, just know that everything can be overcome - just get good at Googling your issue. One tricky issue I ran into that may be of help to someone out there who is upgrading from Windows 7.1: I have another 7.1 computer that has a discoverable printer attached. Every other computer in the house can see the printer, but not the Zen Book. It turns out the even though the printer is attached to a 7.1 computer that has no administrative password, this version of Windows 10 requires that you provide the username of the 7.1 computer in order to access the printer. I can access the shared files without the user name, but not the printer. After I provided a user name to the network manager, the printer appeared. I bought a cooling pad, as I am running this laptop at max speed virtually 24/7. Its been running now for over three days at constant 4.1ghz, and hasnt skipped a beat. I also bought a full licence for Windows Office 2016 Pro for $70 as a download, and the install process was flawless. If you are looking for raw speed and super functionality, this laptop + Office Pro 2016 is just the ticket. You dont need Windows 10 Pro, as most all of the Pro features are now bundled into the Home version. If you are not sure you need Windows 10 Pro, just go with the Home version.

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Build Quality: Very Good build quality overall. I believe it is all plastic, but it is a very nice/durable material and looks/feels like it could be aluminum. Very thin as well, a little thinner than the height of a penny for comparison. Weight is just under 4 lbs not including the (also small) power brick. With the thin bezels on the screen, the 15.6" screen does fit into a 14" size class as advertised and feels smaller than it actually is. The ergo-lift also works as advertised, raising it up very slightly but providing a noticeable improvement to cooling capacity and a more comfortable typing experience. As far as sound quality being increased by the lift as they advertise - the speakers fire from the front of the laptop, so it doesnt really do anything to that end. Speakers get fairly loud, but they are laptop speakers - dont expect much, thats what headphones/earbuds are for. Keyboard is the typical ASUS backlit chiclet keys - good quality and not mushy (something Ive gotten used to from using ASUS for a long time). The trackpad is also large, smooth, and overall good. The trackpad issue that some report, with it getting stuck, jumping, freezing, etc. I have encountered this, but it was not nearly as bad an issue as some claim, and it is a minor inconvenience at most when it does happen every now and then. Perhaps a fix will come about in the future, but I dont think it is a dealbreaker for me, also considering I use a wireless mouse most of the time. Hardware: The 15" models i7-8565u is very adequate in my usage so far. 16GB of ram is also more than most people would likely need, and the included 512GB SSD has plenty of fast storage, as well as providing very fast boot times. The GTX-1050 Max-Q GPU also performs well - I tested it in a few fairly demanding games, and it hits 60 fps in most games with lowered settings. This isnt a super high-tier gaming GPU nor is this laptops form factor fit for such a task, but for the casual gamer that wants to be able to do some light gaming on the go, but also not have to settle for the aggressive size, design, or price-tag of most gaming laptops, this is a great option. It looks professional and also remains quiet - with the max-q design label (meaning the laptop meets certain requirements, one of which is that it doesnt get much louder than 40dB at max load) this laptop gets no louder than a whisper, and in normal browsing or non-intensive applications, it is completely silent (fans off). The screen is good as well, a nice 60Hz IPS panel. The thin bezels look fantastic. It is not the brightest panel (as to be expected of an ultrabook meant to sip battery), but it gets the job done without blinding you. It is not an anti-glare screen, so you will get reflections in bright areas, but the screen is bright enough to overcome it most of the time. Also comes with Windows Hello support, and sign-in is very fast with this. Edit 1: I noticed that running some intensive tasks does cause the CPU cores to throttle once a core hits 89C. Some people are saying that it cant deal with the heat, which is true (and most of the time you probably wont be using the laptop so heavily that it would hit this normally), and I ran stress tests with the laptop plugged in and on maximum performance mode, to test this. On battery, and with some amount of battery saver mode on, you wont throttle, but the fans will still kick up a decent bit. However I remedied this by undervolting the CPU by about 70 mV - causing max temps under the same stress test to not exceed 85C max, which ceased any throttling. If you are seeing performance dips under heavy load, chances are you are throttling, and undervolting will reduce your temps. Edit 2: There is a quirk with the headphone jack i have run into. Apparently if you have headphones plugged in before running an application that uses the in-built microphone, the microphone will be disabled until you unplug and re-plug the headphones - or run the program before plugging in your headphones. Trying to find a permanent fix for this but no luck so far. It has an easy workaround, but it is a little annoying. Conclusion: I have only owned this product for a few weeks, but I have put it through its paces and it has performed wonderfully. Fast, cool, quiet, and powerful. What more could you want? All of my previous laptops have been ASUS products and have served me well, and the new Zenbook 15 has the same great quality I have come to expect from them. As an aside: I would hope that as the market moves towards higher refresh rate monitors, ASUS would start offering 120Hz+ panels on products other than the ROG series.

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In such a small chassis, the fan frequently running hard even I using Chrome and Youtube. I further tested it with Diablo 3, with the default setting, the FPS starts with 100+ then gradually drops below 30, and CPU temperature hit 80+, and the fan running in a maximum speed with 60db voice by a db meter. I have to return the laptop, it has good design, looks awesome, but the heat dissipation is an issue.

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As a long-time user of ASUS components it hurts to say this, but the new zenbook is a complete mess. The laptop has a lot going for it: its light, it has extremely narrow bezels, excellent performance, and fantastic battery life. But it has three major issues that make it completely unusable: the trackpad, coil whine, and the keyboard. The zenbook trackpad constantly "seizes up", refuses to register real clicks and then mis-registers the lightest touches as clicks. Halfway through a two-finger scroll the trackpad will stop tracking movements and then suddenly accelerate. And to finish everything off, it is almost impossible to left click and highlight text. After a week trying to get work done and having to constantly fight the trackpad I just gave up. A second major issue is the coil whine. Even as I write this review, with no programs on except my browser, the fans emit a very noticeable coil whine that makes it impossible to concentrate without headphones. Both at the office and at the library I have had people complain to me about the noise and now I cant use the laptop in the two places I most needed it. Lastly, the keyboard is very poorly designed. The left ctrl key is far too small and often fails to register when clicked. Ive stopped counting the number of times I have had to re-input a shortcut. And secondly, the keyboard is far too cramped (to make space for a useless numberpad) and the keys are so light and have so little feedback that Im never sure whether Ive typed correctly or not. ASUS is a great company, and this bad experience isnt enough to put me off their products. But the zenbook is completely unusable and I will be returning it.

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This is my third laptop from Asus, and their products have been serving me well for almost 10 years. I still complain about the fact that there were no black version for this model, but Royal Blue still looks great. The battery life is a huge improvement from previous Asus products which I appreciate. The 15.6 inch screen with tiny bezel catches the sight of my friends right away. I recommend this ultrabook to anyone who do computer programming work as well as some light gaming.

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For my comparison, I will be using Lenovo (my previous personal laptop) and Dell (Inspiron - work laptop). My Lenovo finally died by having one of its hinges break. I know the day was coming soon when the hinges started to creak and it would have trouble closing sometimes. Now going looking for a new laptop, I wanted to avoid a 2 in 1 laptop and go for personal laptop (if you like that, go for Dell as the consensus was they only make the best hinges). I came upon this laptop as hitting all the criterias I was looking for. I am not a heavy gamer but like a laptop to have a good graphics card if I happen to use architecture CAD which is sometimes taxing on memory processing. Here is the outcome: Keyboard - The keyboard is a match made in heaven. Compared to the new Lenovo laptops which feel very light and filmsy, the keyboard have a healthy space that allows your fingers to travel and are not too light or hard when pressing. It also has a number keyboard which at first looking at the pictures, thought it looked a bit overcrowded but now having received the laptop, it allows me to type information faster. Heat and Fan - The laptop does tend to get warm (in a good way unlike my past Lenovo flex 5, which would get hot and spew hot air from time to time). The fan does not also kick on annoyingly. I have 30 tabs open right now and the fan has not even kicked on. Battery - This laptop uses a high end LCD display. The color saturation resembles very closely to AMOLED screens. I was hesitant at first but after receiving the laptop, all my doubts have been erased. The screen clarity is excellent and the physical dimensions of the laptop are meant for a 14 inch laptop while this one carries 15.6. In addition, LCD displays tend to use less energy, which is a bonus. Cons: Drivers - the drivers are a hit or a miss here. There is no central utility software you can download that will allow you to update BIOS and all sorts. You have to go to Asus website to download and install. This is cumbersome and unnecessary and I am removing a star. Realtek - This is another annoyance. The audio recording for this is amazing when I finally got to use it on Google Hangouts and Webex meetings (no background noise, no keyboarding typing as its filters would eliminate these). But sometimes, Realtek would go haywire and would not allow Mics to be used.

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I got this computer to work while traveling to use with linux. Most things work out of the box with linux, we need to do a fix for the sound. We also need to install the latest nvidia cards to able do disable the dedicated graphics card, and some work to get face recognition working. After doing this we get a light and fast linux machine. 15.6 inch in a frame of a 14 inch laptop. I get 10 hours battery, With linux and light usage (linux is a very light operating system so I never had to use the laptop intensively) there is no trackpad issues at all. The only issue is the flex on the back, that is annoying.

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To be 100% clear, this laptop is awesome in terms of performance and battery life BUT.... Lots of people here talk about the trackpad issue and I thought to myself, "How bad could it be". The answer is "Pretty Bad..." I find that it helps if you are getting the difficult trackpad issue to wipe your finger as dry as possible as that helps a bit, but essentially, if you need this laptop, plan on getting something like the microsoft slim mouse or an aftermarket track pad. Now, that out of the way, performance is excellent. Battery life is great compared to my previous Lenovo. The Windows Hello unlocks the laptop amazingly fast and in terrible light. The only other issue Ive had so far is that every vendor who says they sell a spare power brick for it has the wrong one even though the part numbers or laptop model numbers are correct. Im currently waiting on my third one.

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I work as a traveling software architect and consultant and this is probably the best laptop Ive owned. There are a number of reasons for that but the i7 85x has a burst performance that is blazing and works well for compilation. The NVIDIA graphics are sufficiently powerful. The battery life is great. The screen is clear and bright. The hard drive is screaming fast. Ive owned far more expensive laptops but this one really hits the sweet spot and for the price it is hard to beat.

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