ASUS is a Taiwanese multinational computer and phone hardware and electronics company, that is known for its laptop range, from the business-oriented “thin and light” notebooks (ZenBook) that provides the best performance with better battery life and aesthetics,to the gaming laptops (ROG republic of a gaming) that are focused on providing sheer performance.
They recently announced their newest ZenBook pro 15 UX550G. What this notebook offers that no other notebook provides, is the new Intel Core i9-8950H hexacore CPU, how is this going to help you in your daily tasks, it is pretty much explained by the core i9 trademark only, by combining the power of a Corei9 processor and Nvidia Geforce 1050Ti with 8,16 DDR4 memory clocked at 2400Mhz, it can house the stock resolution of 4k while making it slim and light with thickness of 18.9 mm and 4.1 pounds weight.
By looking at it, you might think that you have seen it before since it is built on the same chassis as was its predecessor the UX550VE model. They not only updated the internals and the resolution of the device but also the LED-Backlit display too, that is now Pentone-certified having 100% Adobe’s RGB and 132% sRGB color gamut, that will provide true to life colors and a wider 178 degrees field of view that also ensures better viewing angles and good brightness that is not confirmed yet, by looking at its exterior we can see the traditional rear finishing of any other ASUS’s laptop, simplistic design that has a minimalistic texture to it that illuminates when exposed to light at a certain angle.
Accompanying the Core i9 processor and the GPU is the 1TB PCIe 3.0×4 SSD and a 512 GB SATA SSD, that should make it a screamer for both CPU and GPU intensive tasks. It also has all the ports that were present in the last model plus some additional refined ones, namely Full-size HDMI output, 2 USB-A ports, threeUSB 3.0 thunderbolt ports and a micro SD card surprisingly they had enough room for a full-sized SD card,but they opted for a micro one.
Coming to the heat dissipation It has a dual fan design one for the CPU and other for the GPU complimented by 3 heat-sink pipes, the fans blow out the heat dissipated by the CPU and the graphics card through the grills present at the rear end of the notebook, heat is the worst enemy of the performance with the newer core i9 processor it would have become more of a problem but ASUS’s answer to it keeps the device’s thermals at the minimum.
The sound department has always been premium no matter the laptop series same is the case with this notebook, providing company’s proprietary SonicMaster audio system, complemented by the array microphone that supports Cortana’s voice recognition, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, the speakers of the devices, are however branded by Harmon Kardon which ASUS claims output 1.4 times as much as the volume, and there is a VGA camera for the video calls, details about it are not out yet.
The most amazing component of the ZenBook lineup is their keyboards that are even better than the much expensive MacBook pro’s keyboard, the key-strokes are very responsive having the perfect key-spacing of 1.5mm, the keyboard, however, is not a full sized one,but that is what we see in any other notebook. The trackpad too is premium looking and feels premium too, it has the latest windows precision drivers, accompanying the trackpad there is a fingerprint scanner that is fast and secure.Despite the Zen Book pro being a powerhouse, the 71Wh battery can support it for around 9.5 hours that can be recharged up to 60% in only 49minutes.
Lastly, comparing it with its direct rival the MacBook pro, despite the fact that the MacBook is much expensive the ZenBookprovides a good competition, The MacBook is supported up to the 7th gen core i7 processors, while the highlight of the ZenBook pro is its core i9 processor, both notebooks have comparable Backlit-LED displays but latter has better overall saturation and vast color gamut, despite being much quiet the only component that lacks in the ZenBook compared to MacBook is the optimizations provided by the Mac OS that are way better than those of the windows 10 home/pro the operating system of ZenBook pro 15, and most importantly for the headphone enthusists out there it has a headphone jack unlike the MackBook.
To conclude, the pricing and availability of the ZenBook pro is revealed yet, but seeing the specifications and the design it is for the content- creators and the artist out there, the wide color gamut, the 4k screen and the Core i9 processor that too in a slim chassis should be enough for the consumers this notebook is marketed towards, it is expected that the notebook will surely be pretty heavy on the wallet with all the highlighted specifications, however the much lighter specifications of the UX550G will somewhat lower the price. The full review of the notebook will be up on the website as soon as it is available, Stay tuned!