Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin take one look at the Isuzu end book s13 and you will see that there is a lot going for it I want to give a real shout out to a soos for hooking us up with these Zenbook a little bit early this won't be going on sale until around March or so so we have a slightly pre-production unit but beyond that this thing looks dope this is a 97% screen to body ratio which means that you're essentially getting a 14 inch screen and a 13 inch laptop sighs now the way they do this is with very thin bezels on the sides as well as a little bit of a anti notch or a verse notch you got a little a little tab maybe instead of moving the webcam down below the screen or onto the keyboard this actually seems to be a pretty decent approach it gives you a little bit of something to grab when you're opening up the laptop and it means that you still do have a decent quality webcam don't get me wrong it's not amazing with a 720p resolution but this is so much better than if it was like yes they're the keys of this is the bottom bezel it's there but you just can't see it so that's thanks to the ergo lift hinge so when you actually open up the laptop what happens is that it slightly elevates the keyboard and that is a couple of advantages including making a little bit more comfortable to type on giving you more cooling and importantly totally making it look like there's not a bottom bezel of the screen at all it's a really clever piece of technology and engineering and it's just smart it's also helped that this is a solid display no it's not a touchscreen it is only 1080p resolution but honestly I prefer that for battery life and importantly the panel itself is very high quality it's very accurate and it is one of the brightest laptop displays we've ever tested bezel little smartphones kind of taken over and laptops are starting to take that trend but what's cool about this is it actually makes a big difference right I mean you're getting a legitimately bigger screen and a chassis which is just as small as a lot of the other 13 laptop so we've been using the last few years it's one of those things where there's no real downside there's no real gimmicks here it's just some smart ideas and a cool way of making a laptop just that a little bit much better that brings us to the second claim to fame for the Zen book s this is the world's thinnest laptop with dedicated graphics and yeah that's pretty thin 13 millimeters the NVIDIA MX 150 inside is hardly the most powerful GPU in the world but it is a huge step up over integrated graphics this is enough power to play most games as long as you don't mind turning down the settings a little bit so for example here in fortnight I've got it 20p medium we're able to get a pretty consistent 50 to 60 frames per second the only issue is is that because this is so much power in such a thin and light laptop it means that it does run a little bit warm especially on the keyboard and the fans they can spin up a little bit it's not crazy loud but it's definitely much louder than most ultrabooks open it up and we see that's actually Wow okay so first of all it has a dual fan setup which does make sense considering we do have not only a CPU but we also have a GPU also I just realized this is unstoppable are they like trying to keep jerry-rigged everything else so it does look like you can swap out the nvme SSD but it's really impressive is just how big of a battery they're able to fit this is a full 50 watt hours so usually when you add a GPU to a laptop it means that not only is it pulling more power so you need that bigger battery but on top of that there's less room for an actual battery as far as the physical space you've got to add room for the cooling the GPU but here they've got pretty much a full size cell and you've got the power to back it up so in addition to the MX 150 you have a whiskey lake eighth-generation core i5 or Core i7 you also have up to 16 gigs of ram and all the way up to a one terabyte PCIe SSD build quality is solid so not only is the keyboard deck very rigid but even the screen really doesn't have any flex to it a big reason for that is because unlike most other laptops out there this starts life as a single block of aluminum which is then CNC milled down to get what you see here and that's usually reserved for very expensive laptops such as razor as well as Apple options so it's nice to see on a Zenbook and I think it's probably part of the reason why they're able to get so much power into such a small and thin form factor the fundamentals are all here the keyboard feels great thanks to the ergo lip design the touchpad is a little bit on the small side but it works and it does have a fingerprint sensor and you have a decent selection of ports new Thunderbolt 3 but you do have two USB see a micro SD card reader as well as a full size USB a I'm really impressed with the Zenbook s not only has the bezels display nice but more importantly for me you're getting a lot of performance here without sacrificing the form factor I don't have to carry around a heavier laptop to have my GPU as well as have my 14 inch screen the only downside here is that price is not enough yet so as long as this is reasonably priced I think that they've definitely got a winner here