Gadgetory

hey how's it going Dave 2d here and this is the Asus Zenbook Pro for 2017 this is the UX 550 and this thing was announced quite a few months ago I think was like March at Computex when this thing was revealed and I finally been able to spend some time with it it's a very powerful machine it's one of those thin and light work oriented machines that also has a gtx 1050 Ti so if you want to play some games you can and this is the type of stuff that gets me excited these are the type of laptops that I'm most interested in because I mean they're kind of stealth like they don't look like they're not they're not designed for gaming but because of the video card you'd think they'd be able to bang if you really want them to this one you'll see the end of the video as to why it's not so much a gaming laptop but it is a very good laptop for what it was meant for I want to talk with the design first first thing black this is the first Asus laptop that I've used that was black so fully black finished black top black bottom there is a silver chamfer as you go around the edges but the whole idea of this thing is black the build quality on this thing is good better than expected and let me explain the UX 5:01 from last year and the year before had okay build quality not amazing which the panels were just a little softer when you press down on them this thing is definitely more rigid it's definitely better build quality than the UX 5:01 but it's still not perfect there's still a little bit of flex on all the panels the top the bottom the keyboard deck the screen itself if you try to torque that it's super solid I couldn't get it twisted the hinges are all so well made the laptop not whole I would consider to good build quality not excellent I wish it was better but it is good the port selection on this thing is good is actually to Thunderbolt 3 ports and those run on all four lanes of PCIe so if you plug up an external GPU you're gonna get max bandwidth the thing that I don't love is the inclusion of a micro SD slot now it's cool that they have an SD p-- slot at all but it's micro SD and this is a pro laptop right this is the Zen Book Pro and working professionals very few of them are using micro SD s as their main like form of data transfer it just doesn't make sense that they put that there it seems almost useless because you're not gonna use that I would much prefer to see a regular SD slot but you're stuck with that and that kind of bugs me there's a lot of good stuff about this laptop I like the screen I like the speakers the speakers are actually very very impressive it has the Harman Kardon branding and usually when you have that kind of branding on a laptop it means nothing this time there's four speakers two on the top two on the bottom the ones on the bottom are down firing and they sound really good I was quite impressed with it they don't sound super loud but the audio quality is there the mids the lows the highs they're all present and they sound good back to the screen up top this one's running a 1080p panel they do make a 4k panel if I'm not mistaken but this one's 1080p touchscreen the color accuracy is there it's not super bright I wish it was brighter but the overall image is nice and the bezels on the screen aren't too thick it's like I don't know it kind of looks like the newer MacBooks in terms of look the bezel thickness but it's just an improvement over their regular Asus Zenbook proline it's just a thinner cleaner looking design up top okay to get home the inside of this laptop I've removed the screws but it's pretty simple there's seven eight screws they all pop off pretty easily t 4 and when you get inside things get less awesome so so far it seems like a really good laptop right ok on the inside we have a fast SSD which is good get a great Wi-Fi card the Intel 1865 which is good the RAM is soldered on and this bugs me this is not like one of those super thin laptops right so it doesn't make sense to me that the RAM is soldered on now maybe it was a space issue maybe it was an energy efficiency issue because you know when you solder on RAM when it's built on board it uses slightly less energy and if that's the case fine but I just don't like seeing soldered on RAM but the thing that bugs me is the thermal design so we're looking at two heat pipes to cool a gtx 1050 TI and an i7 7700 HQ so these are ready hot components that's not like the hottest stuff out there but they're not cool components and you'll see in the thermal performance later on that they don't do great and the battery down here is a 72 watt hour cell it's getting around 6 hours of battery life for the screen at 215 it's so this is probably in the middle of the pack in terms of battery life it's because it's not a huge battery it's kind of a small chassis so the batteries there's only so much space in here but if you're gonna bring this thing to class or to work and you're expecting a full day of use out of it you're probably gonna bring the charger with you just because it's a little bit tight um before I get into performance because I know that's what a lot of people are interested in I want to talk about the keyboard and the track better so keyboard is a very standard asu's keyboard it's a good keyboard the home page up page down buttons are on the side and I like them there but not everyone does because if you're not used to them being there if you're trying to hit backspace or shift or enter you might hit those keys but I like them there because if you want to you can use them and you will get used to their positioning it doesn't interfere with my regular typing anymore but for people that haven't used an Asus keyboard like this before there's a bit of a learning curve the keystrokes themselves are a little bit soft but firm at the same time it's hard to describe but basically the pressure that it takes to activate the switch is a little more than your average keyboard but the spring feels softer so it's a different type of experience than I'm used to I just haven't used an Asus keyboard for a while but you'll get used to it quickly because when I use this thing for like three four months before not this one but a keyboard very similar to this you get used to it and it's not a problem trackpad good trackpad probably its best feature in terms of the inputs it uses windows precision drivers so it's got accurate tracking and as a fingerprint sensor for quick logins and stuff in Windows hello okay let's talk about performance because that's probably the most important thing because if it doesn't have good performance nothing matters right okay the performance on this thing I got to open her back up to kind of show what I'm talking about is good for certain people and not so good for other people so this ins running like I said earlier that 1050 Ti and a 7700 HQ the KB Lake i7 and because the thermal output on these two chips is quite high it's difficult to cool something like this in a chassis this small and this compact and with the heat pipes that they have because there's only two maybe even one and a half heat pipes you're not gonna get the best cooling if you're doing work stuff if you're doing like video edits and vendors and stuff this is sufficient because you're not stressing the GPU at a hundred percent all the time and your workload because you're kind of using the GPU here and there you do stuff in Photoshop or Premiere so I ran some video edits and I ran some renders this thing runs really well you're getting the performance you would expect just on the paper specs the 1050 Ti is a good card for video editing but when you start playing games that's when issues start to rise the temps creep up and after like 20 30 minutes of gaming you're gonna notice some serious thermal throttling and you could probably resolve this if you re paste it or if you undervolt it and I mean you can I'm not gonna do it on this unit and I'm positive that if you did if you repay stood this and if you under volt of this you would get better performance but I wouldn't pick up this laptop if your main purpose is to play games it's a really nice looking laptop and it's slim but because of the thermal issues I can't just openly recommend it for people who are quote unquote gamers the fans don't come on very often when it's idle it's actually very quiet but at full load it's a little bit loud not super annoying or anything but it can get loud so this is a laptop that was designed for professional users right it's a Zen Book Pro and I think because of what it's equipped with because it has a 1050 Ti because it has an i7 I think a lot of people are drawn to the specs and think hey I can pick this up and play games really well on it but that's not what it was designed for unfortunately it's a really nice looking laptop it's not super expensive I think the base model starts at 14 $1500 this unit here with everything I've decked it out with seventeen hundred dollars but yeah if you're a gamer and you're hoping that this would be like the gaming laptop that didn't look like a gaming laptop this is not that laptop I'm sorry I was disappointed and I feel like a lot of my viewers were really interested in this thing because it had such potential but no it's not the one okay hope you guys enjoyed this video thumbs if you liked it sub C if you loved it see you guys next time if you're curious like if you're looking for other options I don't know if anyone is still sticking around to this part of the video but if you're curious I've been using the arrow 15 X so this is the upgraded model this is not that different in size from the Zen Book Pro it's a completely different price point this is significantly more expensive but they've designed this thing to house a gtx 1070 it's a signal video card but it's similar in size but the way that they're doing is that they have to crack this thing open and like they're putting a ton of venting on this thing to make it more viable for gaming and that's not what the Zenbook does they try to keep it clean and minimal and just very nice looking it does look a heck of a lot nicer than this like look at this but this thing is where you're gonna get performance if you want something that's built for gaming look at other options like this the Aero 15 this is actually the Aero 15 X okay see you guys next video