Dell XPS lineup has made a huge noise with its design, and performance. Sighting the same (apparently), ASUS has launched its latest lineup of ZenBook- ASUS ZenBook 15 UX533FD, a lighter and cheaper work machine than the heftier and more powerful ZenBook Pro.
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ASUS has launched ZenBook 14 UX533FD in India, after the introduction in Computex 2018. We received the variant powered by Whisky Lake 8th-gen Intel Core i7-8565U, along with Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 Max Q, paired with 16GB RAM, and a 1TB PCIe solid-state drive (SSD). So, how well this laptop performed? is it worthy enough to drop your money on? Let’s find out in this review.
ASUS ZenBook 15 UX533FD: Specs Overview
- 15.6″ FHD (1920 x 1080) NanoEdge display
- Intel Core i7-8565U CPU
- 16GB 2400 MHz DDR4
- Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 Max Q, 2GB GDDR5 VRAM
- 1TB PCIe SSD
- Windows 10 Home
- 73Wh 4-cell lithium-polymer battery
- Dual-band 802.11ac gigabit-class Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0
- Connectivity: 1 x USB 3.1 (Gen 2) Type-C (up to 10Gbps), 1 x USB 3.1 Type-A (Gen 2) (up to 10Gbps), 1x USB3.1 Type A (Gen1), 1 x HDMI, 1 x MicroSD card reader
- Dimensions: 354 x 220 x 17.9 mm; Weight: 1.69 kg
ASUS ZenBook 15 UX533FD: Design
We simply go back to our Zenbook 14 review when it comes to describing the ZenBook 15’s design and aesthetic. Basically, both are identical, however, the ZenBook 15 has a slightly larger 15.6-inch NanoEdge display. Apart from that, it’s all same be it the Royal Blue with the gold trim color scheme or the textured golden bar above the keyboard.
Not just the design, but the quality of ZenBook 15 is identical to its smaller ZenBook 14, which bring MIL-STD-810G military standard build to UX533FD.
The ZenBook 15 also shares ErgoLift hinge from ZenBook 14 for optimizing the cooling, pleasant experience, and enhancing audio quality. And much like its smaller sibling, this machine lacks a fingerprint sensor, instead, an IR camera is added for faster and secure Windows Hello login.
“the ergohinge on zenbook 15 richens the user experience and takes it to a new level.”
The ASUS ZenBook 15 UX533FD has very thin bezels (nearly bezel-less) bringing the screen-to-body ratio of 92 percent. It comes around 3.0mm along the sides and 4.5mm up top, and the best part is, it still packs webcam above the display. The UX533FD measures just 13.94 inches wide by 8.66 inches deep.
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PORTS
Again, much like ZenBook 14, the ZenBook 15 comes with a wide variety of ports; at the left, there’s a USB-C port, a USB 3.1 input, and an HDMI connector. To the right, there’s a microSD card slot, a USB 2.0 port, and a combination headphone/mic jack.
Once again, ASUS went with slow-charging DC-in connector instead it could have gone with Thunderbolt 3 port for charging/general use and also a full-sized SD card port would have been way better than the microSD slot.
ASUS ZenBook 15 UX533FD: Display
The ZenBook 15, as the name goes, comes with a 15.6-inch Full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS NanoEdge display, which brings more pixels without losing battery life. The display with NanoEdge or say 92% screen-to-body is immensely satisfying, however, we would have loved to see a 4K display (of course for some extra bucks).
In our testing, the display of ZenBook 15 reproduced 72 percent of the AdobeRGB and 94 percent of sRGB color gamut, giving out a comforting vividness and a decent color reproduction. Apart from that, the indoor visibility was nice, however, the outdoor visibility wasn’t that good, but was better than ZenBook 14 perceptibility, which was expected when it crossed 300 nit mark.
“the nanoedge display uplifts the overall content consumption plesantly.”
ASUS ZenBook 15 UX533FD: Keyboard, Touchpad, Audio And Webcam
Much like ZenBook 14, the typing experience in this laptop was excellent. In fact, the tactile feedback with a relatively shallow 1.4m backlit keys was ample. The keys are well spaced out, however, the Numpad keys weren’t. We have also encountered a slight flex in the keyboard, not a deal breaker though.
Coming to the trackpad, the machine has well laid out trackpad with Microsoft’s Windows Precision Drivers, which means the accuracy and the gestures were excellent and worked really well.
The ZenBook 15 has two down-firing speakers which are unexpectedly good, considering the size and the position of the drivers. The overall sound quality and richness were bright, thanks to Harman/Kardon for fine-tuning.
It was astonishing to see a webcam over a thin top bezel. That said, the 3D IR HD webcam is just sufficient enough for standard video calling, not the best in class but does the job. As there’s no fingerprint sensor to unlock the device, this webcam also used for Windows Hello.
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ASUS ZenBook 15 UX533FD: Performance
The ASUS ZenBook 15 comes with Whisky Lake 8th-gen Intel Core i7-8565U CPU paired with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD, which is faster, efficient and enough to power anything you forward. In the Geekbench 4, the notebook scored a strong 5,330 in the single-core test and 17,607 in the multi-core test.
Apart from that, the ZenBook 15 uses Western Digital PCIe SSD and gives out a pretty good read and write. What we mean by that is that it can duplicate 4.97GB of data in 10 seconds for a rate of 508 megabytes per second. It took around 3 minutes and 14 seconds to chunk down 1080p res video of around 300MB in Adobe Premiere. Overall, the performance is very satisfying.
“ASUS zenbook 15 ux533f clears out the assigned task chunks like a master.”
In addition to that, in my daily usage; with 15 Chrome tabs open (in which 4 tabs are playing YouTube videos), a slight Photoshop and Lightroom, and a few other Windows apps (like Spotify, Shift) running simultaneously, the ZenBook 15 UX533FD didn’t give up on me, even after a heavy usage.
GRAPHICS
The unit we received to test came with Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 Max Q with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM. In our testing, the ZenBook 15 performs just below the GTX 1050 and around the same as the AMD Radeon RX560X. It scored 5,193 in 3DMark Fire Strike synthetic benchmark.
Speaking of games, the laptop pushed 220 frames per second (FPS) at 1080p and performance settings and 132 FPS at high quality in the Rocket League. Coming to the graphics intense games, like in Battlefield 1, the laptop pushed 58 FPS at 1080p at medium settings and 30 FPS at ultra settings.
“Even though The zenbook 15 isn’t a gaming machine, but it does justice to entry-level gamers.”
This laptop is definitely not meant of hardcore gamers, but as it can handle modern titles at 1080p, it is above average machine and does justice to entry-level gamers with good throughput performance.
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ASUS ZenBook 15 UX533FD: Battery And Thermals
The ZenBook 15 UX533FD comes with a 72Wh 4-cell lithium-polymer battery. In our daily usage with streaming videos on Netflix/YouTube and slight documentation with 70-80% brightness, the battery lasted us around 5 hours 46 minutes on average, which is respectable.
Coming to thermals, much like ZenBook 14, the chassis never got overly warm, and the fans spun up but were never overly loud. There’s supposed to be the same Quiet Fan utility that we liked on the ZenBook S, but we couldn’t find it in our review configuration.
PROS
- Sturdy build quality
- Beautiful display
- Unquestionable performance
- Good battery life
CONS
- No 4K display
- No full-sized SD cards lot
- Average bright display
- Runs hot with demanding loads
- Fan noise is evident
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Verdict
The ASUS ZenBook 15 UX533FD is an extremely lightweight, portable with strong looks and performance making it a versatile laptop or a 15-inch notebook to carry around easily, especially when chassis gives you a great screen-to-body ratio. Moreover, the inclusion of a good keyboard, transcendent speakers, great battery life is an added bonus.
Coming to whether or not you should go for this one? well, with all the mentioned features, the ZenBook 14 UX433FN is worthy one, however, the pricing is really high, so it depends from individual to individual. Moreover, with almost the same specs, the ZenBook 14 comes cheaper than this laptop, check out the review. The ZenBook 14 UX433FN is priced at Rs 144,246 (as of now on Amazon.in).
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