Asus Zenbook Pro Ux550 Review
The updated ZenBook Pro from Asus can match its Apple rival regarding professional-level performance and portability and is much more affordable. The ZenBook Pro UX550’s design is simple. It has a glossy blue or black case, and the 15.6-inch screen is surrounded by a black plastic border that looks old-fashioned. It feels sturdy, though, and the large screen gives the keyboard and trackpad much room to move around. It’s a little thicker than the 15-inch MacBook Pro (19mm vs 15.5mm), but both weigh 1.8kg, so the ZenBook Pro is a good choice if you need a powerful laptop that’s still easy to carry around.
Asus Zenbook Pro Ux550 Specifications
| Memory | 8 GB DDR4 |
| Storage | 256 M.2 NVMe SSD |
| OS | Windows 10 |
| Battery | 73 Wh, 120 Wh charger |
| Weight | 4.05 lbs (1.84 kg) |
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 4.2 |
| Wi-Fi | 802.11ac |
Pros
- Built to be small and looking great
- Excellent click pad
- Good I/O, with four TB3 ports
- Multiple configurations available
- Works perfectly and stays cool when used every day.
- Lasts a long time
- Loud and powerful speakers
- Fair price
Cons
- Some flex in the frame and flaws in the finish
- The keyboard is soft and has an unusual layout.
- Fans are always in use, every day.
Price
Prices for the new UX550 range begin from £1,199. This range is for a model with a Core i5 processor. We tested a mid-range model that cost £1,399 (including VAT, or £1,165.83 without VAT) and had a quad-core Core i7-7700HQ processor running at 2.8GHz (3.8GHz with Turbo Boost). In the US, Asus’s website only shows one configuration for the UX550 line: it has the same specs as our review unit but 16GB of RAM and costs $2,100.
Display
The ZenBook Pro’s 15.6-inch, 1080p screen isn’t the brightest out there, but it’s bright enough to use without a problem and has a lot of colours. When I saw the Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer, I could see every stitch on Luke Skywalker’s cloak. The ZenBook Pro’s screen covers 122 percent of the sRGB colour gamut. This makes it more colourful than the average mainstream laptop (103 percent), and the Yoga 720 (114 percent), but the MacBook Pro (126 percent) and XPS 15 (an impressive 188 percent) were even more colorful.
Our light meter showed that the Asus laptop had an average brightness of 271 nits. The display resolution is better than most of the category’s average (258 nits). To be mentioned here, the XPS 15 (282 nits) is brighter, and the MacBook Pro (460 nits) is in a league of its own regarding brightness.
Screen
The screen is well-built, with a strong frame and bezels that don’t pinch the surface, save from the lid’s kink. As a result, there is minimal light leakage at the sample’s borders and corners. Quality control is a crapshoot, as some people online have complained that their devices bleed more than they used to. Make sure you buy from a place that makes it easy to return things because there’s a good chance you’ll get the short end of the stick here.
The Keypad and Keyboard
I don’t mind if this keyboard didn’t have a few other small problems. You’d usually find the Delete key on a standard layout, so putting the computer to sleep when you’re trying to delete something is frustrating. So, you should immediately turn off this key the first time you boot into Windows. You’ll also find it hard to use Enter and the arrows until you get used to the new layout. You might find it useful to have separate keys for Home/End, PgUp, and PgDn, but it will take some time.
Audio And Ports
It would be best to have headphones to listen to music on the ZenBook Pro. The Harman Kardon speakers are well-balanced but quiet. When I listened to “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden, it was barely loud enough to fill our labs, and I had to be close to the machine to hear it. Using the movie mode on the included ICEpower Audio app made the song a little bit louder, but it also made the vocals louder than the bass, guitar, and drums, so it wasn’t an improvement.
FAQs
Webcam of Asus Zenbook Pro Ux550
ZenBook Pro’s 480p webcam is awful. Asus laptops have had low-resolution webcams for years. It lacks details (my hair was a clump) and colour reproduction (the blues and greens on my shirt practically blended).
Heat of Asus Zenbook Pro Ux550
Normally, the ZenBook stays cool. After streaming 15 minutes of HD YouTube video, the laptop registered 81 degrees Fahrenheit on the bottom, 80 degrees between the G and H keys, and 76 degrees on the touchpad, well below our 95-degree comfort criteria.
Software Warranty of Asus Zenbook Pro Ux550
The ZenBook Pro comes with Windows 10’s Signature Edition and has no Asus software, but Microsoft’s garbage does.
