Asus Zenbook NX500

This sports supposed 100% NTSC and has a GPU that can actually run games decently well.

I have and never will understand macs. They seem disgustingly overpriced for the abysmal specs they offer

The price of this is certainly higher than what I would have liked to seen. That being said, it still seems to undercut its competition like the Razer blade.

 

I agree with arcturar. If this is literally the price, I would rather spend an extra $300 on a MBP. Dual OS, better keyboard and excellent build quality. They even have an Iris Pro CPU, which is more expensive, so I can't really understand Asus's price justification. Yes the GPU is only a 750M but by the time the NX500 comes out, Apple will probably refresh the rMBP with the 850M. Heck, they'll probably have the same screen for all we know.

Doesn't matter - I'm still counting on a $1800 base model with a 256GB SATA M.2 and WISHING for a $1500 QHD panel option

 

If the macbook refresh gets a gddr5 850m refresh, then it will indeed probably be a better deal than this

 

Forgot to ask. What's the refresh rate @ 4k resolution?

 

Price mean nothing before we see reviews. Im very concerned about the battery life, cooling and especially the coil whine...

 

Why oh why can't a manufacturer do something that makes sense.
Asus has gone to apparently great lengths to make an awesome product, and then they stick a SILVER KEYBOARD on it !!!
Asus, if you are listening, and care about your customer's wishes (we're the ones who will be buying this thing) - please change the keys to BLACK.
I've had laptops with silver keys before and there is NO way to read them - especially when the backlight is on - there's simply NO CONTRAST.
How can you employ a great screen and forget something so simple and logical as a functional keyboard that the user can actually see ?

 

Mike, one question nobody seemed to ask, would you buy the NX500? If no, why not?

 

I'm afraid those prices are on par with what I have. between 2100 and 2800 euro over here, based on configuration (don't have the exact configs associated with those prices though). This should translate in $2200 to $3000 in the US.

4K refresh rate is 60 Hz.

To share some spoilers, battery life isn't great. And on top of that, this thing gets really really hot, to the point that you can't even touch the belly and the area just on top of the keyboard when gaming for hours. The internals don't actually get as hot as on the UX303LN, but the CPU and GPU get past 85 degrees Celsius under load. Of course, high temps lead to throttling and there's a bit of this in here as well. So I wouldn't exactly get this one for serious gaming, it's more of a multimedia laptop with potential gaming abilities.

I wonder if the GX500 will sport a different cooling solution. From the pics I've seen, it doesn't seem to, and there's a 860 in that one that could lead to even higher temps.

On the "pros" side, the screen is really good. 100% sRGB and 97% Adobe RGB according to my colorimeter, with accurate colors. Top brightness is at about 270 nits only though so my initial impression was somewhat right. Measured contrast is about 750:1. Haven't tried testing the brightness at various resolutions, but I will. Wi-fi performance is good as well and there's not a lot to complain about the touchpad.

Also, someone asked if you can keep the screen on 2560 x 1440 px. Well, you can have it on any resolution you want, but anything except native will make content slightly fuzzy. I'm keeping it on 1080p right now because I test a lot of games (and if you don't change the res in WIndows they are running in small windows in 1080p), and it's alright, but definitely not a sharp as native, which is a given with these LCDS.

 

Thanks Mike! 60Hz is better than Lenovo Y50 but between the heat, price and the keyboard, I think I'm going to pass on the NX500. Eyes are now on the GX500 and the G551. The GX500 has some vents on the bottom but I think they are passive. The videos I've seen, you can see the copper pipes run past them. IF that's the case, the heat is probably going to be the same or worse. If Lenovo fixes the refresh rate, I'll likely settle for the Y50 now.

 

My usage would be multimedia and occasional gaming on the go. Even so, the always active fans, coil whine, throttling, and hot surface are all potential deal breakers. Its battery life, touchpad, and screen brightness sound disappointing as well, but I'm glad to hear the screen mostly delivers when it comes to colour reproduction. I'm still thinking of ordering the GX500 as soon as possible, knowing there's a high chance that I'll feel inclined to return it.

I'm guessing it's using the same cooling setup, but, for what it's worth, it does have some additional ventilation. Although the 860M is just an 850M with a higher clock speed, it might also be higher binned, translating to a lower required volt per hertz ratio and cooler performance at 850M clocks if true. Hopefully some Liquid Ultra will suffice to take care of the throttling.

Asus didn't tweak the scaling to allow 1080p to be rendered with four pixels representing one? That's a shame.

 

What do you mean about 'hot'. Which casing temps are we talking? And more importantly WHERE

Colors may be great, but <1:1000 contrast ratio is not that great

 

hey dude a few favors to ask

1. can you open up the backlid to show us the cooling placement

2. can you do single and double stress test on cpu and gpu and notify us any throttling issues? and if so how low did it throttle to

alright thanks buddy

 

A bit high...

As it should be. Well, I'd like 120Hz but one can't get everything at the same time.

85 degrees under load is nothing. Also any computer with a powerful dedicated GPU will get hot unless they are using a huge chassis with huge fans, nothing strange about that. Most people think 60 degrees feels scalding (which it actually is given enough time) but isn't that hot hardware wise.

Is there room for anything else? I guess Asus could have tweaked the fan response curves as gamers tend to be less sensitive towards fan noise than premium notebook buyers. The 860 is using the same chip as the 850 but clocked a bit higher, the GDDR5 memory system is the same and that sucks up a bit of power too. Nvidia selects chips with better characteristics to become an 860 GPU so the power difference may be very small.

That sounds nice except for the brightness. I guess you tested without the automatic backlight adjustment running?

Using full HD shouldn't be a problem unless either the scaling (software or hardware) sucks or you have cleartype enabled and Microsoft doesn't detect that special case. Otherwise integer scaling (x2 for both x & y in this case) should produce a just as good picture as the native resolution.

 

Any chance you'll be getting the GX500 for review as well?

 

Why would one want the GX500 over NX500? And dont say GTX860M instead of 850M..

 

Well there's that, and hopefully it has better cooling. I personally play games, so if the NX500 turns into a frying pan because they refused to put in the proper cooling, then I'm out. I'll gladly sacrifice a touchscreen for better cooling and a faster GPU. Plus, I kind of like seeing the keyboard keys and from the pictures I've seen of the NX500, it's pretty hard to read the keys. What I really don't understand is the preorder prices I've been seeing. They seem awfully high and Apple-like, so at this point I would rather wait for the MBP refresh and get that over the NX500. Even the Razer Blade has a better value which is a rare thing to say. I was all for the NX500 until Mike's first impressions. Now I think it's overpriced. There's no sense in spending that much money on hardware that will be throttled due to heat so easily. I'm still looking forward to Mike's full review but from what I've seen, I'm not optimistic.

 

The cooling will be 99% the same, since it has the same thickness, the same port selection (so internals cannot be placed so differently)
The GTX 850M GDDR5 IS a GTX860M. After reading several ROG laptops they suck in keeping it cool.

The keys you can be right, but i cannot say this as such a dealbreaker to switch to the GX500

Anyway Mike has one unit and is just one person. He also said the UX303 was hot, but that's just warm at best.
Stress a Dell XPS15, now THATS hot. Wait for a detailed review a la notebookcheck with casetemps

 

I'll get myself a good IR thermometer , without it, me saying the case gets hot is subjective and maybe inaccurate, you're right. Not sure if I can buy one in time for this review though, but I'll do my best.

The interior, just on top of the keyboard get's hot imh, and so is the belly, on the exact same place, exactly where the exhaust is placed.

You're saying the UX303LN gets warm at best. OK. So then what's hot in your opinion?

@Megol I keep the laptop exactly how it comes out of the box, aka, with the default ClearType settings and I haven't encountered any screen that scales perfectly when changing the resolution. Keeping it at default res and playing with the Font-size, yes, that works fine. But that's not a solution for games. If I keep the res 4K in Windows with the fonts scaled to 200% and try to play a game in 1920 x 1080 px, the content is displayed in a small window. So I need to change the res in Windows, right? And that means either change it only when playing games, which is a bit annoying, or changing it for good and dealing with the slight font fuzziness.

I've tested a bunch of 4K and higher than 1080p screens (among them, lenovo yoga 2 pro, asus ux301, Dell UP3214Q, etc) in the last months and none were perfectly sharp when switching the resolution for anything but the default one. So maybe I'm doing something wrong here?

And yes, of course I test for brightness with the Auto function disabled. I'm using a Digicolor Spyder4 Elite, no really a professional tool, but not a bad one either.

 

If you switch to 1920x1080, it should look the same as a similar sized 1080p panel(minue the scaling of the icons and fonts of course). Games should look the same though. The last two 4k laptops I've seen both looked great at 1080p. There was no setting for 1440p on them, probably because it wasn't 4:1 ratio of pixels. I can only assume that since 1080p is a 4:1 ratio, the software scaling was a lot more natural looking and therefore looked better. So maybe start there and compare with a native 1080p panel. It's hard to compare against itself because 4k looks so much sharper. Either way, some games will require you to manually scale with Windows and others will scale at full screen correctly. Crysis 3 played in a mini window half the time, which was weird to me. But Skyrim always played in full screen at 1080p. SC2 changed resolutions just fine.

That colorimeter you use is professional enough. Many photographers use that or the Pro. I use the Pro and rarely get different readings than the "professional" readings that reviewers get.

 

You can usually change the window in the scaling options either in the drivers or the game itself.

 

didn't people just tell you about chips binning? yes they are both gm107 chips, but the ones with less defects get to be 860m while the others become 850m

the way nvidia does its binning is like this. we know 860m's default clock is 1029mhz
if a chip can meet that standard, it's an 860m
if not, it goes to a lower end product like 850m
if it can't meet the standard of 850m, it either becomes something even lower, or gets sent back to the manufacturer

due to a lower quality chip, you can have very different result such as
1. higher stock voltage causing higher heat
2. lower OC potential

don't get the impression that 850m will be as good as 860m. your chip is only guaranteed at the stock clock speed, chances of 860m OCing to a higher clock speed is a lot higher than 850m, that's considering if you are even OCing at all.

MIKE!!!!!!!!!!!
CAN YOU POST SOME PICS OF THE INTERNAL PLEASEEEEEEEEEEE?!!
I'm just curious to see its cooling setup

also CAN YOU PLEASE RUN SOME STRESS TESTS?

<333

 

Yes, I'll take pics of the internals once I finish everything else. Stress tests though I'm probably not allowed to run on this pre-production unit, I'll have to check with Asus. If I am allowed, I'll include the results in the final article.

About having this on 1080p, fonts are somewhat fuzzy, but again, that happened with all the high res panels I ever got my hands on, even on 4:1 resolutions. Everything else is alright and gaming on 1080p should definitely not be a problem, with all the moving elements. Reading texts or browsing is though. I find that keeping the screen at 4K with fonts-scaled to 200% looks much better. In fact, that's how Asus ships this by default.

 

I love you man. alright back to topic, they wouldn't really know if you ran it or not wouldn't it? but if you really can't don't worry about it

we just want to know more about throttling issues. thanks dude!

 

The scaling of games is a setting in the nvidia driver panel, and some games have a setting of their own on top of that. It has nothing to do with 4K panels or anything. People have been gaming in resolution below native without changing their windows resolution for the longest time.

Can I ask for the poor battery life, since the battery capacity is so huge, what is the average power consumption?

 

They would if they read his review lol

 

I know, yet, correct me if I'm wrong, but some recent games run on small windows if the in-game res is smaller than the Windows set resolution, regardless of the settings in the Nvidia panel. Need for speed most wanted is one of them, for instance.

I'm still conducting battery tests. It would be great if you could suggest some software that would reliably show power consumption, other than Battery Bar Pro / HW Info, which I'm using most of the time and I find fairly accurate. I don't have tools to measure power consumption so have to rely on software.

Another thing I noticed is that the laptop doesn't run to the full of its abilities on battery, on High Performance, although the settings look good for the power profile. All the titles i've tried are limited to 30 fps on battery. I wonder if this is a settings/drivers thing that could be tweaked, but I've yet to find how...

 

Battery eater?

Sounds like the nvidia driver is doing 30fps cap.

 

If you had to guess, how long would you say the battery lasts on a full charge with just basic internet usage?

 

nvidia battery boost does this

 

Which day can we read your complete review mike?

 

Seems odd to me that Asus would provide you a pre-release unit for review but then not also provide you a method to contact them to get all your questions answered about hardware, settings, tweaks, etc. Seems that kind of support would be fairly easy for them to provide and would lead to much more favorable reviews as the reviewer is not having to guess and wonder about things, but instead is getting reliable info directly from the manufacturer.

 

Well, that's just the way it is, I have no technical contact with them, just P R contacts.

The complete review should be available by tomorrow.

 

Tomorrow... awesome~~~!

 

Managed to finish this earlier, so here we go: Asus Zenbook NX500 / NX500JK review

Looking for your feedback.

 

Great review, Mike! Just a few quibbles. What's the boot up time on this thing?. Also, you said it's coming in a few weeks. Would you say the end of August is a possibility or is it more likely coming in September? Nevertheless, great and informative review, as always.

 

It boots from cold in 10 seconds or so. And I don't know when it's going to be available, but I'll probably find out more about the configs and release date when I return the laptop tomorrow.

 

Thanks for the full review!!
And this is such a great shot!


Still I think you were a bit harsh for the battery life and final 3,5/5 score.
I think wifi on, brightness 50% and achieving 8hrs is very good, certainly when you have a 4K display pushing it.
Personally I dont know much other laptops that get 8hrs on windows with wifi turned ON and get a quadcore inside (Dell XPS15 and that's about it? Retina 15 too, but in windows you wont get 8hrs)

CPU, GPU temps seem alright, but you really scare me with CASING temps too hot to touch. Did you ever own or used a retina 15? Would you say the casing gets hotter?
Or do you just mean it's aluminium, so it gets hotter than a plastic one will ever be.
I currently own an old HP Envy 15 and it gets quite hot (even while browsing)

Is it right I see TWO PCIe SSD slots? One empty?

Does windows have a 250% scaling option? or only 100 125 150 and 200.
Was a 150% scaling still readible? (like for daily use)

 

Indeed, that's a real great shot. Just curious, what camera did you us here, Mike?

 

@Devenox

Those are 8 hours on idle, while running nothing at all. It offers 5 hours of actual use, maybe 6, which is definitely not bad, but I was expecting more, given the big battery. I haven't exactly deducted points for this though. That's not why I only rated this one a 3.5/5 , it was because of the performance issues, screen brightness on battery and the keyboard/typing experience. If the performance is going to be addressed on the final units, I'll revisit the review.

I'd say the case temps are on par with the RMBP, maybe slightly higher. It's too bad I couldn't get that thermometer in time but I'll try to update the story once I do, if I can get the laptop again for a few hours.

And yes, there are two M.2 connectors, one free (looks like an 80 and a 60 mm one).

There's also a 250% scaling option in Windows but I haven't tried it. 150% scaling is not readable imh. 200% is just fine though.

I'm using a Canon DSLR to take the shots, nothing fancy.

 

wow dude thanks for the amazing review!

here's a few things that I would like to see if you can add them
1. pictures of cpu, including throttling, under single/ double stress test?
2. you said the GPU goes up to 1149mhz, that's abnormal for a stock D5 gtx850m, can you also verify that? it might be factory overclocked
3. can you also measure the pch temps?

sorry if I'm asking too much but can you please add those if possible? thanks!

 

asus trolled on the cooling completely. honestly, the cooling setup isn't bad, two heat pipes in series with gpu and cpu with dual fans should be enough for a 4712hq and 850m, and they got COPPER heat sinks too which is a huge plus plus, but...
why would they not have an underside intake vent? that's honestly the stupidest decision ever, the main problem with cooling is that it's not drawing enough air. I have yet to see a laptop with 4702hq or 4712hq throttle that much, until now.

the case temp would've been more tolerable if you factor in the chassis size, but the throttling issue? seriously?
how hard is it to put a grille on the bottom?

 

This should help: http://www.ultrabookreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/temps-gaming.jpg

1. Not sure what you mean by pictures? And now that I look at the HWInfo logs I've saved, it looks like I'm missing the stress logs, which means that I probably forgot to copy them from the laptop :|
2-3 Should be answered by that picture.

Anyway, I returned the laptop to Asus today, so can't run any new tests.

BTW, I think they somehow limited the CPU's temperature to around 86 degrees before capping the performance, at least on this model. No matter what I did, the cores never got higher than 86, while on some other laptops they go beyond that. So maybe that's something they could address, allow them to get higher before lowering the frequency.

I'm with you on the no-cuts on the back part though, the intake is really limited on this design.

 

ah sorry I didn't look at that one clearly, I'm more used to seeing the furmark donut in the back and prime95 running on the side for pics of double stress tests.

to answer your question, there could be two possibilities
1. there's a thermal limit of 86C on the CPU so whenever it reaches 86c, your system bios throttles the cpu. this has been done before various times to control the temperature. for example, lenovo y50 has temp limit of 65C on CPU turbo boosting, which turns off turbo after 65C to control temps. if asus puts an 85C limit on CPU that means they know they can't cool it down when it gets beyond that, a great example of bad cooling

2. it could also be power limit. since you didn't tell us the specs for adapter I'm guessing it could be that the power adapter is unable to provide enough power to the CPU under double stress mark, unlikely, but still possible

but regardless thanks a lot dude, I appreciate the review.

so far for the all machines with same/similar specs, this is the trollest cooling I've seen.
they could've just drilled a few holes on the bottom, that would have still made it a lot better than what it is now lol

EDIT: I was hoping for GPU-Z pictures of the gpus clock originally haha, at first I thought you were running on iGP because of the high clocks but then I see iGP has 0 volts so yeah they probably OC'd the 850m

and BTW, did you remember the room temp when running the stress tests? sorry for all these questions haha

 

I'm with you there... It's almost like they designed it for the i7-4500U. Heck, that would probably perform more consistently.

@Mike: You mentioned that Asus advertised a wider gamut and the sample you had didn't deliver. From my understanding, they advertised 100% NTSC and you got 92%. That's close enough I would think since if you consider the accuracy of the instrument and the lighting conditions. Or were you meaning doesn't deliver with something else?
Nice article though! As usual, you put all the info out there that I care about. I think I'm definitely going to pass on this one now. Asus has made extremely hot 15" Ultrabooks in the past and this one seems no different. Those were also $2200+, so I'm assuming the price point will be the same. We'll see if they fix any of the issues pointed out but I highly doubt it. It's not easy(probably impossible) to change major things like that 2 months before launch.

 

I don't think it's a power limit. See this: http://www.ultrabookreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/battery-life1.jpg , it's a 125W adapter. Also, keep in mind that we\re talking about a pre-production model so I wouldn't be hasty to say that they can't cool the hardware above 85 degrees. They might have went with this limit just to be safe on this early sample.

In fact, I sure hope they can on the final units, as they must fix the throttling and the more annoying freezes when playing games if they want us to buy this thing.

Again, I can't wait to see if the GX500 improves on these. From what I know, that one is going to come a bit later and maybe their engineers can learn something from the feedback gathered on the NX500 and at least work on the software side of things.

@Xentar712 Yeah, they said 100% NTSC and 108% SRGB if I remember correctly and my tool got 92% NTSC and 100% sRGB. I was referring to this when saying they did not deliver, but I agree it's very close, so I should probably change the wording in that phrase, just to make myself clearer.

 

from the cooling setup, no they didn't design for 4500U, if they did you wouldn't even be able to see dual heat pipe+dual fan set up. this setup right here is very similar to gigabyte p34g, which they put two heat pipe connecting gpu and cpu in series and cooled by two fans. this is a very logical setup for this kind of spec, and they even put in COPPER heat sinks, which you don't even see in Razer blade or alienware.

all these show that they definitely spent enough effort designing the cooling, but then the question becomes, how the hell did they not think of something as simple as putting a larger intake vent? it's a basic standard for all laptops, even macbooks, which have crap cooling know they have to have large underside vents. yet, asus just completely ignores this fact. nx500 is experiencing a whole new problem that no one else had before, solving a problem they never had to, which is just plainly stupid.

also, xentar, do you think that 92% is just marginal error or do you think it's actually not 100% NTSC? I'm not familar with color calibration so can you explain a little more on measuring the gamut?

 

I compared your reviews and it doesn't look like the 840M outperformed the 850M with GDDR5. You got higher framerates with 1080p high detail on the 850M than you did with 1080p low detail on the 840M. Did you really use high detail settings on the NX500 though? Was AA off at least because I thought those readings were pretty good on the high side.

 

Ah, scratch that, my bad, I was looking at the wrong column in the UX303LN review :| I'll go ahead and edit that reply.

Yes, I ran all the games on 19 x 10 with High details and standard AA settings (what comes by default which each title when selecting the High profile) on the NX500. So AA was not OFF.

BTW, room temperature was about 25 Celsius for all those tests, I forgot to add this.

 

I'd say so. I can measure my screen 5 times and get a +/- 3% easily just from turning an extra light on or waiting until night time to test it. Even then, someone with a different colorimeter can get up to 10% different than what I got. My instrument(Spyder4Pro) tends to estimate more because it doesn't go through all the color spectrum. In fact the test only takes about 10 minutes and it cycles through just a fraction of the colors. A full test of colors would take hours and it's not usually necessary to calibrate it so they only hit key colors and just assume all the others will fall into line. It doesn't even hit some of the colors at all, yellows being an example. That could be why I got such good results on the Y50 yet it still has crummy looking yellows. I'm still not sure if a better colorimeter(or a more thorough calibration) would help fix the yellows because yellows are generated by RGB and are not a primary LED color(with the exception of some Sharp brand screens). Either way, the colorimeter didn't even look at the yellows so it didn't count it against the sRGB score.

I actually contacted Datacolor yesterday to see if I could find a solution for mustard yellows for the guys in the Y50 thread. They said that laptop screens have been a nemesis to them for a long time now and gave me some tips on how to calibrate them better. I'll be experimenting some more in the coming weeks and will share what I learned.

 

yeah 125w is well enough for this rig, so the conclusion is just a temp limit of 85C

the fps seems low and it shouldn't be if we factor in that asus OC'd the 850m to 1150mhz, stock 850m just don't go that high.
your 3Dmark firestrike score is a little weird too

however, since you measured it with fraps, it may be because of that, that we'll have to dig further to find out.

EDIT: if AA wasn't off then it's understandable, but that firestrike score is still a bit weird