Zenbook U500 Announced: 15.6" HD IPS, GT650M, Quad-Core i7...

Frozer have you intention to open the laptop bottom to check the components?

 

Trust me, unless they started using different panels just recently, it's IPS. I agree it's odd that HP wouldn't advertise it that way, but I can assure you it is. When you move the panel vertically or shift the laptop horizontally there is no picture degredation, color shifting, etc. The nice thing is there is also no Orangegate issues. It's an LG display, LGD037F I think to be exact and it's a beautiful 1080p Matte display (especially for the price).

I had it side by side with the Sony S15, and I liked the HP much better. The Sony had a slightly higher contrast / colors popped a tad more, but the anti-glare had a tad more reflection to it as well. Many people can confirm this in the HP forums as well that the DV6T (at least at some period) was an IPS display (or one of the most incredible TN displays to ever grace the earth). However, I can assure you its IPS. Im getting the newer ENVY version of the DV6T tomorrow and will conform they are stilll using the same Matte 1080p IPS screen.

Any news on a touch screen UX51 yet? Thats the only other PC I have any interest in at this point.

 

I am in Denmark and I would guess ambient temperatures some degrees above 20.

Someone was interested in Furmark burn-in benchmark:


And also a HWInfo64 log file:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApqA58GEvFrXdEJXMG9EWldmSnlzNEdHVVphc1FsUkE&output=html

Okay please note that this log file does not show any throttling on the GPU however Furmark showed throttling, I am note sure which one to believe :S

 

I will probably if or when I decide to keep it . . .

 

Frozer, I'd still be very interested in the noise emissions. Besides the measurements: would you say, it's comfortable to work with this laptop in a library in office mode? What about gaming mode or watching movies? Was the noise disturbing or was it bearable? Was it also a low-frequent noise or are the fans running at high speeds?

 

I am also in Denmark, can I ask where you got it from ? Do you have the option to return it (within 30 days or 60 or something), and if the touch screen will be available by then, do you plan on switching to the touch ?

 

Hmm I am not sure on the noise emissions. I am sure it could be used in a library without a problem it is not a high pitched and annoying noise. One positive thing was that in my opinion it did not get much worse while gaming. I will try and leave it running for a while and see what the temperatures stabilize at.

Also regarding the red color here is another comparison with Galaxy nexus, it does indeed seem like my last picture was not really red:

 

It's enough clear that on GPU there isn't any throttling problem.

The points in which we should focus are:
1) Orangegate
2) SSDs form factor
3) Throttling on CPU when CPU & GPU are used simultaneously

Frozer can you give us the Windows ID of display? Maybe you can use HWinfo64 to obtain this info.

 

With regards to Number 1:
Please see my last picture and ID is LGD0323

Number 2:
Maybe I will check this, I can return it for three weeks but as I need a laptop bad I will decide very soon if I will be keeping it or not.

Number 3:
It will throttle at least mine did instantly during Prime95 and Furmark.

I do not plan on switching to touch.

 

Dear Frozer, once again thank you for your time! What do you think about external temperatures after some gaming? How it is on the top surface (where you put hands or palms) and on the bottom surface? Did you run all these tests with the laptop directly on the table or on some sort of cooler pad?

It seems to me that color reproduction is fine

EDIT: did it come with a sleeve and an external unit? Could you post a photo of the sleeve please?

 

All tests were run on a normal table. Did not touch the bottom to test temperatue. I did not have any issues on the top of the laptop, however I did not really touch everywhere to check.

 

Nice, I can see they are "ordering it from remote inventory". Not sure if I can order it right away, but evidently one can. I would really much like to order it right away, but I'll try to keep calm and wait for more info on the touch.

And thanks again for all your info.

 

If it throttle instantly maybe it means that power supply is insufficient?

 

Thank you very much.

That is a nice GPU temp you have there. Quite impressive.

 

That would be my guess as well, temperature did not get high.

 

Should I wait for this or get the w110er from clevo

 

Now that you've played with it a bit, how do you feel about build quality? What about screen hinges, touch pad, keyboard, flexing,..?

Well, that is a totally different type of product...

 

A second ago I would have said that it was perfect, except I just noticed that the front right corner is not touch the surface. I grabbed the laptop and tested on several surfaces and sure enough on most of them the front right corner was hovering 1 mm or so above the surface. This was sadly most apparent on the surfaces I believe to be quite even. See this picture:

 

What a pity. But I guess this can happen sometimes. Do you plan to send it back to get it fixed?

Sent from HTC HD2 with Tapatalk

 

Actually I am not quite sure, it is such a minor thing but I suspect it is going to annoy the crap out of me. Also I guess this kind of money is too much to pay and have issues like that.

 

From the log file it looks like it disables turboboost at 80º wish is a good thing,
but it also looks like if the cpu pushes to much power it throttle to 1.2GHz and unfortunately that limit seems around 20watts ~30% cpu utilization wish is a very little margin for games to work without throttling

Can you do the same test for Civ V
its a bit more cpu heavy, if it passes that it should n´t be a problem

 

i just got the Envy Dv6 with 1080p screen, no orangegate and very high viewing angles, quite possibly the best TN panel i've seen on a consumer laptop. Also has the GDDR5 650m and it doesn't throttle. Only 1000 US after coupon and only 1lb heavier. Yes it's a mixture of plastic/aluminum but its built better than the S15.

I still prefer the Asus on looks but not on performance and I get 5 hrs battery and about 8-9hrs with the extended battery but Asus has left a bad taste in my mouth with this whole fiasco. However i am a laptop fanatic and will keep my eyes peeled for reviews.

So far feeling the Envy DV6 more than my wifi perfect XPS 15

 

Bend it over your knee, it's aluminium.

 

You could just scrape a millimeter of the left corner as well to even it out . What is your impression of the touchpad so far?

 

As mentioned a few pages back, I have the DV6T as well and you are 100% correct about everything. And for the extra pound you get some cool extra features like Blu-Ray, Finger Print reader, etc.

However, I also think the Matte 1080p is NOT a TN. It has to be IPS. I compared it with the Sony S15 and even my IPS 24" external monitor and viewing angles were nearly identical. What is the Model number of the panel in the Device Manager?

If it's a TN panel, it is by far and away the most IPS like TN panel Ive ever laid my eyes on.

 

Touchpad seems very good to me, however I am used to awful awful touchpads.

 

Hey, good to see another owner on the boards.

I've also done an Android phone Sound Meter test now, and with the mic at 10 cm above the keyboard, facing the vents below the screen, it idles at around 32 dB. Under load (used 3DMark) it goes up to 45 dB.

For those interesting in the older 3Dmark results (Vantage), see here: 3dmark

My U500 is straight, as far as I can tell. All 4 rubber points are making contact with the table.

 

Does anyone know what is the maximal external resolution supported? 1080p, 1440p or even 2160p?

 

Hmm, sounds like the fans are running too fast instead of too slow in this machine The screen looks good and definitely A LOT better than the S15 monitor. The only thing I don't like right now is idle noise. Do you guys think that there may be any chance to turn is slower later on?

How is the sound? Really that great - even without subwoofer? And could somebody show us a picture of the included bag please? THX!!!
'

 

I really liked the sound, of course it is not as good as my speaks for my desktop but considering it is a laptop I am very impressed.

A picture of the bag:

 

The Envy DV6-7214nr certainly looks like a good competitor to the Sony S15 and Asus U500/UX51, and it's substantially cheaper than either of them.

Could you look at the hardware ID of the panel in the Windows Device Manager and let us know what it says? That should help establish whether it's an IPS or a TN model.

 

Bag:



Noise: The passive CPU policy did not help. Maybe it can be changed in BIOS? What's the default key Asus assigns to enter it?

 

You can enter the BIOS by pressing F2.

 

Mine says this MONITOR\LGD037F

 

Right, nothing there. One of the most Spartan BIOSes I've seen. I thought they had introduced UEFI graphical BIOSes everywhere by now...

 

Did someone also get the external dvd drive?

How's the overal performance of the laptop (intensive browsing online, through folders, etc)? (not gamewise)
Does it reply 'snappy'?


As for the owners of that HP envy: would you have gone for the rmbp if the money was no issue? I'm still in doubt between these 3 laptops but there seems to be something wrong with each one of them .

 

Thanks. I totally failed to find any information about that. Anyone else know whether that's IPS?

 

Thank you again for all the information. Sadly the bag looks "quite cheap" in comparison to the notebook. I still hope that there will be any solution to reduce the idle noise. Apart from that all looks fine. I am still excited to know how long 1080p video playback on battery (50% brightness) is possible. If there is no throttling in normal gameplay I am pretty much sold....I think ;-)

 

I didn't get the DVD drive, as I indicated before.

Snappy? Yes, quite so. It's got some heavy hardware onboard to make sure. Laptops such as this one or the S15 are targeted specifically at the power user segment, so snappiness is not the problem.

 

Yup, thats the panel on mine as well.

 

Not sure if this is useful at all, I ran the build in Civilization V benchmarks Units and lateGameView:

HWInfo64:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApqA58GEvFrXdEhBWXJ1RVZJMVlndTdJVU01eXZHRGc&output=html
and
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApqA58GEvFrXdE1wV1hKdVRINW1PTnZfNEZQckVRX1E&output=html

Info from the log file generated by Civ V:
LateGame:
Full Render Score: 1206
NoShadow Render Score: 1962
No Render Score: 3710

Units:
Full Render Score: 650
NoShadow Render Score: 972
No Render Score: 2124

Settings:
1920x1080
8x MSAA
VSync Off
High Detail Strategic View: Enabled
Other Settings: High

 

What HP laptop are you guys talking about? Is it the DV6-7214nr mentioned above? I briefly browsed the hp forum and people were talking about hp discontinuing their best model so now I'm confused.

 

I've also been struggling to find this out. Supposedly, with some new Intel HD4000 drivers, the laptop should be able to output up to 4096×2048 through HDMI. I'm still looking for someone to confirm this however.

 

Not sure how I can confirm this I have no monitor capable of taking that resolution also I was not able to install the newest intel drivers on the laptop. They were not certified by the manufacturer or something.

 

Notebookcheck says that the typical backgroud noise in a quiet room is 28 dB, and putting the microphone at 15 cm from the laptop they classify rumor <=30dB as "barely audible". So, if this has 32 dB at 10 cm I think it won't be a problem. Notebookcheck also consider 45 dB while gaming as "still acceptable".

Agree, unfortunately the sleeve they ship with smaller Zenbooks looks much prettier..
I'm very interested in that test,too. If you happen to make some battery test, would you try to see for how long you can play full hd movies at 50% brightness please? Really important to me

It seems that it behaves well also with a cpu-intensive game, so if battery life is good (>5 hr in web surfing/typing/listening to music @ 50% brightness) and the price doesn't kill me, I'm quite sold :thumbsup:

 

That is very useful indeed!

It seems the laptop throttle now and then even at low temperature.

Since it´s an asus and its a common problem for them i would assume it´s the bios protection when the laptop tries to push to much power but in contrary to other asus laptops wish doesn´t present the problem during real case scenarios this seems to be right at the limit.

It seems that if your up to it i would recomend you use throttlestop during games for a smooth gameplay

 

Since the first models are shipped out, it's really time for me to decide between this beauty and the Sony Vaio S15.
Can anyone help me deciding? As it's mentioned before, they're very closed compared to each other, while this one of course has the better graphics as well as the better screen (from what've been told up to now).
Besides that, the Vaio is much cheaper, especially because I'm aiming to use it mainly for office/surfing usage. I also considered the Samsung 900X4C, but it's got worse hardware for the same price as the Sony Vaio. Gigabyte U2442V would look nice as well but apparently isn't available here in Switzerland...
So guys, any recommendations for the decision Asus Zenbook UX51 vs Sony Vaio S15?
I'm mainly looking for things like noise, weight, temperature (cool enough to have it on the lap) and usability in office mode.

 

I still can't figure out how it's possible that Asus still don't have U500 on their website while in Denmark and Norway it's already available for purchase...

 

Really hard to say. With the bios mod the S15 is exactly as fast as the UX51 and it still does not throttle. The S15 remains cool and in office mode it is really quite. It does not turn the fans off but right now I cannot say if the UX51 is noisier. While gaming the S15 gets quite loud but for me that was no problem. I also have no comparison to the UX51 right now. I am about to answer the question to myself pretty soon. Depends on some test results of the UX51, news about the touch version and reports of the new S1512 model which might have no orangegate issue any more. I would only get it if there is again this awesome bios-mod.
For me there is also a third option - Samsung Series 7 17" which would also have some really nice benefits and the smallest possible form factor for a 17" device. I will continue reading for another 2-3 weeks and then I do have to finally decide.

Edit:
S15(12) is out for me. Still organge: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/673678-vaio-s15-orangegate-again-13.html#post8922234
So, only Samsung 700Z7C and UX51 left in the game. Samsung upgraded the 1TB hybrid HDD now from 8GB SSD to 16GB. Not bad...+ 12GB ram, BR drive, 3615QM, good battery life, same GPU, completely silent @ idle ......ok back to topic guys ;-)

 

I'm wondering how much the "Orangegate" affects casual user like me, which don't need a perfect screen for editing or such. Is it bearable or is the red really orange which means COMPLETELY different colour?
In the thread you posted, some also say, for casual use it's no problem...
Samsung 700Z7C looks nice, but 17" is too big for me, still want to carry it around

EDIT: I just saw the HP Envy from the discussion below... very interesting for a very low price! What are the cons compared to the Asus or the Sony Vaio?