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

Not possible, it takes a large and heavy reservoir to cool a cpu. You'll end up with a very thick and heavy laptop.

 

So, is it safe to assume this 15" zenbook will be available when Windows 8 is launched (officially) October 26?

 

As you can see in every video about Zenbook U500VZ it uses already Windows 8.

 

Sure, beta version of Windows 8 exists for the public, but not the official-public release launch of Windows 8 (reported to be October 26). Your response still doesn't answer my original question regarding if the Asus U500v will be released with Windows 8 public launch (Oct 26) or not. :thumbsup:

 

[QUOTE='[-Mac-]You can see cooling grid (I guess for exhaust air) near the low part of display (minute 1:38):
[/QUOTE]

Oh cool, I checked many videos but not this one (this time). I just saw a low res picture and I thought I saw something like these vents. Does not looks that bad

No, but it will be definitely available this year. No more detailed information about the release date.

 

Windows 8 is not more beta, its RTM version is available from 15 August.
I have already downloaded original ISO of 32 and 64 bit version.
If you want you could download windows 8 enterprise 90 days trial (not beta).

What the sense to develop drivers for another OS when at the launch moment Windows 8 is already out.

Inviato dal mio GT-I9100 con Tapatalk 2

 

All liquid cooling does is move heat around to another place. This function is fulfilled by heatpipes in laptops and they already do a good job. The problem with laptops is both the size of vents on the laptop and the size of the heatsink's array of metal fins. Laptops are space constrained so they have to limit them.

 

the deal breaker on his ultra book will be the battery life for me.. I am excited to read some reviews!

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus

 

Any chance this laptop will be up for pre-order on Amazon before Sept 15th? It would be nice to pre-order it before Amazon starts taxing us Californians.

 

With the Asus U500 being thinner than the Gigabyte U2442N by 0.76mm (0.03") with an i7qm, and a 650m, Asus needs to do a better job than Gigabyte on cooling.
With this in mind I am pretty sure if they are going to deal with the heat then they are going to go with at least a dual fan... Unless all that extra weight is from the heat sinks then I think it'll do fine in temps.

 

Two disk drives, gt650m, and a quad core i7 won't have good battery life in a thin laptop. Realistically, probably 3.5 hours with the 650m off for light usage.

 

It being 15" vs 14", there's a little bit more space for heat dissipation, should help.

 

Asus UX32 series already have dual fan design, hopefully they will carry over to U500

 

For light usage you would use the Intel's HD4000 through Optimus.

You can see the dual fans in the video that was posted a couple of times already int his thread - the dual fan design as already been discussed and confirmed more than once.

 

Still don't understand why this is considered an 'ultrabook'; i7 + dedicated gpu + 15 inch screen?

Excuse any ignorance, but weren't ultrabooks meant to be power efficient and portable (smaller screen size, light weight, thin, etc)?

 

It's 0.78" so it is thin, there is no size requirement. It doesn't have a ULV CPU dissipating 17Watts or less and I thought that was a requirement though so who knows.

The Ultrabook label is worthless marketing fluff anyway, it's better to just buy the computer you want rather than looking for labels. I personally don't want an Ultrabook, but a fairly thin and light 15" with a good screen. Naturally I'm interested in this one and Lenovo's Y500.

 

Asus didn't call it an Ultrabook in their Press Release. It's just everyone else that's calling it that.

 

Has anything on the weight come out yet?

 

You know the newly announced Y500 will have 1366x768 resolution right? Unless they do another variant that has FHD, just going by what's been announced. In any case I highly doubt it will be an IPS panel.

 

Yes... There is a very good chance 1080p will be optional and if they use a panel like the current Y580 I can deal with it for the price. The U500 is going to be very expensive. As an example their nearest competition starts at $2200.

 

I was really hoping Lenovo would come to its senses and update the U400 and U310 with IPS panels and better gpu (U400) but they haven't done any of that and on top of it all their newly announced laptops are stuck with 768p resolutions.

U500 is definitely the best option so far but like everyone else I'm worried about heat and really curious about ram. Price doesn't really bother me, but I still don't think it will be that expensive. My guess is that there will be several configurations and one without dgpu with HDD is not going to be that expensive at all. With 650m and 128gb SSD I can see it being around $1600-1700 which would be 300-400 bucks more than their lower tier UX32VD. Seems fair for those specs. I've been using Asus laptops for a long time and I've never seen one priced above $2000.

 

I wish it would be as low as $16xx, but I have a good feeling that the base model with gt650m will start at $1799 at least. That 128gb ssd drives the price by a lot. Either way this laptop sets a new bench mark for others to follow.

 

True but the price for 128gb SSD has dropped drastically in the past year. You can pick one up for under $100 and obviously Asus gets even better prices, so not sure it will have that big of an impact. If anything the 650m will make a bigger difference in price I think.

 

Awesome laptop!
Waiting for reviews, specially about the heat.
Going by the little brother UX32 whose components consume half as much i would say it would be lucky if the u500 behaves in the same way cooling wise.
i just don't see it as having more then double cooling capacity with is size and thickness.

luckily thanks to the big vents underside the laptop a cooling pad should do wonders for the laptop.

 

Hello guys

I get to play with an early U500 sample for the next two days and I'm going to post my impressions on this sample after that.

If you have any specific questions or things you would need to know, just let me know. However, I'm not allowed to post that many benchmark results, as this is a pre-release unit and it's probably one of the first to be released in the wild.

Anyway, more details are available in this short unboxing i shot an hour ago: Asus Zenbook U500 unboxing and quick preview - YouTube . And I'm waiting for the questions here or on Youtube.

Just a heads-up though, I do not own a IR thermometer, a colorimeter or something that would allow me to measure the noise in DB, so I can't offer precise details on how good the screen is, the noise levels or outer case temperatures...

 

Oh goody! Can you give your opinions on the screen, keyboard and track pad? Once you're done reviewing it, how does the quality of the screen, keyboard and track pad strike you? And when it comes to heat, how bad is the heat under an intensive workload?

 

heat heat heat! how hot does it get? we dont need specifics just ur relative measurements. also if u could run some benchmarks and use afterburner or something to determine the internal temp of gpu (and/or cpu) just to c how high it goes. and if u could possibly check on throttling where it doesnt get hot but the performance is greatly reduced

 

Yes i'm with @PaKii94 heat!
If you could run prime95 + furmark with HMinfo, cpu-z and gpu-z opened for monitoring that would be nice!

And maybe looping some 3dmark11 for half an hour and check for temperature and throttling?
Thanks.

 

Unfortunately I'm not allowed to stretch it so I can't do a full-stretch test... But, I did run 3dmark 11 and Pcmark 07 for the last two hours and temperatures got to around 85 Celsius for the CPUs and 75 for the graphics. It will probably get higher under stress, I'm going to run some games tomorrow and see if the whole thing gets hotter.

On the other hand, the interior remains fairly cool, on the palm rest and around the keys. The upper rim above the keys does get very hot, but that was expected, since part of the cooling system is placed behind the screen's hinge. the bottom does get however very hot when running those tests mentioned above, I couldn't keep my hand over those cooling grills for more than 5 seconds without getting burned so using this laptop on your lap might not be that good, although with daily use, it doesn't get that hot.

I'll post my feedback on the keyboard later on, in that review. As a first impression, it's good, somewhat close to the keyboard on the N56. The Numpad keys and the arrows are cramped, but the travel is alright and i'm OK with the overall feedback. The trackpad seems a bit jumpy, like on the UX31A.

Those are just early impressions, so take them with a grain of salt

 

I have seen your video and I have some questions:

Can you confirm mini VGA instead of mini display port?

Can you can give us info about the display manufacturer and the ID code supplied by Windows, in order to know it is the same panel used by the HP Envy 15 and Sony Vaio S15 both FHD IPS by LG that suffer of the issue called orangegate.

Can you perform a test about throttling, prime95 (blend test)+Furmark (burn test) , 15 minutes could be enough and you can log the results in a file with HWinfo64 and post here, (lunch HWinfo64 after Furmark lunch otherwise HWinfo64 logs the HD4000)

Your model is a RAID 0 version? If yes It possible to use Trim?

 

Thanks for the quick reply!

85º cpu and 75º gpu during 3dmark11 is excellent!
no burn fingers or hot palm rest is very nice too.
lets see how it behaves during games then.

 

1. Yes, there's mini VGA and full-size HDMI.

2. Hmmm, I could do that if you could guide me on how to do it... BUT, this unit is a preproduction-sample, so we should not get hasty on drawing any conclusions here, many things can change till November

3. NO, i'm not allowed to do that

4. It's the Raid 0 version with two 128 GB SSDs. I'll check if Trim can be used

 

Thank you! I asked on youtube but I'll second here:
Is there any key to check battery level when the laptop is off?
How many hours does the battery last?
Does it throttle under load? E.g. gaming, or running Prime95+Furmark?
Maybe, if you can't stretch it with furmark and prime95, could you use HWinfo64, in the way Mac explained, to see if it throttles? Thank you very much!

 

Could you measure the weight of it? I think that's the last spec we are missing right now a part from running tests.

 

Could you please also tell us what type of optical unit it is? DVD burner? Blu-ray reader? Blu-ray Burner?

 

There isn't an optical drive in the U500.

 

Checked out if TRIM is working with CrystalDiskInfo and seems to be alright (if i get how that programs works, if TRIM is not grayed out in there, it's enabled and working). If there's a better way to check this out.. let me know.

About the optical drive, it's a dvd-rw in my box, but i'm sure there's going to be at least a blu-ray combo option

Didn't get to check the battery life just yet, but it's a 74 Wh battery inside. we'll see how it goes.

As for the weight, I'd say about 2 kilos (i said 2 pounds in the clip, my bad ) but unfortunately I don't have an electronic scale around here Hopefully I'll find one tomorrow.

 

Can I get a link to your video please? I'm not sure where to find it.

 

It's here: Asus Zenbook U500 unboxing and quick preview - YouTube .

And I'm not going to post it again here, as I already posted it above once.

 

Thank you for the answers.

2. I guess you can check by HWinfo64 or by Control Panel and device manager (sorry but I have a Windows version localized in Italian and so I can't be more specific), for example for HP Envy 15 this ID Code is LGD0323.

4. Can you post the results of bench like CrystalDiskMArk and HD Tune:
CrystalDiskMark - Software - Crystal Dew World
HD Tune website

What is the score of 3Dmark11?

 

I'll post the benchmark results in the post that will be available in about two days. I can say that the scores are good though, as a spoiler

The ID is LGD0323 . is that the one you mentioned?

 

Yes, it looks the same display of HP ENVY 15 and Sony Vaio S15...
Maybe this is not good news.
Here there is a review of this display used on HP Envy 15

 

Yep, i'll look into it. But like I said, this is a pre-release, many things can change till November when this will hit the stores

BTW, the unit I have does not have that particular problem, I'm comparing the colors to what i get on my dell 2209WA and my Lenovo X220, both IPS screens, and the reds are just as red as they should be... So perhaps only some versions have these issues

 

Mac, there have been reports that the newer Envy 15 laptops have had the red/orange issue fixed. There were some issues with blue however.

MikeTLB - as you can see there is much excitement in you having a pre-release version! Do you notice anything odd about the colors?

 

I believe that is very hard that Asus change the display, seems the only FHD IPS 15.6" is made by LG, the other 15.6" IPS that I known is used on DELL M4700 and is a RGB LED IPS, too pricey.

 

see the update in my previous posts. Things are looking good on this particular model, as I said. I'll get pictures for the final review

 

Also blue and violet are good?

 

HP has solved orangegate, but has created bluegate, maybe it's better to check what happen when Blue, Violet and Purple are on the screen specially compared with others displays, please add these checks in your review.

 

yep, those too. in fact, all the colors seem alright but a bit brighter than on my other IPS screens, a bit more saturated. And that with Splendid on an Normal mode selected.

 

The other ips that asus use on the zenbooks have sRGB coverage and very high brightness.

It's possible asus requested a ips panel to lg with better backlight for more colors and brightness.