The latest member of the Asus Zenbook line of portable laptops isn’t the company’s smallest or lightest ultrabook to date. But it’s one of the most powerful.
The Asus Zenbook Pro UX501 features an Intel Core i7 quad-core processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M graphics, speedy storage, and a high-resolution display.
It also weighs about 4.5 pounds. That’s not bad for a laptop with a 15.6 inch display, but it makes the Zenbook Pro UX501 a little less portable than smaller models such as the 13.3 inch Zenbook UX305.
Update: The ZenBook Pro UX501 sells for around $1799 in the US.
The Asus Zenbook Pro UX501 features an Intel Core i7-4720HQÂ Haswell processor. Wondering why Asus would put out a premium laptop with a 4th-gen Intel Core chip at a time when 5th-gen “Broadwell” processors are available? It’s because this particular Haswell processor is a 47 watt, quad-core powerhouse that should offer higher performance than the low-power Broadwell chips that are currently available. We won’t see more powerful 5th-gen chips until later this year.
Asus says the laptop will be available with a choice of 1920 x 1080 pxiel or 3840 x 2160 pixel IPS displays, up to 16GB of RAM, and up to 512GB of solid state storage using a PCI Express x4 SSD which should offer read/write speeds of up to 1400MB/s.
Other features include 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, three USB 3.0 ports, a headset jack, mini DisplayPort and HDMI jacks, Bank & Olufsen audio, an SD card reader, and a Thunderbolt port on select models.
The laptop will be available with 4 cell, 60 Whr or 6 cell, 96 Whr batteries and Asus says you should be able to get over 6 hours of run time with the larger battery.
The notebook measures about 0.8 inches thick and weighs 4.5 pounds with the 4 cell battery or 5 pounds with the 6 cell model.
via Notebook Italia
Nice, if this starts at around $1000 US it should do fairly well.
A competitor for the dell XPS 15 refresh when that eventually happens, I like! Bit disappointed there’s no USB C on it or just more displayport outputs. HDMI is nice and all but displayport is used on a lot of high end monitors because it was ready when UHD came about.