Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A review

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Asus has apparently taken the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach with the UX31A's design, because it's hard to find much of anything that's really changed, and that's not a bad thing. The matte black of the keyboard deck and the shiny silver keys have traded their colors, some curly text by the hinge has disappeared, and the new system might be the slightest hair thicker and heavier, but that's about it. All the materials and ports are in the same places.

If you've never touched the original UX31, though, what should you expect? A rougher-hewn MacBook Air chassis, basically. It's fairly light at 2.86 pounds, shy on full-sized ports with just a pair of USB 3.0 sockets, an extremely shallow SDXC card slot, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, though like the original it does come with a Micro HDMI port, as well as a USB to Ethernet adapter, a Mini-VGA to VGA adapter, and a small cloth pouch to tote them around. It's thoughtful of Asus to include them, and you never know when you might need one. On that note, the UX31A also still comes with a nice protective sleeve, and an Apple-styled power adapter that fits fairly easily in a bag.

Like that MacBook, the UX31A appears to be made entirely of aluminum, and if anything, it actually feels more rigid and durable than Apple's machine. It seems like Asus is trying to accentuate a rough, back-to-basics feeling for the computer, with much sharper angles on the corners and edges of the chassis. If you look closely at the corner of the keyboard tray, you can even see the individual layered cuts that the metalworking tools made. The main chassis is brushed aluminum, the bottom is polished to be glossy, and the top has a striking spun pattern. It's interesting if you like variety (and I do), but compared to the MacBook, it can definitely feel like a bit of a mishmash: there are five different shades and textures of metal on this one laptop. What I don't like are the rough front edges of the machine. They can really dig into your wrists, even more so than the Air. I develop red lines on my arms whenever I use it for extended periods.

If there's a real issue with the build, though, it's the smallish hinge that Asus uses to prop up the display. Either it's too weak or the lid is too heavy, as the slightest jolt or sometimes even the force of gravity alone is enough to cause it to fall backwards.

Compare this: Zenbook Prime vs. the $1,000+ ultrabook competition, including Apple's MacBook Air

It's not easy to build a quality keyboard for a laptop this thin. Many come out stiff, shallow, and cramped. Like the original, the flat-topped chiclet keys on the UX31A aren't perfect, but they aren't bad. They're stiffer and shorter than I'd like, not as cushy as the Air, slightly inconsistent, and the spacebar has an annoying habit of squeaking continuously as I use it. Over the course of a long typing session, like this review, you might decide that you'd rather be using something else, but it'll do fine for most tasks as long as you get used to it. On the plus side, the entire keyboard is backlit now, with three brightness levels. No more fumbling about in the dark for your letters.

Now, the moment of truth: did Asus fix the touchpad issues that sullied the original? Yes and no. Mostly no. In fact, Asus has changed up the trackpad quite a bit, and it doesn't jump around during use. The touchpad (an Elan model) is fairly quick and accurate with a single finger, although the company's new, tackier glass touchpad surface can keep your digits from traveling smoothly if you're light on finger oil. I prefered the texture of the original.

The problems are these: scrolling through webpages and documents with two-finger swipes is a stuttery mess (ditto pinch-to-zoom), and more importantly, there doesn't seem to be any sort of competent palm rejection to keep the cursor from traveling while you're typing. See these paragraphs in front of your eyes? I typed every one on this machine, and just about every single one of them was abruptly chopped apart by my mouse pointer when my palms accidentally brushed the trackpad. Infinite monkey theorem could be disproven by the touchpad on this Zenbook.

You'd think a premium laptop like the Zenbook Prime wouldn't have any software cruft. You'd be dead wrong. The UX31A greets you with constant product registration reminders, unwanted toolbars and widgets, and the system also has totally extraneous processes (like tablet PC stylus input software) running in the background. That would be fine if all that software didn't affect performance, but oh, how it does.

We tested the $1,399 version of the UX31A with a 1.9GHz Core i7-3517U processor, integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB solid state drive. While our benchmarks seemed fine, it was plainly obvious during regular Windows tasks that something wasn't quite right. Apps and webpages seemed slower to load than on comparable ultrabooks, scrolling was slower too, and with boot times of over thirty seconds, it's surprisingly sluggish for an ultrabook in this price range. It does wake from sleep quickly in 2.4 seconds, however.

My first instinct was that maybe Asus picked a sub-par solid state drive, so I ran the 128GB ADATA XM11 drive through a couple rounds of the AS-SSD benchmark. The drive seems fine: sequential write performance (for copying large files) seems a little low at around 100MB/sec, and access times a little slow at 0.14ms read and 0.24ms write, but they shouldn't really account for the slowdown here.

One thing I discovered that helps a bit is a little setting in the Power Option menu called "Intel Dynamic Platform & Thermal Framework Setting." By default, Asus has set the processor to run at 13 watts and a clockspeed of up to 1GHz when on battery, but you can change that or switch the mode to high performance to extend the range to 17W and up to 2.4GHz under a heavy load.

As I hinted earlier, though, it's really the bloatware that's responsible. When I did a full clean, bone-stock install of Windows 7, everything immediately sped up. Even boot times were dramatically improved, with the system starting in just 18 seconds instead of the 30 it required before.

Gaming

As usual, you shouldn't expect to play recent games on a system this light, but Intel's HD 4000 graphics are slightly better than the previous generation. I was able to run our aging benchmark favorite Tom Clancy's HAWX in DirectX9 mode at the Zenbook's 1080p native resolution, with maximum settings, and average a healthy 30 frames per second. Mind you, that's a game from 2009, and it wasn't state-of-the-art even then.

I'm hoping to get some quality time with the Zenbook Prime UX32VD, a slightly thicker version of the same machine that has Nvidia GeForce GT 620M graphics, to see if it can do much better.

Heat and noise

It's a bare aluminum laptop, and as with most bare aluminum laptops, the material is a double-edged sword: heat dissipates quickly and easily from the exposed surface, but it also transfers directly to your hands which can make for sweaty palms. Thankfully, the UX31A actually runs fairly cool. The fans can get noisy and the chassis grows a bit warm after extended use, but not unbearably so, and compared to my 2011 MacBook Air, it's both cooler and quieter under load.

Battery life

When it comes to longevity, the UX31A is just under par for the course: we clocked the system at 5 hours, 46 minutes in our Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of popular websites and high-res images (with the screen set to 65 percent brightness) until the system bites the dust. We also ran the same test with Asus' special Battery Saver mode (which automatically kicks in whenever you unplug the AC adapter and disables a lot of Windows eye candy to save power) and got a very subtle increase to 5 hours, 55 minutes... which makes me think that the silicon does a pretty decent job of managing its own power consumption, thank-you-very-much.

In real-world use, things weren't quite as rosy, as I got only about four and a half hours of work done with my typical load of auto-refreshing web browser tabs, push email, music playing in the background, and the occasional video clip here and there. That's about average for a laptop this thick, but it lags behind best-in-class machines, including the MacBook Air. Perhaps that's attributable to the 1080p screen, though.