There is something about a ZenBook that makes it attractive and beautiful. The ZenBooks attract people by being extremely slim and light in weight. The Asus ZenBook 13 comes with Intel’s new tiger lake chips. These tiger chips are a part of Intel’s new Evo startup. If you are wondering how your laptop is performing better, how the battery life has gone up? Well, it is certainly because of the new tiger lake chips. Moreover, you will also get the beautiful and strong chassis of the ZenBook.
Configuration and price
Available with a price tag of $949, the Asus ZenBook 13 offers its basic model, which comes with a 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor. You will also get 8GB of R.A.M, a 512GB M.2 PCI 3.0 SSD Along with Intel Iris Plus graphics. Another variant that is available with a price tag of $999 offers 1TB of storage space and offers you Intel Iris Xe.
Design
Just like the other ZenBooks, the new Asus ZenBook 13 is a head-turner too. The chassis of the ZenBook 13 is manufactured from Pine Gray Aluminum Alloy. A shiny chrome Asus logo is present on the center-left side of the laptop’s body. On the lid, there are concentric circles that cascade on the whole lid. Don’t worry, the lid is not that much sensitive to fingerprints.
Along with the pine gray color, the Asus ZenBook 13 is also available in Lilac Mist. A lot of people loved the red copper accents that were found on the Flip S but, in the case of ZenBook 13, there’s only 1 color. One-color, which looks subtle, beautiful, and sleek.
On the interior side, the pine gray concentric circles continue till the end of the body. The laptop also gives you a palm rest on the lower part of the deck. The touchpad is huge too. The most interesting thing that we noticed was that whenever you open up the laptop’s lid, it reveals the Asus’s Ergo-Lift hinge. This hinge pushes the keyboard upwards to about 3-degrees, this makes typing so much easier and comfy.
The display bezels are being slowly minimized. Upon measuring, we found out that the sides of the laptop are only 0.16 inches in width, the top is 0.24 inches and the bottom is 0.43 inches. We think that Asus’s Nano-Edge bezels are not enough now because the Dell has extended their infinity-edge bezels to all four sides.
Talking about dimensions, the ZenBook 13 is seriously light-weighted with only 2.5 pounds of weight and 11.9 x 8 x 0.5 inches of length, width, and height. This laptop is more lightweight than the Acer Swift 3, HP Envy Wood 2020, and the MacBook Air.
Durability and Security
We ain’t just talking beauty here. The new Asus ZenBook 13 is durable too. Even though it doesn’t look that much tough but, the laptop has the MIL-STD 810G certification, which means that the laptop can easily go through vibrations, shock drops, and even extreme temperatures and altitudes.
Talking about security, the Asus ZenBook 13 does not have a lot to offer. It comes equipped with a Windows Hello webcam, this webcam allows you to log in through face recognition along with the typical method of locking your laptop by using the ‘FN’ key. Moreover, the laptop doesn’t do much except for the fact that when it’s locked, no one can turn your webcam on.
Ports
The new ZenBook 13 has a lot of ports and slots that are useful too. On the right side of the laptop, you will find a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port along with a microSD card slot. On the left-hand side, you will find a full HDMI 2.0 port with 2 thunderbolts 4 ports. Having these thunderbolt ports has made the Asus ZenBook 13 the first laptop ever to offer the next-gen standard of charging. One disappointment that we noted was that there is no headset jack, this is going to make a lot of you upset.
Display
The Asus ZenBook 13 comes with a thirteen-inch display. This display is a matte surface with a pixel density of 1920 x 1080. Upon testing the display quality through the DCI-P3 color gamut test, the panel of the ZenBook scored 76.1%.
In our opinion, the ZenBook 13’s display should have been brighter. The display is only 370 nits. Still, it is better than Swift 3’s 251 units. But, both of these laptops have a dimmer display than the standard average 382 nits.
Audio
Although the new Asus ZenBook 13 looks great and all, the speakers that come equipped in it are mounted on the bottom. Moreover, the audio output is not impressive at all. If you place the laptop in your living room, it won’t even fill up the room. We tried playing Adele’s music and it turned out to be awful. The speakers were not doing justice to the music at all. The vocals sounded very distant and hollow. However, you can surely boom the sound quality to some extent by installing DTS Audio processing software.
Keyboard
Coming over to the keyboard, the Asus ZenBook 13 comes with a keyboard that is comfortable and springy. You can have a lot of space to type through the keys that are mildly concave, large, and very comfortable. The LED backlighting in the keys is attractive and looks decent too. It makes the letters easy to see in a dark room. Moreover, the backlight can be adjusted according to your preference.
Performance
As mentioned earlier, Asus ZenBook 13 comes equipped with a new and latest processing chip. Tiger lake, being Intel’s 3rd 10-nm chip, is produced based on Willow Lake Architecture. This architecture is exclusively designed to improve the efficiency and performance of the laptop. A 20% better performance has been claimed by Intel with the help of the new Super-Fin process.
We tested Asus ZenBook 13 by simply launching 30 tabs in the Google Chrome browser. Some tabs were running YouTube streams, others were running Twitch and other different sites. Guess what? The laptop didn’t show any signs of lagging or sluggishness. Moreover, we tested the laptop through Geek-Bench 5 overall performance test and it aced the whole thing amazingly by scoring 5,084 points. This score is higher than the Envy Core i7-1065G7 (3,487 points) and MacBook Air Core i5-1030NG7 (2,738 points).
Talking about the video transcoding, ZenBook 13 was able to transcode a 4K video to a 1080p in just 17 minutes, breaking the record of MacBook Air and Envy CPU. However, it could not win against the swift 3. The swift 3 was able to perform video transcoding in just eleven minutes. Upon running the file transfer test, Asus ZenBook 13 SSD had a file transfer speed of 583.6 megabytes per second after copying 25GB of multimedia files.
Graphics
We all know that the 11th generation of graphics cards is here now. The Intel Iris-XE is the new graphics component that is being introduced in Asus ZenBook 13. With the help of this new GPU, we all will be able to enjoy more games at 1080p resolution. Moreover, the gaming performance will be doubled up too.
Upon testing the ZenBook 13 through a 3DMark fire strike benchmark, amazingly the laptop was able to score 4,407 points leaving behind the Swift 3 at 2,847 and the Envy at 2,071 points.
Battery Life
The ZenBook comes with an Intel Evo Certification. It means that the laptop will have a battery timing of more than 9 hours. Upon testing the laptop, it performed better, the battery timing was recorded to be 13 hours and 47 minutes. The premium laptop average score is 10:01, the Asus ZenBook 13 was able to get 3 hours more than the premium laptop average.
Final Thoughts
The Asus ZenBook 13 comes somewhere between business and premium class. The exterior body is beautiful and classy, the features are a mix of premium and business class laptops. The laptop is durable and has the security features like the ExperBook (Asus’s new business line laptops). Having a battery life of more than 13 hours is a plus point too.
Although, the laptop has a weak set of speakers. And, if you are all about the displays, this laptop might end up disappointing you. The HP Envy 13 wood edition will give you a more vivid display. Furthermore, if you are all about power and performance, try the Acer Swift 3 (AMD version), it will roughly cost you 700 bucks.
But if you want a laptop that’s durable, yet lightweight and stylish with great performance and excellent longevity, the Asus ZenBook 13 is the way to go.
All Specs
- Price: $999
- CPU: Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor
- GPU: Intel Iris XE Graphics
- RAM: 16GB
- Storage: 1TB M.2 PCI 3.0 SSD
- Display: 13.3-inch, 1080p
- Battery: 13:47
- Size: 11.9 x 8 x 0.5 inches
- Weight: 2.5 pounds