UX303UB

Anyone get their hands on this new Skylake model yet? Curious about display quality and if there's any noticeable backlight bleed. Thanks!

 

^^bump

 

I got mine a few days ago.
PROS:
All metal body just like a Macbook air/Pro
Fit and finish is perfect with no play in the lid hinge.
Boots up super fast like 10 seconds.
Huge track pad works well.
Back lit keyboard just like my 5 year old Sony Z11 and the GPU blows past the Sony's 330m.
Personally I have not noticed bleed on the display and the text is sharp.


Cons:
Display seems off color. Whites could be whiter but I am NOT the guy to talk to about hues and colors since I am red/green color blind, so if the display appears too greenish for some it certainly does not bother me as much.
My main problem is the WIFI. I tested this laptop against my 5 year old Sony Z11 in a library and found the signal was getting dropped with certain downloads, which prompted me to test them head to head. I found the Wifi MBps on the Z11 was more than twice that of the UB303 using Speedtest.com
When I moved to an area closer to the Wifi source at least then the UB303 stopped dropping the signal. I hope this is perhaps just a defect in mine but I heard another complaint about it's Wifi.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for this laptop but if it is the all metal body that is hindering the Wifi reception I'm hoping the Wifi adapter I ordered will cure the problem, leaving me with two USB ports, which I don't mind.
http://www.amazon.com/SIIG-Wireless...sr=1-1-spell&keywords=SIIG+Wireless-N+miniUSB
I mean some of the Mac laptops have less than that, right?
I REALLY want to keep this laptop if possible.
The adapter arrives tomorrow so I will try to post the results ASAP. Stay tuned.

 

An all metal body will hinder wifi reception it's true. I'll be interested to see your results.

 

UX303LN = Haswell CPU + 840m
UX303LB = Broadwell CPU + 940m
UX303UB = Skylake CPU + 940m

They are essentially same laptop with just those minor updates and 940m is essentially a ever so slightly faster 840m. So if you want answers, you can look up reviews of any of those laptops.

 

Not sure what happened. Back at the library I downloaded the WIFI mini USB adapter software and inserted the little USB dongle. The speed of the laptop is now is equal to or greater than the Sony Z11. But here's the kicker; I removed the USB dongle however the speed is still as lightning fast as it was when the USB adapter was inserted.
It's puzzling. Could it be the adapters drivers? Anyway now I don't need the dongle, but I will continue to test. For now this laptop is definitely a keeper for me.

 

Drivers can impact performance, especially as some can edit the transmit power of the chip.

 

Thanks for that info.
If anyone has purchased this laptop and has unusually slow Wifi speeds I would suggest installing the Windows driver found here:
http://www.siig.com/download/search/?keyword=JU-WR0112-S1

If no joy, here is a link to the adapter:
http://www.amazon.com/SIIG-Wireless...sr=1-1-spell&keywords=SIIG+Wireless-N+miniUSB

 

Further experimentation revealed this laptop has whiter whites if colors are calibrated in Control Panel; my UX303B now has whiter whites than my Sony Z11 and appears to be just as bright. The screen also has visible improvement in resolution than the Z11.

 

Here's a pic showing the 303 on the left and my Sony Z11 on the right

 

Wow, that is quite the difference

 

One problem remains. When I shut down and reboot the color calibration does not hold and the screen returns to its original state. I called Asus but they has no solution nd gave me Microsoft's number.

 

Difference is that they are two different vendors, so not sure how that would impact the integrated wireless adapter transfer speeds.

 

I've been using Control Panel to change colors but I just found out this is not the way to do it. In the icon tray there is a specific icon for Intel HD graphics and using that app changes and keeps the color settings even after laptop is restarted.

Here is the window it brings up:

Since I am red/green color blind I will have to get a second opinion on my adjustments. I can also create and save different color profiles thru this application. It seems to work very well and actually increases brightness if calibrated a certain way. Some someone can try this out and post results. My laptop is so bright now it's almost disturbing in a motel room.

 

The 305 is a much better value.

 

If you want to compare apples and oranges yes, but my requirements are a discrete GPU and a back lit keyboard so nope, X305 was not for me at all. In fact this laptop seems to have everything my Sony Z11 has but with more than twice the GPU power and less than half the price with twice the GB and more than twice the memory. For me it was an excellent deal.

 

Twice? Try three times the GPU power, and at half the cost.

 

IGPs have come a fair way, but they had a LONG way to go as it was. A decent entry level dedicated GPU is still a nice step up.

 

I've already received my UX303UB. Things are wonderful. Just noticed that sometimes the cursor is duplicate on screen. That's, the cursor is showing on a side with two white small circles surrounding it and another cursor... any advice?

 

Is it a BT mouse? Can you swap it with a different mouse? I don't remember mine ever doing that. I do have an issue with the Intel HD520 crashing in Firefox. In the event that Firefox crashes though all you need to do is collapse the Firefox window and bring it back up; you don't need to quit Firefox and lose your page. This laptop is not the only one that the 520 crashes. Just read HP laptops do the same so I gather it's not the laptop. Updating my driver does no good so far so I took someones advice who had the same problem and switched to Google Chrome. Hoping no more crashes.

 

Thank you buddy1065. Yes this happening on Firefox and it happens many times but maybe when my blue tooth mouse was connected! Seems that I'd go with Chrome. However, for better display of Chrome, I need to change the screen resolution to 3200x1800. My question is except for battery, is it safe to keep the laptop on such high display all the time? is there any lag?

 

Is it a BT mouse? Can you swap it with a different mouse? I don't remember mine ever doing that. I do have an issue with the Intel HD520 crashing in Firefox so I took someones advice who had the same problem and switched to Google Chrome. Hoping no more crashes. In the event that Firefox crashes though all you need to do is collapse the Firefox window and bring it back up; you don't need to quit Firefox and lose your page. This laptop is not the only one that the 520 crashes. Just read HP laptops do the same so I gather it's not the laptop. Updating my driver does no good.

 

Mine is on 3200x1800 all the time. I do not experience lag. In fact I've always thought there would be more lag if this laptop was not in it's native resolution, which is 3200x1800 but I could be wrong.

 

After few hours with native resolution, i. e., 3200x1800 I think you're right. No lag as I used to have on Yoga Pro 2. I hope native resolution and Chrome seems to fix the previous mentioned issue.

www.MohamadKarbi.me

 

four questions:

1 Can you tell me anything about your impressions of the speakers of this notebook? I heard that they are very weak, however I especially want to know whether the membranes are starting to vibrate, when watching a movie for example. That's what I found with the UX305: Even at middle-volume there was this strange sound when people were talking in movies. At the time I was listening to music however the speakers were without this vibrations.

2 Are you experiencing some kind of coil whining? You barely can hear it, it also depends on someone's ears, as not everybody is responsive to this special type of frequencies.

3 Is there backlight bleeding visible or even disturbing?

4 which battery life times can you achieve in daily usage (wifi on, mainly surfing while streaming music and movies half of the time in the www). I am interested in the FHD version of this notebook, so maybe I can get 1-2h more hours out of it.

 

To me the Audio by ICEpower speakers(Bang and Olufsen) far surpass my 5 year old Sony Z11 13" with a fuller bodied sound. The volume is very good IMO for a 13" laptop. If there are any changes in sound I will post them. There are no audio artifacts that I can hear. No bleeding on my screen.
I have not done any battery tests. Perhaps other reviewers can comment on this and your other questions.

 

Can anyone tell me which model is the Wifi module?

 

Hard to tell from the pictures but I don't think it's intel and it's a standard M.2 wifi module.

 

The big question for me is if it has the same hinge mechanism as the ux303lb?

 

All I can say is that so far my hinge is rock solid with no looseness or wobble.

 

i bet it has

 

I just got a new UX303UB, however what I first found out was that the battery wear Level is about 7% right after turning the Notebook on after a full charge.



Is there anything I can do?

 

That's not uncommon, but it may also not be calibrated properly. Just do a slow battery drain down to about 3% battery life and then recharge, and you should have a more accurate reading.

 

It was 6.6% now after a batter drain to less than 5% and a fully recharge afterwards it's now at 7%.

I am also not very impressed by the battery life time: I could barely made 6h surfing at 50% brightness with this notebook. After reading several notebookcheck reviews of it's predecessors I was hoping for much more like 8+ hours.

 

The UX303 gets about 5-6 hours useful battery life, not sure where you read 8+ hours? It's going to draw about 8W with light loads.

 

here for example

 

here for example

 

Hmm, will have to retest my machine, but it looks like they had LCD at minimum brightness, it was 1080p IPS non-touch LCD, power saver mode, and keyboard backlight off. I can't see it getting 9.5 hrs though, since it means it would only draw average about 4.5W-5W which is darn near impossible considering the hardware. Something doesn't seem accurate there.

But other reviews state 5-6 real world use:

http://www.ultrabookreview.com/4274-asus-zenbook-ux303ln-review/
" The Zenbook UX303LN packs a 50 Wh battery and for me, that translates in roughly about 5 hours of daily use.

My usage scenario keeps the laptop on Balanced mode, with Wi-Fi ON, screen at 50% (I turn OFF the auto-brightness adjustment in Windows 8.1) and the keyboard’s brightness at level 1, while performing various daily tasks: browsing, chatting, watching movies on Youtube, some light photo editing in Photoshop, listening to some music. You can squeeze more than 6 hours if you’ll use the laptop lightly and dim the screen more, and at the same time, you’ll get under 2 hours when running games or other heavy tasks."


http://laptopmedia.com/review/asus-zenbook-ux303ln-review-a-heavily-armed-beauty/#battery-life
" ASUS ZenBook UX303LN’s battery has a 50Wh capacity. We’re going to put it to test by using our benchmark, which makes the browser surf the Web automatically. We use Power Saver mode, 120cd/m2 display brightness and Wi-Fi connectivity.

The result is 313 minutes – it’s not a record, but it’s pretty good performance."


http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Asus-Zenbook-UX303.htm
( For LA non dedicated graphics version)
" The UX303LA model with integrated graphics averaged 6.5 hours on a charge at a quite bright 50% brightness with WiFi for our mixed productivity test that includes working in MS Office, web browsing with 10 tabs open, playing 30 minutes of HD YouTube video, editing 10 RAW files in Photoshop, checking email and social networking. With more aggressive power saving settings, 7 hours should be doable. The dedicated graphics model should fare much the same when using integrated graphics, and we'd expect a few hours drop in use time if you manage to keep dedicated graphics constantly active."

 

notebookcheck.com did several tests with the UX303 models: Broadwell, Haswell, etc. and they got at least 8h out of it. They are used to set the screen brightness at 140-150cd/m² which is nowhere near the lowest brightness-level. power-saver mode does not really let the battery last longer but influence performance heavily, that is what I experienced. I now had three different ultrabooks with skylake i5 and FHD non touch panel. Each of them only lasted for around 6h and came along with a battery of 50 Wh. I guess you have to pic a XPS 13 to get proper battery life times.

 

Power saver will reduce overall power consumption at the cost of performance of course. In any case 5-6 hours is realistic and typical.

Sent from my VS980 4G using Tapatalk

 

I got mine from Costco back in October and right now I really hate it. I had really high hopes for this computer because it really is a beautiful and slender machine. I am a graduate student and use the laptop mainly for online research and writing papers. Holy **** does this thing like to crash with Word in Office 365. Today it crashed about 8 different times and with word. Somehow using Smart art in Powerpoint or Word really does it in. The screen randomly blacks and becomes unresponsive and the only way I can get use out if it is to do a total restart by holding down the power button. I cannot figure out why even when I review and adjust the settings. Sometimes I will close the laptop just for a minute, I come to the unresponsive black screen issue again. Also when I restart, the startup screen goes into a crazy flicker... Internet connectivity is also an issue like others mentioned. I'm using my 10 year old macbook pro right now to type this. The pretty Asus is going back to Costco.. ugghh. Lost about 3 hours of work today due to these damn problems.. #pissed

 

Sorry for your problems, but I think you just got a bum unit. Also, FWIW, I have had numerous issues with Office 365 crashing on me on other machines as well. It seems fickle with software running in the background, which is completely stupid. Office should just run.

 

Although Firefox still temporarily crashes the Intel Graphics chip (which automatically recovers) I find that collapsing the Firefox window and bringing it back up solves the problem and I am right back on the same page. Nevertheless I rarely use Firefox anymore since Chrome does not crash at all. I uninstalled the included Office trial, never even using it, since I have an old 2002 edition of Microsoft XP Professional, which I just installed and activated over the internet. Word, Powerpoint and Access open successfully and look fine. We'll see how that goes although I rarely use these programs. Other than Firefox I am not experiencing any black outs, crashes, etc. except when I quit Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion game, but that occurs on my old Sony Z11 laptop and it's known as pretty buggy software.

 

After the last update from Nvidia, I'm using Firefox running on it instead of Intel. No problem at all. Chrome is still the best but I don't like it a lot. With resolution of 3200x1800, there is almost no problem. But problems come when I choose less resolution: Firefox has some lines showing here and there and Chrome is blurry...

With my other High DPI laptops, I used to use a resolution of 1920x1080 or 2048x1152 to save battery and Graphics Card's. But here, less resolution is causing issues....

I have no problem at all with Office 365 nor with Paint shop or Cyberlink Power Director. @TSPortland your device might not be ok. And to tell you the truth, this is what I hate about Windows devices; things take time to get your device ready and you might need to replace it afterall. Macbooks are more stable

 

Thanks for the tip. I just updated nVidia driver and Intel Bluetooth and wireless drivers also needed an update using Intel HD Graphics app in icon tray.

 

Running at a lower resolution on the desktop wont have much impact on battery life The screen still has to drive the same number of pixels, the increased processing these days is handled pretty efficiently and wont have much of an impact.

 

Hello ! first post here ! i'm a happy ASUS UX303UB-DQ004T owner since one month now. But only one problem ... my built-in microphone doesnt work ! I have try many things like changing drivers etc. but no way ... the mic doesnt work. The card is a connexant one, model with Bang & Olufsen ICEpower.
Some of you have the same problem ? thanks for your answers !

 

I suggest contacting your reseller/asus regarding getting it looked at.

 

With GT 940MX on the horizon with GDDR5 curious if they add that GPU to this line of notebooks. But *PLEASE* fix the yellow screen issue, the hinge, and offer a 1080p non-touch matte LCD in USA like is in Europe. That GPU is basically what's in the Microsoft Surface Book, but 940MX is slightly faster.

 

With such a narrow bus the faster memory does make a big difference (notebookcheck have some good estimates).