ASUS ZenBook 14 UX430UA Review

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In this article, I give you my Asus ZenBook 14 UX430UA review with specs included. You know and lately, I’ve been reviewing a lot of very high-end ultrabooks. The new Dell XPS 13 the Lenovo thinkpad x1 carbon. Machines that if you want to configure them with large SSDs and plenty of RAM can get close to $2,000.

Sometimes even more. So for something refreshingly less expensive but pretty nice high-end. You want a quality piece you want a lumen immune Abadi kind of construction you want really good specs this is what the sous Zenbook Li are solid bread-and-butter Asus Zenbook stands for.

Zenbook 14 UX430 Keyboard
Zenbook 14 UX430 Keyboard

Not so much the more expensive ones like the Zen book three deluxe and all those. Those are what you’re paying more money for fancier looks and a couple of other things. But this one’s still quite good-looking. This is the Zenbook ux302 14-inch ultrabook with a 13.3-inch laptop footprint.

Zenbook 14 UX430 Colors Blue Rose Gold Silver Gold
Zenbook 14 UX430 Colors Blue, Rose Gold, Silver, and Gold

They’re kind of pulling the XPS thing there but making the display bezel very small. The specs inside of here are good. Intel eighth-generation KP Lake are quad-core CPUs. So core i7 – 8550 use so you got the latest generation 4 cores 15-watt 16 gigs of RAM ddr3 low-power and a 512 gig SSD all for the list price of 1099.

You can often find them for closer to a thousand dollars. It’s extremely thin also. It’s fifteen point nine millimeters. And that’s even a little thinner than the ThinkPad x1 carbon that’s sixteen millimeters. Okay, it’s really really close there. And the weight also is significantly are. Two point seven six pounds which is about one point two five kilograms. Up that’s lighter than a lot of competing ultrabooks that cost more money.

Zenbook 14 UX430 Side profile
Zenbook 14 UX430 Side profile

So the assistant book UX430ua is available at quite a few retailers around the world. Are petite our unit came from computer upgrade king. And you can get the URL in the description below and see it. And they sell a lot of laptops and they offer well upgrades they do it for you.

Zenbook 14 UX430 Ports
Zenbook 14 UX430 Ports

That’s why they’re called Computer upgrade king. Anyway if you shop around you should be able to find it around $1000 which is nice. And some also available is UX430UA. That’s the same laptop but with low-end dedicated graphics at the NVidia MX 150 graphics there and that’s $12.99 if you wanted.

ASUS ZenBook 14 UX430UA Charger
ASUS ZenBook 14 UX430UA Charger

Now don’t confuse this with a higher-end ux for ninety. That’s the one that is these end book the Luxor model. That has that royal blue finish. Is 1699 it is more expensive. You get Thunderball three even lighter weight. Okay so if this was lightweight enough.

A couple of other creature comforts faster NVMe PCI-E SSD s so you get the idea there. So that one’s a kind of aspirational expensive one. And they I kind of like the 430 better because you get so much for the money. So it might not have quite the visual flair of the Zenbook three deluxe that’s considerably more expensive.

But you know it’s kind of a boring gray color but it is aluminum it has that nice concentric link little ring lid pattern that we’re used to with Zen books. It’s very slim it has very small bezels. Like 80% screen-to-body ratio. Which is quite nice. And it gives it a modern look. It has a 14-inch full HD that’s 1920 by 1080 matte IPS display.

No touch there’s no touchscreen option here. So if you want a touch screen laptop this one’s not for you. The metrics pretty much fall in line with anything in a thousand-dollar price range. It’s about 3% shy of the gamut that we see in some competing models. But 3% isn’t that much. Decent brightness on it not superb.

You can see the metrics are on screen there. But it’s a matte display so it doesn’t have to fight glare so it’s particularly fairly usable anyway. It was Intel 82 65 AC Wi-Fi that’s a good wireless card. As a fingerprint scanner embedded in the touchpad on the upper right corner. And speaking of the touchpad it’s in a lawn trackpad and those are no longer bad trackpads. In fact, it’s a very pleasant glass trackpad.

I enjoyed using it quite a lot. I’m less fond of the keyboard which has white multi-stage backlighting. The backlighting part is fine. But it’s 1.4 millimeters of travel which by today’s standards for the fin ultra bug isn’t that bad. But it just feels very abrupt and very harsh and sort of a 12-inch MacBook likes feeling.

But not as weird as that anyway. It could be better it oh well it can’t be perfect right. Terms of ports it’s pretty good. You have a USB-C gen 1. It’s it doesn’t support charging over the USB which is on. So you can’t charge of the notebook over USB. You get a barrel pin charger. And we have two USB ports.

One is 3.0 and for some reason the one on the side but the card reader is 2.0. I don’t know why anybody would be doing this anymore. But if you’re using external mice and things like that then 2.0 versus 3.0 doesn’t really matter. And a sous is still using the annoying micro HDMI port. I mean the thing isn’t that skinny.

You would think they could fit a full-sized HDMI port in there but you’re gonna need one of those micro and a full sized adapters if you want to use it with an HDMI display. Or you could use the USB C port and put two DisplayPort or HDMI or plug in an Ethernet dongle as well. Of course, there’s a headphone jack there’s a full-size SD card slot. The card does not sit flush and sticks about halfway out.

Performance is about what you would expect and matches most competing ultrabooks. It’s not as fast again is the more expensive Dell XPS 13 the one that does a little bit of overclocking and fancy work to get the latest performance therefore the 9370 model. Not quite as fast as the super high-end ThinkPad x1 carbon because it has a slightly faster CPU inside in the 15-watt new series CPU family.

But you’ve got four cores here it’s twice as fast as what came before it. And the benchmark said right about in the middle of most of the competition other than those particular very fast models. Again this is the model with integrated graphics so you get Intel UHD 620 graphics.

Say you have a separate model if you want that low-end NVIDIA GPU. 16 gigs of ddr3 low-power Ram soldered on board. So you can’t upgrade that after the fact. In an m2 SSD. It’s a SATA 3 SSD. But the good part is is a 512 gig capacity. And I think for a lot of everyday normal users they’d rather have a whole lot of storage capacity 512 is pretty generous in this price range.

More than having a couple of faster benchmarks you know to brag to your friends about. So it’s a decent decision there. Ours isn’t SanDisk brand SSD. And the speeds are okay you know. Certainly, while be faster than a hard drive so there’s that. In terms of heat and noise the cooling is pretty effective the chassis is large enough the fan is large enough that it never got beyond warm.

Certainly well below human body temperature even when we were doing things like benchmarking it. And the fan is not loud at all. So the thermals are very well controlled here. We didn’t see any evidence of thermal throttling. And Evo and running benchmarks the core temperatures rarely went above 80-degree centigrade. So that’s actually very good.

In fact that Zeus makes gaming laptops means that they know how to do cool right. It has a 50-watt hour battery inside. That’s about average in the 13-inch to 14-inch Ultrabook category. And it does about average on battery life test two. They claim up to nine hours. Mill yeah not so much in real life.

With brightness set to 160 minutes with Wi-Fi on and active doing productivity were extreme in some Netflix video that sort of work. A couple of photo edits in Photoshop. We have herbage six and a half to seven hours of battery life. Comes with the usual the soos small square charger.

It’s pretty compact really. It’s no pain at all the carrying around. And now it’s up to 65 watts. Rather than the usual 45-watt for ultrabook. And what that gets you is a bit faster charging. So that’s the Asus Zenbook ux301 a memorable name that’s the way Asus rolls with model numbers and all that sort of thing. Anyway for around $1,000 well you know it’s a pretty nice machine.

And you’re getting a lot of SSD storage here. Plenty of RAM a fast CPU a very competent mat 14-inch full HD display. Granted no touchscreen option here. So if you want touch this is not the one for you. Not in love with the keyboard, it’s okay it’s not super great the feel is very abrupt on it. But the trackpad at least is good on these.

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Asus ZenBook UX430UA
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