Asus ZenBook UX333FA Review

As the youngest member of the ASUS Zenbook 2019 series, the Asus ZenBook UX333FA owns a pretty thin design. This will be a great machine to work as well as gaming. Now let’s explore this lightweight laptop.

Design

With a compact design, Asus Zenbook UX333FA is smaller than a sheet of A4 paper (horizontally). The design of this laptop is always appreciated and loved by men and women because of its lightness and prettiness that can help them to easily carry it on everyday work or go on a business trip.

To add more, the thinness of the laptop is 16.9mm and the weight is 1.09kg only. Like the other 2019 Zenbook UX laptops, the UX333FA is also equipped with a metal chassis with a military standard strength to help you feel more secure when using. If any accidentally dropped, no longer have to worry about inside components.

In addition, the ErgoLift hinge is also equipped to help lift the keyboard of the device up to about 3 degrees for the most comfortable typing.

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Although it is light and thin, it is still fully equipped with the popular connection ports today. The left edge of the laptop has a charging port, HDMI port, USB 3.1 port, USB Type C port. While the right edge comes with a micro SD card slot, USB 3.1 port, and 3.5 mm headphone jack.

Display

At the present time, Asus ZenBook UX333FA is the laptop with the largest screen area today (up to 95%) and the edge of both sides is 2.8mm thin. The feeling of using the ultra-thin screen is very eye-catching, making the display feel much wider.

The merit of the ultra-thin edge design of the Asus is still able to put the camera in the front with an infrared sensor that helps to open the device quickly in any brightness conditions. And of course, placing the camera on the edge of the screen gives better display quality than placing it downwards like some others.

Owning a 13.3-inch screen with Full HD resolution, the higher pixel density makes images sharper. The display color of the laptop according to our personal assessment is beautiful, flattering and lively.

In addition, the screen also has high brightness with wide viewing angle (178 degrees), good glare resistance that can be used in many different environmental conditions.

Keyboard and trackpad

With a compact design, the UX333FA keyboard is somewhat smaller than normal and very suitable for smaller hands. When typing on this keyboard, We still feel the key has a long journey, high bounce, comfortable typing feeling. The key layout is also somewhat different to ensure the arrow keys are full size. However, the right shift key slightly makes us sometimes press the wrong key and decides to use the left shift button only when typing the capital initial.

Backlight keyboard is also an indispensable part of a high-end laptop like UX333FA. With three levels of brightness adjustment will be much more convenient when we have to use the laptop in a dim lit environment.

Similar to the trackpad, We also feel it is a little smaller than normal, but the feeling of hover is still very comfortable, the mouse pointer also gives quick feedback and accurately identify the hand operation.

In addition, the track on the Asus ZenBook UX333FA is also equipped with a numeric keypad for faster data entry, very useful for office workers, especially accountants.

Performance

The Asus ZenBook UX333FA we are using to evaluate has a brief configuration including:

• CPU: Intel Core i5 Coffee Lake, 8265U, 1.60 GHz.
• RAM: 8GB, DDR3L, 2133 MHz.
• Hard drive: 256GB SSD NVMe PCIe.
• Integrated graphics card: Intel UHD Graphics 620.

Using Geekbench software to evaluate performance points, the laptop achieved 34875 points. This is also a pretty high number compared to laptops that do not use removable graphics cards today.

Continuing with UX333FA’s hard disk read and write speed test, the device’s maximum read / write speed can be up to 1736.8 MB / s read and 877.8 MB / s write.

With 8GB of RAM, this laptop has the power to do multitasking. As the evidence, we have opened Chrome browser with up to 38 tabs in combination with the use of Photoshop software, which was opened with nearly 50 (4MB) photos for processing, the UX333FA still works without any signs of lag or slow down.

Challenging the game, the first game we chose was PUBG Mobile with Tencent Gaming Buddy emulator and a high level of configuration options. When playing, the average FPS of the game is about 34 FPS and fluctuates around 3x, generally playing smoothly and without phenomenon lagging at all.

Next, to the League of Legends, We only managed to configure it, on average, and it was quite good for FPS to enter combat at 60 FPS. However, sometimes when we play, will encounter a slight lag, which is a sudden drop of FPS.

Finally, CS: GO, We only have the minimum configuration to play and also feel a bit difficult to play with a shooting game that has low FPS at 4x. So our experience when playing CS: GO on UX33FA was not satisfied.

This can be said to be a powerful office machine and if you used to play entertaining games, perhaps it should stop at gentle games.

Speaker and heat sink

Similar to the other two brothers, the UX333FA is also equipped with Harman / Kardon technology for excellent sound quality. You can use it to listen to music, watch regular movies for an audible sound experience. For a closer look, the device has a moderate bass beat, the mid and treble are clear and pretty.

The heat dissipation of the laptop is pretty good. The normal temperature of the CPU when we only use the device to work normally falls to about 45 Celsius. The metal body is quite cool when used. If we use the device for a long time, the temperature may rise slightly by 50 Celsius and the rest of the laptop is still very cool during that period.

When using the laptop for heavy duty tasks or gaming, the CPU temperature can reach nearly 80 Celsius and for the rest of the time is also warmer. After we finish the game or turn off heavy tasks, the temperature quickly decreases to normal (from 45 – 50 C.)

Battery

According to Asus, UX333FA battery life can be up to 16 hours. But in our test the battery in the conditions of maximum screen brightness, speaker volume at 50%, WiFi on and used normal office tasks combined to listen to music, the battery used for more than 7 hours to report the weak battery.

According to calculations as well as combining battery life measurement through Batterymon software, We found Asus ZenBook UX333FA has battery life up to 8 hours 33 minutes. This is a good battery life compared to the ultrabooks like UX333FA. This will allow you to work all day when fully charged without fear of running out of battery in the middle.

Final line

Compact, lightweight and durable are three short words to describe this Asus ZenBook UX333FA laptop. With a price of nearly $850 to own, it is absolutely worth the money for a laptop like this.