Thin and light ultrabooks are a boon for both students and office workers alike because of their portability and great battery life. And the Asus ZenBook 15 is one of the better options available at its price bracket. It is a mid range laptop that sports a sleek and innovative design along with amazing battery life, making it one of the best laptop with i7 processor and the best laptop that is an ultrabook.
Why We Like It – Asus ZenBook 15
The Asus ZenBook 15 is a fantastic option for anyone looking to buy a high end thin and light ultrabook at $1500. It comes with a decent pair of mobile CPU and GPU, plenty of RAM and fast storage, a great looking main display, and a touchpad display that is actually useful, not a gimmick.
- 12-17 hours of battery life
- 1TB PCI-E NVME SSD built-in
- The 5.65-inch trackpad sports a display
- No USB C charging
- Older Intel quad core processor
- The Wi Fi module could’ve been better
Power & Performance
Well, this laptop features two generations old quad core Intel Core i7-8565U. So, it’s gonna be a little bit slower compared to ultrabooks that launched this year with newer CPUs. In fact, this laptop has a variant that comes with a Core i7 Intel Comet Lake (10th gen) processor inside. But it still is a four-core eight-thread CPU, so it’s likely to be a little bit faster and a bit more efficient, not much. On the GPU side, it’s an ultrabook, so a proper desktop-grade graphics card is pretty much out of the question. Still, it does have 1650 Max-Q discrete graphics. Max-Q GPUs are about ~15-20% slower than their desktop counterparts. So, you’re gonna be able to play a few older games perfectly fine. If you need a good laptop for working remotely, then you need to read our ASUS Zenbook 13 review.
Battery
Now coming to the section that this laptop rules in, it sports a 71Wh 8-cell battery. And the laptop can last up to 17 hours on a full top-up. Even if you are running the most demanding workload all the time, making the CPU boost up to 4.6GHz for the most part, you’re at least gonna get 12 hours of battery life out of it.
Ports & Expandability
In terms of I/O ports, you get an SD card reader, a USB C port (3.1 Gen 2), two USB A ports (one 3.1 Gen 2 and the other is 3.1 Gen 1), one HDMI, and a Headphone/Mic combo jack. Unfortunately, it doesn’t feature USB C charging. So you’re gonna have to carry around the DC charging cord everywhere. If you really need USB C charging, you can grab the Microsoft Surface Book 3 instead. If you like this laptop, then you’ll love our ASUS Zenbook Flip UX360CA Convertible review.
Build Quality
Just like the HP Spectre x360 13t, it also has a very premium feeling full metal body chassis. It is a bit of a fingerprint magnet, to be honest, but it’s manageable. The 15.6 Inch display is Full HD and has narrow bezels that make it look modern. And surprisingly, it has a full size backlit keyboard, a very good one at that.
Like the MacBook Pro touch bar, it features a touchscreen display on the trackpad. But unlike Apple’s offering, it’s actually useful here. You can use it to take notes, multitask, create macro buttons, and do a lot of other stuff with it. It’s actually innovative and helpful.
Value
Once you factor in everything like the 16GB RAM, 1TB NVME SSD, the incredible battery life, the sleek and modern looking design, and the unique trackpad, even at MSRP, the value proposition of the ZenBook 15 comes out to be quite incredible. And now that a variant of the ZenBook 15 is out with the newer Intel Core i7 Comet Lake processor, you should be able to find the older variant at cheaper price points easily. And you’re not losing much in terms of raw power and efficiency.
Asus ZenBook 15 Wrap Up
All in all, the ZenBook 15 is a great ultrabook capable of light gaming. But, if you need a full-fledged gaming laptop, the MSI P65 Creator will obviously be a much better choice.
