Asus ZenBook 13 UX331UAL [UX331UAL-EG002T] (90NB0HT3-M00280)

Slim and light

The Asus ZenBook 13 UX331UAL is a laptop that is almost unrivaled in terms of size and performance. Equipped with a performant filling and a frameless 13-inch display, it weighs less than a kilogram!

Laptop dimensions — 130x216x13.9 mm. As we said, this is one of the thinnest and lightest models on the market. For comparison, popular models of 13-inch laptops weigh around 1.5 kg. The ZenBook 13 UX331UAL cannot be even thinner because of the USB ports. I am glad that this lightness did not affect the strength of the structure in any way — the body is made of polished metal and assembled to last.

Frameless IPS display

Also, the frameless display has a positive effect on the dimensions. The 13-inch display is surrounded by a very thin bezel on the top and sides, and there is a wider strip at the bottom with the Asus logo. IPS matrix with Full HD resolution shows a checkerboard contrast and excellent colour reproduction, making the laptop comfortable to use both at home and outdoors.

Serious headroom

In terms of performance in the popular PCMark 7 benchmark, the laptop gets a pretty serious 5911 points. All thanks to a bundle of a quad-core Intel i5 processor (frequency from 1.6 GHz to 3.4 GHz), 8 GB of DDR4 RAM and a fast 256 GB SSD drive.

In real life, this hardware gives maximum performance in office and multimedia tasks. With games, things are not so clear. The maximum for the integrated UHD Graphics 620 graphics card is the average graphics settings in past generation games like Diablo 3 and Bioshock Infinite. You can play, but it's hard to call it full-fledged gaming.

Up to 15 hours of battery life

The battery capacity is 5000 mAh, and the battery life claimed by the manufacturer is 15 hours. And this is the case when the numbers on the box do not lie. In a conditional "office" mode with coffee breaks and a full meal, ZenBook 13 UX331UAL can withstand up to 14 hours of work. If you arrange a telethon and review the last season of the Game of Thrones in a day, then the charge will last for 9 hours. This is one of the most "long-playing" models among laptops. The icing on the cake is fast charging, which allows you to half charge the battery in 40 minutes.

In terms of peripherals, it’s hard to find fault with the Asus ZenBook 13 UX331UAL: there is one HDMI port, a pair of high-speed USB 3.1 connectors, one USB-C port, a card reader and a fingerprint scanner. The only oddity in terms of additional features is a camera with a resolution from the time of the first smartphones (640x480 pixels). For a laptop with a price tag of $ 1000, this decision looks frankly strange.