Asus VivoBook Pro 17 N705UD (i7-8550U, GTX 1050) Laptop Review

The VivoBook Pro 17’s case design renders maintenance and upgrades unfortunately challenging. Following the removal of ten screws from the underside of the machine, the aluminum top cover must be (extremely) carefully pried around the edges to disengage the clips holding it to the bottom cover/base unit below. The keyboard is part of the top cover, as is the power button (which is located on the keyboard), so three separate ZIF connector cables connect these critical components to the motherboard, running from the top cover rather inconveniently into the center of the motherboard. There is no easy way to disconnect these cables during the disassembly procedure (much less to reconnect them), so users might find it simpler to just lift the top cover off, hold it above the bottom, and replace the desired component without bothering to disconnect the cables.

Even once inside, however, there isn’t a whole lot to do. The mechanical hard drive is secured by a few more screws to the board and case within a metal caddy, the wireless adapter is readily accessible from the side, and one of two cooling fans can be accessed. The remaining components—including RAM and the NVMe SSD, as well as the other fan—require a complete teardown of the rest of the machine, motherboard and all.

Keyboard

The keyboard on the VivoBook Pro 17 is likely identical to that of the VivoBook Pro 15, and our same impressions apply. It’s decent, with comfortable travel and actuation force, but it can’t compete with category leaders such as the Dell XPS 15. We do appreciate the inclusion of a numeric keypad, but this one is patently inferior to most thanks to its horizontally-compressed form factor and narrower keys. The same affliction applies to the arrow keys, which makes them quite a bit harder to operate by feel. Finally, the relegation of the Home/End/Page-Up/Page-Down/Insert/Delete keys to secondary functions of seemingly random keys on the numeric keypad is not likely to prove an easy adjustment for the average user.

The keyboard is backlit with three adjustable brightness levels while activated.

Touchpad

Although the relatively touchpad is different from the one in the 15-inch VivoBook Pro (for starters, it lacks the integrated fingerprint reader for Windows Hello functionality), it nevertheless retains the Precision Touchpad designation. Elan manufactures the pad, which features a smooth, comfortable, spacious (104 mm x 72 mm) surface and integrated buttons along the bottom. The buttons feature very short travel distance but offer a great sense of feedback. Our only significant complaint here is (once again) with the slightly-louder-than-normal clicks, but it’s a minor complaint overall (especially since the user can always opt for tap-to-click functionality until the use of a physical button is warranted).

Asus fortunately did not opt for the same grade of display as that of the cheap TN panel we found in our VivoBook Pro 15. Instead, our VivoBook Pro 17 review unit includes an LG LP173WF4-SPF5 IPS display panel, which carries a 1920x1080 resolution and subjectively appears far superior to that of the VivoBook Pro 15.

Our measurements further support our impressions of the display’s superiority over its 15 inch counterpart: a very good 354.7 cd/m² brightness and 896:1 contrast ratio, made possible by a low black level of 0.42 cd/m².

Colors also appear comfortably vivid, and we measured 87 percent coverage of the sRGB spectrum (57 percent of AdobeRGB). These values—along with the brightness and contrast measurements—bring the display in line with the rest of the competition, and far ahead of October’s VivoBook Pro 15 review unit.

We detected PWM in our measurements at all brightness settings up to 99 percent, but the frequency of 119 KHz is quite high, so it's unlikely to bother sensitive users.

Outdoors, the machine is perfectly usable in most environments (all but absolute direct sunlight) thanks to the anti-glare display and high brightness/contrast. Viewing angles are vastly superior to those of our VivoBook Pro 15 review unit, as expected, thanks to the upgrade from TN to IPS panel technology.

The venerable Intel Core i7-8550U is a quad-core CPU featuring clock rates ranging between 1.8 GHz and 4.0 GHz. It carries a TDP (15 W) which is just one-third of that of the VivoBook Pro 15’s Core i7-7700HQ (45 W). Naturally, performance can’t quite keep up with the i7-7700HQ—but whether it even approaches the ballpark is heavily dependent upon the laptop’s cooling system providing ample thermal headroom within which the CPU can operate at higher frequencies uninhibited (a challenge which many recent machines have failed to meet). How does the VivoBook Pro 17 fare?

At least initially, it’s pretty solid. We recorded single-core performance that leads the field with a score of 172 in Cinebench R15 single CPU. In multi-core, the score of 642 is only around 14% below the leader (Dell XPS 15 9560), which—like all four of the competitors above the VivoBook on our chart—is equipped with an i7-7700HQ. Both of these results are well above the class averages of 119 and 564, respectively.

But unfortunately, this doesn’t tell the full story. Sustained performance is absolutely the biggest challenge as it applies to cooling these quad-core processors in thin and light machines, and here, the VivoBook Pro struggles heavily. During our separate Cinebench R15 loop test, we initially recorded a score of 625 in the first run. The second run’s result plummeted all the way to 543, however, after which the device permanently remained in the 535 – 540 range barring a bizarre 515/518 score incident near the middle of our test. While we expect to see some degree of performance loss following the first couple of runs from machines powered by these newer quad-core 15 W TDP CPUs, a drop of 14% is pretty severe. By contrast, our Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2018 test unit, which featured the same CPU and is even thinner and more comparably compact than the VivoBook, witnessed a drop in performance of just around 5% between the first and subsequent runs of this test.

Regardless of sustained processing limitations, in terms of everyday application performance, the VivoBook lives up the challenge. It unequivocally tops the charts across all of our PCMark benchmarks, delivering scores even slightly above the average for its particular CPU + GPU combination. Part of this is a consequence of its lower screen resolution than some competitors (a factor which does affect overall scoring in these tests), but nevertheless, these results do indicate a system which feels universally fast—and the VivoBook Pro 17 unmistakably does.

The Asus VivoBook Pro 17 is capable of dual-storage solutions, which are ideal for pairing up a solid-state drive for operating system and application storage with a mechanical hard drive for large, disposable files (such as videos, music, or downloaded games). At the risk of sounding redundant, we should point out once again that it would be wise to select the desired configuration from the outset, as disassembling and customizing the situation post-purchase is not very convenient—especially if adding an M.2/NVMe SSD is in the plans (since that port is located on the opposite side of the motherboard than is accessible under the top cover).

Our particular review unit came outfitted with a conventional 1 TB 5400 RPM mechanical hard drive paired with a 512 GB NVMe Samsung solid-state drive.

The Samsung NVMe drive is a PM961, a drive which is shared by many competitors and which always performs admirably. Our benchmarks were no disappointment, with scores mostly exceeding the average (and beating all competitors in the comparison field). See our full results in the charts below.

The VivoBook Pro 17 is powered by an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050, a card which we have thoroughly evaluated at this point. In all benchmarks, we found results right in line with expectations, nearly identical to the average numbers we’ve recorded across all GTX 1050-equipped machines, and roughly equivalent in most cases with the Dell XPS 15 9560. This suggests that thermal throttling and other constraints are not in play.

To further clarify these results, we turn to our Witcher 3 one hour stress test, in which the machine idles at a particular spot in the game for a full hour while we monitor clock rates and temperatures. The graph shows some minor fluctuation in frame rates, but mostly those which would be expected as a result of day/night cycles and other in-game variances. The average frame rate over the course of the full hour remained around 25 fps overall, which is above the average for all GTX 1050 notebooks we’ve recorded (21.8 fps). CPU/GPU core temperatures hover between 69 and 73 degrees C.

Our synthetic stress tests, as always, were very useful in helping to interpret the machine’s performance under sustained loads. We are always quick to remind our readers that thin-and-light machines frequently struggle to maintain high Turbo clock rates over longer periods of synthetic stress. In many situations, these constraints do not translate over to practical usage scenarios, but in the case of the VivoBook Pro 17, we’ve already seen previously that the CPU performance limitations absolutely do apply to normal use (review our Cinebench R15 multi-CPU loop test results above).

But what conditions lead to this behavior? Our full-load CPU stress test data reveals the answer. Although initially, the Intel Core i7-8550U maintains full Turbo frequencies of 4.0 GHz, it soon after drops precipitously until after around 5 minutes of operation it remains at 1.8 GHz. What appears to prompt this behavior is an escalation of core temperatures to 80 °C, after which point all bets are off and the temperatures permanently drop to the mid-50s C. Although we occasionally still encounter spikes to around 3.7 GHz subsequent to this point of no return, the machine never recovers to anything closely resembling full performance. Since this CPU can sustain temperatures close to 100 °C, it seems this behavior is a strict limitation at the firmware level from Asus. Perhaps a future BIOS update or some sort of supplemental software might offer options to adjust this temperature limit, but for the time being it appears to be set in stone.

Of course, no such constraints apply to the GPU side of the equation, where an average clock rate of 1633 MHz is maintained permanently and average GPU temperatures never exceed a stable 76 °C. Combined stress sees similar performance and identical core temperatures from the GPU, with an average CPU temperature of 82 °C (oddly enough, when both chips are stressed, the CPU appears to break the 80 °C limit and ascend into the 90s C for a short period of time) and the CPU clock rate throttling to 1.4 GHz.

The VivoBook Pro’s speakers produce healthy volume with a fairly linear overall sound, especially in terms of mid- and high-range frequencies. As is usually the case, it’s the low frequencies which present the challenge here, where bass is a bit lower than the class median and linearity is decent. Overall, however, the audio sounds quite good and is among the best we’ve recently seen from comparable machines. There was no noticeable vibration or distortion even at higher volumes in the tests we performed.