Asus Zenbook Pro UX550VE (i7-7700HQ, GTX 1050 Ti) Laptop Review

Whereas our previous Zenbook Pro featured a matte IPS 1080p display, today’s instead includes a glossy touchscreen display. The resolution remains 1920x1080, and it’s still an IPS panel—in fact, the same panel that we evaluated in the previous unit. Colors seems moderately vivid and brightness and contrast make an overall decent impression. The calculated PPI is nothing groundbreaking, but it’s sufficient nonetheless. Backlight bleed is virtually nonexistent on our review unit—just a very small amount on the lower right side of the screen.

We measured an average brightness of 266 cd/m², which is decent, as well as a brightness distribution of 75%, which is merely average. The lower quadrants of the display in our measurements were quite a bit dimmer than the top quadrants, but as usual, in daily use, it’s difficult to notice the difference. The contrast ratio of 961:1 is more positive, as is the corresponding low black value of just 0.3 cd/m².

The display can reproduce around 90 percent of the sRGB color spectrum and roughly 58.5 percent of AdobeRGB. This isn’t a bad result for general use, though it’s a far cry from the Dell XPS 15’s excellent 100/88.3 percent in those same categories.

Response times are relatively slow, which renders the panel less than ideal for serious gaming purposes. PWM was detected at brightness settings of 29% and below, but the quite high frequency of 25510 Hz means that it’s unlikely most users will find themselves bothered by it.

Outdoors, the panel unsurprisingly struggles more than the matte display of our previous review unit—but it’s still perfectly usable in the shade. Viewing angles remain excellent thanks to the incorporation of an IPS panel.

Overall PCMark system performance scores were just a notch below those of the UX550VD model, but by dwelling on the difference we’d be seriously splitting hairs. Considering that the CPU, storage device, and RAM are all identical in this machine, it’s no surprise that results are within a couple of percentage points of each other. Perhaps the same forces which played into the slight slip in CPU performance above are also responsible for the minor discrepancies here.

PCMark 10 scored our UX550VE a very respectable 4552, which is actually a percentage point above that of the UX550VD.

The Samsung PM961 employed by our Zenbook Pro remains one of the fastest popular SSD choices among modern notebooks. AS SSD awarded it a total score of 3721, fueled by very fast sequential read/write speeds of 2207.5/1475.4 MB/s and comparably great 4K-64 Read/Write values of 1269.16/1160.32 MB/s.

The biggest upgrade to today’s review unit over our last test machine is the GPU. Whereas the UX550VD packed a mid-range NVIDIA GTX 1050, today’s UX550VE kicks it up a notch to the GTX 1050 Ti. This GPU is notably behind, say, the GTX 1060, but it’s also quite a bit more capable than the GTX 1050, generally posting scores around 30 percent faster. With clock speeds of 1493 – 1620 MHz (boost) and 4 GB of GDDR5 RAM, it also carries a somewhat higher (20 to 30 W) power consumption than the GTX 1050, coming in at around 70 W estimated consumption. It will be interesting to see whether such performance improvements are possible in the Zenbook Pro considering that the previous model was already among the slower of the GTX 1050 participants.

As it turns out, while overall the scores are significantly better, the UX550VE once again disappoints in context with its peers as to synthetic GPU performance. The 3DMark Fire Strike Graphics score of 7457, for instance, is well above the 6032 of the GTX 1050 model (a 24% improvement), but it’s still some 4% below the median in our database for this benchmark among GTX 1050 Ti machines. The same goes for 3DMark 11: although the score of 8503 is 15% better than the 7442 of the UX550VD, it is nevertheless 7% shy of the 9125 category median value.

None of this is terribly surprising given the thin profile of the Zenbook—chip temperatures climb quickly under load, provoking a slight reduction in clock rates until the cooling system can wrest control over them once more—and it must be taken in context with the results of the GTX 1050-equipped competition, where top-rated peers like the Dell XPS 15 are between 19 and 43 percent slower in these same tests. The Surface Book 2, which leverages a GTX 1050 in its actively-cooled keyboard base, also comes in around 22% behind the Zenbook in Fire Strike Graphics. Still, the nature of these synthetic results suggests that the performance limitations represent untapped potential of the upgraded GPU in real-world situations as well. In our Stress Test section next, we’ll witness the evidence for this.

Our previous Zenbook Pro review unit struggled to maintain CPU frequencies for more than a minute or two when CPU stress was combined with GPU stress. We’ll be interested to see how the UX550VE, with its newer BIOS version and even more powerful GPU, manages this.

CPU stress by itself is handled slightly better by this latest configuration, with temperatures climbing to around 86 °C and clock rates stabilizing between 3.0 GHz and 3.1 GHz (with occasional spikes to 3.2 GHz). GPU stress, meanwhile, eventually results in clock rates near the base frequency of 1493, with occasional dips below as well as short spikes. Temperatures are stable at 80 °C, which appears to be the firmware-limited maximum for the GPU.

Combined CPU and GPU stress sees chip temperatures of 79 °C and 80 °C for CPU and GPU, respectively, with the GPU maintaining average clock rates in the 1400-1500 MHz range, which mostly amount to frequencies below the base clock rate of 1493 MHz (and thus qualifying as throttling). CPU frequencies are between 1.5 and 1.6 GHz, which is well below the base frequency of 2.8 GHz.

This is synthetic stress, so it’s helpful to be able to discern how much harsh conditions might actually affect real-world performance. A secondary run of 3DMark 06 immediately following full system stress resulted in a score of 26807, only slightly shy of the 27473 we received initially. That’s because it isn’t necessarily high temperatures which are limiting the machine’s performance, but rather moderate temperatures amounting to around 80 °C on average across CPU/GPU and associated power limits. We also monitored clock rates and temperatures during an hour of The Witcher 3 (ultra settings) as a part of our newer Witcher 3 sustained stress test, and though we saw a slight decline in frame rates over the course of the hour, it was only around 1 fps overall (from 24-25 fps down to 23-24).

These two final “real world” assessments of sustained performance potential do seem to confirm a small negative influence on overall performance—but the bottom line is that the upgrade to the GTX 1050 Ti does still yield tangible benefits, even if they aren’t as great as they might have been given better cooling or less restrictive thermal and power limits.

Battery life was, rather unsurprisingly, essentially identical to that of the Zenbook Pro UX550VD. The machine lasted 8 hours and 52 minutes in our web surfing benchmark, which is notably better than most of the competition, with the exception of the passively-cooled Microsoft Surface Book 2 (which managed 11 hours and 3 minutes. Top-rated competitors like the Dell XPS 15 yield more than an hour less in terms of battery runtimes in this test.

Meanwhile, under minimal load, the device lasted for 17 hours and 3 minutes, whereas the Battery Eater Classic Test (heavy load) lasted for 1 hour and 10 minutes.