I’ve always been a fan of Dell laptops. While often a little more pricey than their counterparts, their laptops are usually well built, typically run Ubuntu without any hassles, and Dell have great after sales service. My last two laptops where Dell.
I’d been eyeing the Dell XPS 15 for about a year, and I had planned to purchase one when I was due for an upgrade. However, sometime back in 2017, someone I follow on Twitter suggested something I had not thought of, the Asus Zenbook range.
Now as a PC gamer, Asus is a well known brand. The produce some of the best PC gaming hardware around. In recent years they’ve switched to more integrated hardware, from tablets (my first Android tablet was an Asus) and more recently to laptops. So I was curious to see how the Zenbook range compared to the Dell XPS range.
The first thing that struck me was the wide range of ZenBook Series laptops available. After some extensive research, I eventually settled on the Asus Zenbook 15 UX533FD.
General impressions
I’ve been using this laptop for almost a year now, and I’m very happy with it. It boots fast, runs all my applications without any problems, and is super light and easy to carry around. Whenever I’m working in it, it never gets hot, and I hardly hear the cooling fans spinning up, so it’s super quiet as well. It has a average of 10 hours battery life if I’m using it for development all day, and an added bonus is that it looks really good, with the Royal Blue finish. You can read more about the tech specs here, but it has everything I need in terms of connections. Finally, the charging cable is also small and light, so when it’s in my laptop backpack I hardly even notice it’s there.
Cost Effective
I always prefer to limit myself to a specific budget, this time around, no more then ZAR25 000. I also tend to have specific minimum hardware requirements when it comes to a work laptop, preferring a decent Intel Core i7 CPU, at least 16GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD hard drive. I’m not too worried about getting the latest and greatest of the Intel chips, nor do I need a 4k or touch enabled screen. I’m also not concerned about super powerful graphics or the number of additional ports it has, I just need at least one or two USB ports and an HDMI port.
Based on these specifics the Asus Zenbook was the clear winner, being available within my budget at ZAR7000 less than a Dell XPS, configured with almost exactly the same hardware.
Ubuntu friendly
Whether it comes pre-installed with Windows Home or Pro does not really matter to me, as long as I can install Ubuntu on it without any problems. At first I had some issues with getting Ubuntu installed, but after a bit of research online I discovered that updating the laptop firmware to the latest version would resolve any issues. I also decided to install the most recent Ubuntu version, which usually contains the most recent kernel updates and therefore less hardware compatibility issues. The base OS install was a breeze and I didn’t need to jump through any hacky workarounds to get certain things working. I’ve since successfully upgraded the OS to the recent LTS release (20.04), again with very few issues.
Performance
I’ll be the first to admit that I know nothing about performance benchmarks, so all I did was find a benchmarking tool on Ubuntu that would give me some scores to compare. Hardinfo seemed to be a solid option, so I ran the benchmark suite on the laptop and compared it to my AMD Ryzen powered workstation.
I was pleased to discover that not only were many of the benchmarks pretty close, but a few of them were better on the laptop, mostly in CPU related tests. I honestly can’t say I can tell the difference when I’m working on my laptop vs the workstation, except when it comes to graphics intensive applications, like games.
| Benchmark | Workstation | Laptop |
| CPU Blowfish (lower is better) | 0.97 | 1.05 |
| CPU CryptoHash (higher is better) | 1284.82 | 1058.34 |
| CPU Fibonacci (lower is better) | 0.55 | 0.39 |
| CPU N-Queens (lower is better) | 5.12 | 4.80 |
| CPU Zlib (higher is better) | 2.35 | 1.46 |
| FPU FFT (lower is better) | 0.80 | 0.65 |
| FPU Raytracing (lower is better) | 2.56 | 1.13 |
| GPU Drawing (higher is better) | 16462.80 | 8428.99 |
I’ve since had quite a few online interactions with other developers who’ve also discovered the joy of the Zenbook range.
So if you’re looking for a small, powerful, good looking, well priced, Ubuntu friendly laptop, you won’t go wrong with an Asus Zenbook.
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