Asus ZenBook 15 (UX533F) Review: A powerful, portable performer

Key Specifications

• Review Price: £1399
• Intel Core i7-8565U and Core i5-8265U
• Intel UHD Graphics 620
• Nvidia GTX 1050 Max-Q, 2GB/4GB GDDR5 VRAM
• 8GB / 16GB 2400MHz DDR4
• 354 x 220 x 17.9mm

What is the Asus ZenBook 15 (UX533F)?

The Asus ZenBook 15 (UX533F) is a cheaper, lighter and more mainstream proposal than the heftier, more powerful and designer-focused ZenBook Pro.

It’s one of the first laptops hitting shelves that features an Intel Whiskey Lakeprocessor, which promises improved performance over other 8th gen laptop CPUs and more efficient power use.

In theory, the ZenBook should have enough processing grunt to blitz through your daily tasks while leaving enough power in the tank for you by the end of the day. Here’s how I got on in practice. 

What’s blue, gold, and gorgeous all over? Why, the Asus ZenBook, of course.

Related: Best Laptops 2019

Asus ZenBook 15 (UX533F) – Design and features

The ZenBook, like its bigger ZenBook Pro sibling, is very swish-looking. Our review model featured the same deep blue and rose gold colour combination that stands out nicely from boring old grey and black portable PCs.

The colour of the gold accents is also matched by the lettering on the keys, which is a nice touch that makes the ZenBook look a cut above your average ultrabook.

The first thing you’ll notice when you open up the ZenBook is how thin the bezel is. It’s around 3mm at the sides, 5mm at the top and about 4.5mm at the bottom – Asus claims a screen-to-body ratio of 92% here. It’s certainly very high, to the point where half the time you won’t even notice the edges of the screen.

In Asus branding spiel this is called ‘NanoEdge’, but that’s just a fancy way of saying ‘a very thin bezel’ – it has nothing to do with the quality of the display or nanotechnology or anything like that.

Related: Best Ultrabook

The bezel of the Asus ZenBook 15 (UX533F) is so small, you barely notice it’s there.

Ports-wise, you get two Type-A USB ports (aka ‘the old school rectangular ports’), one Type-C USB (aka ‘the newer, lozenge-shaped ports’), HDMI, an SD card reader and a 3.5mm audio jack.

That’s a good degree of physical connectivity for a laptop which weighs under 2kg (1.59kg) and measures 17.9mm at its thinnest point. It’s up there with the LG Gram 15Z980 in the light-15-inch-laptop-with-lots-of-ports stakes. There’s no Ethernet port, but that’s not so much of a big deal, as Asus has kindly bundled in a USB-A to Ethernet adapter, so you can get wired in easily.

Design quirks of the Asus ZenBook 15 don’t end at skinny bezels. There’s something else called ‘ErgoLift’ too. In practical terms, this means that a portion of the screen’s casing has been designed in such a way that when you open the ZenBook 15, it has the effect of lifting the laptop’s posterior up off of the surface of your desk by an angle of about three degrees.

The ErgoLift design in action – see how both the shape of the top half of the Asus ZenBook 15 (UX533F) and the rubberised feet lift the bottom half clear off of the desk.

This sees the keys angled towards your hands, which Asus says makes it more comfortable to type on. I can confirm that the ZenBook is comfortable to type on, but I’m unsure if this is down to the angle of the ErgoLift design or it’s just because the ZenBook 15’s chiclet-style keyboard is a good keyboard.

The trick with the hinge is also intended to improve airflow as the back of the ZenBook’s base isn’t touching the desk, and therefore emitting heat straight into that flat surface. This supposedly has the effect of improving airflow around the laptop’s hot bits.

The main air vent is lifted off of the desk as a result of this, so I’m inclined to see the method on Asus’s madness. Another vent sits on the left side, near the USB-A and 3.5mm ports too, which kicks out extra hot air whenever you’re doing something intensive. In terms of noise, the fans here are pretty quiet. Then again, this isn’t a huge, hulking gaming laptop, so it shouldn’t be kicking out loads on the decibel front anyway.

Speaking of which, the two downward facing Harmon Kardon-certified speakers are a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the sound these things kick out is very good. It passed the ‘Master of Puppets’ test, with bass, drums and guitar sounding crystal clear and nicely separated. TV content streamed from iPlayer and Netflix sounded excellent too. Not every laptop in this price range is capable of kicking out such good quality sound, so this is worth shouting about. 

That said, when watching something in bed or on the couch, where the speakers would sometimes be muffled by throws and duvets, some of the sound would be lost – it may have been better if the speakers had been mounted on the topside, so they were actually facing you instead. Doing this though would mean that the keyboard would either be smaller, or the overall chassis wider. This is a very small gripe, because generally the external speakers of the ZenBook are very good.

The keyboard’s generally easy to type on, but some of the bigger keys are slightly wobbly.

Asus ZenBook 15 (UX533F) – Keyboard

As I said above, the Asus ZenBook 15’s keyboard is easy to type on, with the low-travel keycaps firing back nicely, making typing at speeds approaching 100 words a minute possible.

There’s some slight wobble on some keys, especially the longer keys, like Enter and the right-hand Shift key, which makes me wonder about how robust this thing is. It’s maybe not quite as nice or easy to type on as the keyboards of other premium devices, like the 2018 Apple MacBook Pro with the third-gen butterfly switched keycaps, or the 2018 Dell XPS 15 2-in-1, with its maglev keyboard (still our favourite laptop keyboard the time of writing).

In terms of layout, this is a fairly standard QWERTY keyboard conforming to the UK layout – i.e. Shift+3 gives you a ‘£’, and the ‘@’ symbol is where it should be.  I was able to comfortably rest my hands on the front of the laptop and get acquainted with the home keys. The same can’t be said for the number keys, which are shunted over to the right-hand side and don’t enjoy the same prominence.

The trackpad of the Asus ZenBook 15 (UX533F) is nicely sized, but I found that it would occasionally hang when I was scrolling through long articles.

I also generally didn’t get on with the size of the Function keys. They’re a little too small for my big old sausage fingers. I’d often find myself hitting the backslash key, which sits very close to the left shift button, when I meant to press Ctrl+Shift+V instead. I feel like these are small gripes though, and with some more ‘bedding in’ time, I’d be able to acclimatise to the ZenBook’s layout easily enough.

I had some issues with the trackpad, which didn’t always respond to commands as quickly as I’d like. After some fiddling around in the settings, things improved, but occasionally I’d find myself attempting to scroll through an article using the two finger gesture and instead find myself clawing in futility at the thing.