ASUS Zenbook 17 Fold OLED Review: Premium, Feature-Rich Foldable
ASUS Zenbook 17 Fold OLED Review: CPU, System and Gaming Benchmarks
Before we dig into any benchmarks, we like to fully update the system being tested to ensure it is current for everything from drivers to firmware to standard Windows updates. The ASUS Zenbook 17 Fold was delivered with Windows 11 Pro. After all the updates were applied, similar to what anyone purchasing a system at retail would do, we ran all of our tests with the system using its out-of-the-box settings, so that we can gauge what the typical user can expect if they pick one of these up and start using it right away.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
ATTO disk benchmark is a quick test to determine sequential read/write bandwidth across various data sizes. While this dataset isn't to compare many different systems it does give us an idea of how good a notebook's storage system will perform.
The ASUS Zenbook 17 Fold features a PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe drive and its performance is somewhat inconsistent depending on the transfer size. Reads topped out just over 6.3GB/s with the largest transfers and writes peaked around 4GB/s. Not the fastest SSD we've seen in a mobile device, but still plenty fast for day to day use.
BrowserBench Speedometer Web Application Benchmark
We use BrowswerBench.org's Speedometer test, which takes a holistic look at web application performance, to gauge mixed internet usage experience. This test automatically loads and runs several sample web apps from ToDoMVC.com using the most popular web development frameworks around, including React, Angular, Ember.js, and vanilla JavaScript. This test is a better example of how systems cope with real web applications, as opposed to pure JavaScript compute tests like JetStream.
The ASUS Zenbook 17 Fold performed well here. These results show that the two high performance cores in the Alder Lake-based 12th Gen Core i7-1205U CPU clearly offer better performance versus previous generation parts.
Geekbench v5.4.1 CPU Compute Benchmark
GeekBench is focused entirely on CPU core performance in single and multi-threaded workloads; graphics performance is left out here. The tests run by GeekBench are a mix of encryption processing, image compression, HTML5 parsing, physics calculations and a variety of general computing workloads.
The ASUS Zenbook 17 Fold performed admirably here and was in the mix with much higher power processors. The Zenbook 17 Fold actually outperformed the Ryzen 7 6800U powered Zenbook S in the single core test, but fell slightly behind in multi-core.
Cinebench R23 Rendering Test
This is the latest 3D rendering benchmark from Maxon, based on the Cinema 4D R23 rendering engine. We tested both single-threaded and multi-threaded tests on all of the notebooks represented here...
The ASUS Zenbook 17 Fold isn't the type of system consumers would buy for intense 3D rendering workloads like this one, but it does manage to put up some strong single-thread performance and the sheer number of additional P and E-cores in the Core i7-1250U results in fairly strong multi-threaded performance as well.
PCMark 10 Testing
PCMark 10 uses a mix of real-world applications and simulated workloads to establish how well a given system performs various productivity and content creation tasks, including image and video editing, web browsing, and OpenOffice document editing. While these scores appear to be all over the place, the systems are sorted by their overall PCMark score, which is the third (gray) bar in each cluster.
Overall performance of the ASUS Zenbook 17 Fold has it sitting roughly in the middle of the pack. It delivers a decent overall score, but a fairly strong score in the Essentials test, which is indicative of a good user experience with common workloads like web browsing and office applications.
3DMark Graphics and GPU Tests
3DMark offers several different graphics tests, which focus on different types of systems. We start with Night Raid, which is 3DMark's targeted benchmark for laptops with integrated graphics. This test presents a solid challenge for the system's CPU and GPU engines using the DirectX 12 API. 3DMark Fire Strike uses DirectX 11, but is far more taxing and it typically targeted at discrete GPUs.
The ASUS Zenbook 17 Fold isn't a graphics powerhouse by any means, but it does hang alongside slightly more powerful systems which also feature 12thg Gen Core processors and Iris Xe graphics.
Middle Earth: Shadow Of War Game Test
Middle Earth: Shadow of War is a fun and beautiful title set in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings universe. To test the game's performance relative to other systems, we set the resolution to 1920x1080 and turned the visuals up to the 'High' preset. The frame rates here are the average reported by the built-in benchmark.
The ASUS Zenbook 17 Fold fell down in this more graphically demanding benchmark. With these higher detail settings, 12FPS is unplayable, but dropping the in-game graphics settings to 'Lowest' and running 900p can get this title over 50FPS average and make it usable.
Next up we'll take a peek at how the Zenbook 17 Fold holds up in regard to battery life, thermals, and noise...
Next up we'll take a peek at how the Zenbook 17 Fold holds up in regard to battery life, thermals, and noise...
