Asus Zenbook UX305 Ultrabook Review: Core M Powered
One of the attractive features of the Core M platform is the promise of increased battery life. In fact, Intel has claimed Core M systems should see a battery life that is up to 1.7 hours longer than the prior generation.
Asus claims the UX305 will last for up to 10 hours of web browsing or up to 8 hours of music or video playback. For many users, this means the UX305 should last for an entire day on a single charge. Of course, battery life will depend on how much you require of the system throughout the day.
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In an attempt to quantitatively measure the UX305’s battery life in a controlled benchmark environment, we ran two tests to get a sense of how long the system will last under light and heavy use. Our web browsing test is a light-use scenario in which it refreshes a webpage over a Wi-Fi connection until the battery is exhausted. For this test, we set the UX305’s display to 50% brightness and connected to the web via a wireless network.
The Battery Eater Pro test gives the laptop a much heavier workload to simulate the kind of stress you might put on the machine with multiple resources engaged including CPU, GPU, memory and hard drive.
As we might expect, the UX305 lasts for a very long time in both tests. In the strenuous BatteryEater Pro test, the UX305 outlasted all other comparison systems by a decent margin. Although Asus claimed up to 10 hours of web browsing, the system lasted for only 9 hours in our custom web browsing test. Still, this is a very long time—enough to earn the Asus UX305 third place in our chart.
