Asus Zenbook UX305 Ultrabook Review: Core M Powered

Name: Asus Zenbook UX305 Ultrabook
Brand: Asus

by Jennifer Johnson — Monday, February 16, 2015, 01:00 PM EDT

Asus includes a few extras on the UX305 but for the most part, the system is fairly clean. In the Start menu, you’ll see tripadvisor, FreshPaint, Netflix, Asus WebStorage, and a few other apps. There’s also a free trial of Microsoft Office 2013 on the UX305.

As we mentioned earlier, Asus includes a couple of extras with the UX305 including a USB to LAN adapter, cable ties, and screen cloth. The charging cord for the UX305 is relatively small, measuring about 2.5 inches square and about one inch thick.

To get a feel for multimedia performance on the UX305, we fired up a few HD movie trailers on YouTube to see how well this ultrabook could handle the workload and see how Intel’s Core M would behave. Here’s how things looked when playing a 1080p Guardians of The Galaxy clip:

As you can see from the Task Manager chart, Intel’s Core M 5Y10 doesn’t reach its top clock speed, because it doesn't have to. CPU utilization hovered around 8%, though there were spikes up to 20% during our playback tests. We didn’t experience any dropped frames or stuttering during playback.

Tags: Asus, laptop, Ultrabook, Broadwell, zenbook, Core M, ux305

Jennifer Johnson

Jennifer grew up around technology. From an early age, she was curious about all things related to computers. As a child, Jennifer remembers spending nights with her dad programming in BASIC and taking apart hard drives to see what was inside. In high school, she wrote her senior term paper on her experiences with building custom computers.

Jennifer graduated from the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. After college, she began writing full-time for various PC and technology magazines. Later, she transitioned to the Web. In these roles, Jennifer has covered a variety of topics including laptops, desktops, smartphones, cameras, tablets, and various consumer electronics devices. When she's not playing with or writing about the latest gadget, Jennifer loves to spend time with her family, capture memories with her camera, and scrapbook.

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