Asus Zenbook UX305 Ultrabook Review: Core M Powered

We began our testing of the Asus Zenbook UX305 with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2014 the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2014 suite (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Physical Disks and Memory Bandwidth). 

SiSoft SANDRA 2014 System Level Synthetic Benchmark Testing

SANDRA CPU, Multimedia

Memory and Physical Disk Tests

The Core M performed well in the Processor Arithmetic test, showing that it could hold its own and scored only slightly worse than the Intel Core i5-3570K running at 3.4GHz. The UX305 also posts good numbers in the Processor Multi-Media test. In the Memory Bandwidth test, the system reports nearly 12GB/sec of aggregate memory bandwidth.  The Physical Disks test reveals a solid SSD with more than 500MB/sec throughput.

SunSpider JavaScript Processing Test (CPU)

The Webkit Open Source Project suggest the following about the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark:

Unlike many widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is:

Real World - This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples.

Balanced - This test is balanced between different areas of the language and different types of code. It's not all math, all string processing, or all timing simple loops. In addition to having tests in many categories, the individual tests were balanced to take similar amounts of time on currently shipping versions of popular browsers.

Statistically Sound - One of the challenges of benchmarking is knowing how much noise you have in your measurements. This benchmark runs each test multiple times and determines an error range (technically, a 95% confidence interval).

The Asus UX305 earns a score in the middle of our SunSpider chart, though it’s worth noting there’s a big gap between the UX305 and the next closest competitor, Intel’s Core i3-2377 which is clocked at 1.5GHz. The UX305 actually scores closest to the Dell XPS 12 with a Core i5-4200U processor.