The ASUS ZenBook 3 Review: A Convincing Case for Quad Core Thin & Light Laptops

Battery Life

Battery life is something that everyone needs, but is also one of the hardest aspects of a laptop to measure since everyone has different tasks they want to perform. To get consistent results, all devices are set to 200 nits of brightness prior to the test being run. All devices are tested with Edge as the browser.

We have three tests that we are utilizing in our test suite right now. The 2013 Light test is our older web browser test, which is the lightest test, and it opens four web pages per minute. It’s reached a point where it's a bit too light for most devices, but it’s also the one with the most backlog of results to compare against, so it’s nice to test it still. The 2016 Web test is a much more demanding web test, which is the same one we use on our mobile devices. Finally, we test video playback from a local h.264 video file.

The ASUS Zenbook is equipped with just a 46 Wh battery, which is about the same size as the Surface Pro, and on the small size for an Ultrabook. A new XPS 13, for example, is a relatively massive 60 Wh, so expectations are tempered going into our testing.

2013 Light Results

On our 2013 test, the ZenBook 3 did very well. 11.25 hours of battery life out of just 46 Wh is well above expectations. It can’t quite match the FHD version of the Dell XPS 13 we tested (this is the original Broadwell version – Dell will be sending us the latest gen one soon for a more up-to-date result), but it’s still a great result for having a below average capacity battery in an Ultrabook.

2016 Web Results

The more demanding web browsing test does knock some time off the result, but the ZenBook 3 is the longest lasting device we’ve tested with this version of the benchmark. It’s a very impressive result.

Normalized Results

By removing the battery capacity from the equation, we can see how efficient each device is. Here the lower resolution display helps out a lot, but overall, ASUS has done a great job on power management. The ZenBook 3 is one of the most efficient laptops we’ve seen.

Movie Playback

Movie playback is not quite as impressive as the Surface Pro, but still quite strong.

Charge Time

The other side of the mobility equation is charge time. ASUS ships the ZenBook 3 with a 65-Watt USB-C AC Adapter. The wattage of this charger is quite a bit higher than most other Ultrabooks, where 40-Watts or so is much more common. Also, ASUS has added upstream charging to all three of the USB-C ports on the notebook, so you can charge it on whichever one is the most convenient. Not all companies do this, so ASUS needs to be commended here.

The ZenBook 3 charges from dead to full in just a hair over two hours, which is one of the quickest we’ve seen. Looking at the charge graph, it hits 50% charge in just 43 minutes, so the larger charger does help on the quick fill-up.