ASUS UX31A: Putting the Ultra in Ultrabooks

ASUS UX31A: A Great Ultrabook, but Still an Ultrabook

There are two primary viewpoints on the UX31A, and both are valid. On the one hand you’ll find people saying, “$1400 for that!? That’s way too expensive when I could buy a substantially faster system for less money!” This is more or less the refrain we’ve heard in regards to most ultraportables since their inception—just ask Anand about his college experiments with various $2000+ ultraportables. If you’re after a do-everything laptop, Ultrabooks are the ultraportables of 2011/2012, and they come with some of the same caveats as earlier incarnations—you simply can’t get the performance of a 100W+ desktop crammed into the volume of a <25W laptop. However, that’s oversimplifying things as there are many other elements of Ultrabooks that can make them much more desirable than the ultraportables of yesteryear.

We are now at the point where pure CPU performance is becoming an increasingly niche market, particularly in the laptop world. There will always be a subset of users that want and even need more processor and/or graphics performance, but for a large majority of home, office, and even school users we’re now at the point where just about every laptop is “fast enough”. Atom is still too slow and lacks too many features for me to go that route, and even low-end Brazos chips from AMD lack the performance and responsiveness that I want, but once we hit the Athlon X2/Core 2 Duo level of performance (and Brazos E-350/E-450 in a pinch) we’re at the point where most people will be okay—at least if they have enough RAM. You can run all the latest office and Internet tasks quite well on such a laptop, and it’s only if you try branching out into games or video transcoding where you start to hit limitations (with Quick Sync helping immensely in the case of transcoding videos).

So if most laptops are now fast enough, what do you get extra from an Ultrabook that warrants the higher prices? The most noticeable element is obviously the thin and light profile (though there are some Ultrabooks that aren’t all that light). As someone who travels on occasion, the UX31A would now top my list for a laptop that I’d love to have along for trade shows, business trips, or something to carry around campus. Going from a four pound laptop to a three pound Ultrabook may not seem like that big a deal, and for some it’s probably not, but that’s still a 25% reduction in weight and it’s far more convenient to put an Ultrabook in a backpack than many other laptops. Along with the thin form factor, you also get good battery life and a laptop that’s generally very responsive. And that’s where I wish Intel would go all in and ditch mechanical storage altogether, as the use of pure SSD storage for Ultrabooks really does ensure a certain level of responsiveness that you won’t get from a hard drive (with or without SSD caching).

Are those benefits worth the price of entry? For some people, the answer will clearly be no, but just as clearly there are going to be users that love the concept. If you’re after gaming in a reasonably light laptop, AMD’s Trinity offerings are much better than any of the Ultrabooks that lack a discrete GPU. Acer’s TimelineU M3 and their new M5-481TG (review forthcoming!) on the other hand negate that advantage while remaining price competitive. You’ll have to decide for yourself just how much you’re willing to spend, as well as what features you want and/or are willing to sacrifice.

What about the UX31A is particular? Here’s where things get a lot easier, because this is simply the best Ultrabook currently on the market in my opinion. The keyboard is comfortable for typing, the build quality is solid, and the aesthetics are great as well (hooray for a complete lack of shiny surfaces!). Perhaps more important than all of those areas however is the display; getting a high quality IPS 1080p panel into an Ultrabook certainly required extra effort on the part of ASUS, and the result is stunning compared to any other Ultrabook (and pretty much any laptop other than the MacBook Pro Retina). The blacks are a deep black, the whites are bright, and the dot pitch is so fine that I have difficulty making out the individual pixels with my eyes even from close up. ASUS tells me that they think the experience will be even better with Windows 8, and while I may not be convinced by Metro I’m sure others will be happy to take the plunge.

With all the good aspects, though, you still need to understand that there are limitations. Perhaps the biggest limitation is going to be the RAM; the 1080p display makes the UX31A perfectly capable of handling photo editing duties, but running something like Photoshop with 4GB can quickly run into RAM bottlenecks. For a premium Ultrabook, I wish ASUS had been a bit more forward looking and equipped the UX31A with 8GB. This is particularly painful since there’s absolutely no way to upgrade the memory. The storage is another concern, as ASUS uses a proprietary SSD gum stick form factor. It’s possible to find replacement SSDs, but they’re what ASUS is already shipping (and stay away from the SanDisk U100 if you want decent SSD performance). Personally, I can’t see any point in buying a UX31A only to replace (i.e. toss out) the original SSD and put in a new, larger SSD, and I can’t see much of a market developing for the 64GB or 128GB used SSDs (since most people would likely be looking to upgrade to the 256GB model). Finally, there’s the touchpad issue; it’s not terrible, but it’s not perfect either. I typed the conclusion with the touchpad disabled just for convenience, and it takes care of the unintentional click/activation problem, but if you’re frequently switching between using the mouse and typing that might not be acceptable. It’s also just not quite as precise feeling as some touchpads, though that’s more of a gut instinct than something I can really quantify.

While the UX31A doesn’t get every aspect right, however, it hits enough of the important areas that it ends up being an easy recommendation for people looking for a good Ultrabook. In my opinion, it’s built at least as well as the MacBook Air, it has a better LCD (at least on the 1080p models), and it’s designed from the ground up to run Windows 7 (and Windows 8 in the very near future). If you want to run OS X, go grab a MacBook Air and you’re set, but if you’re a Windows user and would like something even better than the MBA, ASUS has you covered. As the best Ultrabook that we’ve tested to date, the UX31A earns our Bronze Editor’s Choice award—the 4GB RAM issue and touchpad being the major reasons it doesn’t get a Silver or Gold. The only decisions you need to make are which model to get, and whether you’re ready to spend this much money for a device that will be superseded next year with the inevitable Haswell update. I can’t help too much with the latter, but if you’re stuck on the model question I can provide some input.

The least expensive UX31A that we can recommend is the $1030 UX31A-DB51; you get the 1080p LCD but with a Core i5 CPU and a 128GB SSD. The Core i5 will end up being around 5-10% slower in practice, but if you’re able to live with an Ultrabook in the first place that isn’t likely to be a problem. The storage is a bit more difficult; I can easily use up all the capacity of a 128GB SSD, and even 256GB can start to feel inadequate—particularly when you lose 14GiB to the Windows recovery and fast-resume partitions. Since there’s no 512GB model available, your best bet in my book is to go with one of the 256GB models (or get the DB51 and try to buy a compatible 256GB SSD aftermarket). Right now you can find the UX31A-XB52 starting at $1395, which gives you the i5-3317U CPU with a 256GB SSD, or you can spend $39 more to get the UX31A-DB71 for $1434, which is what we’ve reviewed here. A few places might even be the same price for the DB71 (i.e. if you pay with cash at XoticPC). Considering we’re already well into premium price territory, I suggest just going whole hog and buying the DB71. It’s not cheap, but if you’re going to buy an Ultrabook I can’t think of any other option I’d rather have today.

Update: Unfortunately, it appears that ASUS continues to source SSDs from ADATA as well as SanDisk for use in the UX21A and UX31A. We tested the ADATA equipped model in this review, and we've previously seen poor performance from the SanDisk U100 SSDs. If you're after the fastest possible Ultrabook experience, you'll have to trust your luck to fate should you order the UX31A—you could get either ADATA or SanDisk and there's no way to tell without powering up the system (or opening the bottom cover). On the other hand, if you're mostly interested in a well-built Ultrabook with a good keyboard and an awesome display, the UX31A is still the one to get; I'd be willing to live with the slower SSD just to get the 1080p IPS panel. It's definitely frustrating for end users that ASUS is sourcing two different parts where performance varies so much, but it's not all that different from Apple's MacBook Air (i.e. faster Samsung SSDs in some units and significantly slower Toshiba SSDs in others). Caveat emptor.