ASUS ZenBook Pro UX501VW Review

The fans produce at most 43.9 dB(A)of sound, quieter than virtually all of its gaming competitors. During idle, it is very quiet at just 28.9 dB(A).

The UHD (8340x2160) IPS panel is a touchscreen model. It's average brightness is 250.2 cd/m² which is reasonable, but not ideal for outdoor use. The glass layer used is thicker, muting colors a bit more than other laptops. sRGB achieves 89%, and AdobeRGB scores 58% - both reasonable results, however not extraordinary. The screen is glossy, and provides great viewing angles.

The i7-6700HQ processor paired with 16GB of RAM and accompanied by the GTX 960M offers good performance for just about any task, although machines with similar hardware can be found for considerably less (although they don't come with USB Type-C).

The CPU scores 113 in CineBench R15 - a disappointing result. It's expected that that the system throttles down below its maximum setting before finishing the test.

For storage speeds, this laptop is great. It uses NVMe SSDs that are more common on extremely high end hardware. It can achieve 1633 MB/s read, and 1579MB/s write.

Gaming performance is very good, with games running on high settings with ease. Ultra settings will bring down FPS to below 30 for some games, however lighter titles can still run up to 77FPS (StarCraft 2).

At full load, the ZenBook Pro can last for 1h57m, and when surfing the web it lasts 6h19m. These are good results for a gaming focused gaming laptop.