The $750 Asus Zenbook UX330UA has a CPU that competes performance-wise with laptops in a completely different price range.
We all waste our money on lattes, and we all feel bad about it. But what if you shopped smarter for your next laptop, and opened up $550 for your latte budget? You can do it — with the Asus Zenbook UX330UA.
We know what you’re thinking. If the product sounds more like a serial number than a name, stay clear. Yet the Zenbook UX330UA really is the everyman computer you should consider when buying a new laptop. It checks off most the boxes for what you’d want in a modern Windows laptop, including a thin profile and a snappy keyboard.
We don’t mean to say it’s a perfect laptop. The design won’t make you stand up and cheer — nor will some slip-ups in the details, like the lack of precision in the touchpad or the slight flex in the keyboard.
But for $750 — less than the cost of a new iPhone 8 Plus — you get a laptop that competes with laptops and 2-in-1s that double its price. The UX330UA comes with an 8th generation Core i5-8250U processor, the same one featured in the $1,100 HP Spectre 13, the $1,196 Lenovo Yoga 920, and even the $1,500 Surface Book 2.
While we haven’t tested the i5 versions of all those laptops, we have tested the Core i7 versions (which are even more expensive), seen in the results below.
You’re probably as impressed as we were — the UX330UA holds up against these more expensive laptops surprisingly well. So well, in fact, that you may wonder why you’d ever need to spend more.
Again, this is a $750 laptop. It’s not the best laptop ever built by human hands. When it comes to performance, though, the Zenbook UX330UA offers great value for what you get. You may want to think twice before dropping that stack of cash for a Microsoft Surface Book 2 or Apple MacBook Pro.
