Asus notebook

Asus' new ZenBook Pro UX501 touted as the latest MacBook Pro killer

Asus has released a new notebook that looks to be the closest rival yet to Apple’s bar-setting MacBook Pro. At 0.81 inches thick, the ZenBook Pro UX501 is a tad bit thicker than the MacBook Pro but it more than makes up for it in terms of impressive hardware.

The new ZenBook is sculpted from lightweight aluminum and is equipped with a 15.6-inch VisualMaster 4K (3,860 x 2,160) multi-touch IPS display with a pixel density of 282 PPI. It is powered by Intel’s Core i7-4720HQ processor (2.6GHz, Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz) alongside 16GB of RAM and a spacious 512GB PCIe x4 SSD which Asus claims is capable of read/write speeds up to 1,400MB/sec.

An Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 memory handles graphics duties. Other amenities include 802.11 ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, a backlit keyboard, three USB 3.0 ports, a Thunderbolt 2.0 port, an HDMI port and an SD card reader.

The system measures 15.1” x 10.0” x .8” and weighs in at five pounds. It runs Windows 8.1 for up to six hours on a single charge, we’re told.

The specifications are certainly impressive although the 960M will struggle to push games to the 4K display at anything higher than medium graphics settings.

The ZenBook Pro UX501 is available as of writing for $1,799, a rather attractive price given the powerful hardware and impressive 4K display it includes.

USB 3.1

Here's how fast USB 3.1 is in the real world

The specifications for USB 3.1 were finalized nearly a year and a half ago. Commonly referred to as SuperSpeed Plus, it promises even faster transfer rates than USB 3.0 solutions and with hardware now trickling down to end-users, we’re finally getting to see what it can do in the real world.

On paper, USB 3.1 offers double the signaling speed at 10Gbps. It also modifies the line encoding scheme from 8b/10b to 128n/132b. What this means is that only four bits out of every 132 are set aside for encoding overhead versus two out of every 10. All things considered, USB 3.1 has a maximum theoretical effective transfer rate of between 500MB/sec to 1.21GB/sec. 

Using a prototype USB 3.1 enclosure loaded with two Samsung 840 EVO SSDs in RAID 0 and an Asus Z97-A/USB 3.1 (Asus also supplied the enclosure and drives), The Tech Report set out to see just what sort of numbers they could squeeze out of the setup.

Using CrystalDiskMark to measure sequential read and write speed as well as 4K random reads / writes, the publication recorded sequential read speeds of 781.2MB/sec and writes of 797.8MB/sec. In the same test, USB 3.0 scored just 446.5MB/sec and 448.6MB/sec, respectively.

4K random reads checked in at 35.8MB/sec with writes scoring 79.6MB/sec, compared to USB 3.0 read / write speeds of 26.2MB/sec and 27.3MB/sec.

As you can see, there’s plenty of speed to be had with USB 3.1. Motherboards supporting the spec, like the one used in TTR’s testing, are already available for purchase. Finding an enclosure to support SuperSpeed Plus, however, may take a bit as I was unable to locate any for sale as of writing. I suspect it won’t be long before they start cropping up at your favorite online retailer.