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Asus ZenBook UX305CA Shows What Skylake Core M Is Capable Of (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: ASUS recently revamped their ZenBook UX305 family of ultralight notebooks with Intel's 6th generation Skylake Core m series, which brings with it not only improved graphics performance but also native support for PCI Express NVMe M.2 Solid State Drives. The platform is turning out to be fairly strong for this category of notebooks and the low cost ZenBook ($699 as tested) is a good example of what a Skylake Core M is capable of in a balanced configuration. Tested here, the machine is configured with a 256GB M.2 SSD, 8GB of RAM and a 2.2GHz Core m3-6Y30 dual-core CPU. Along with a 13.3-inch 1080p FHD display and 802.11ac wireless connectivity, the ZenBook UX305 is setup nicely and it puts up solid performance numbers in both standard compute tasks and graphics. It also offers some of the best battery life numbers in an ultralight yet, lasting over 10 hours on a charge in real world connected web testing.
The 13" 256GB macbook pro is $1499. This one is $699. So, you could literally buy two of these for the price of one macbook. If you know of a comparable macbook for less than $750, please post.
I agree about Windows, but if I bought either this one or the macbook, as soon as I got home I'd format the disk and install Debian; so the stock OS doesn't matter.
Did Soulskill and samzenpus get canned as part of the recent Slashdot ownership change? The last submission posted by samzenpus and the last submission posted by Soulskill that I can find both pre-date the ownership change announcement. Since then there have only been submissions posted by timothy and whipslash, as far as I can tell. The about page still lists Soulskill and samzenpus as editors, but it also still says it's owned by DHI, so maybe it has not been updated yet. If Soulskill and samzenpus were canned, will timothy be canned at some point in the near future, too?
Just finished giving three talks in three days at three different locations / venues, where I needed to connect my laptop to the overhead projector. In every case the primary connector to the projector was VGA. Fortunately my clunky, old-fashioned, outdated laptop (actually, an old netbook) has a VGA port, so hooking up was always straightforward.
What does Skylake have to offer?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
First, it's not 2.2GHz (that's the maximum turbo frequency), it's rated speed is less than 1GHz (0.9GHz, according to TFA). The MacBooks use 1.1GHz and 1.2GHz Broadwell processors (turbo boost to 2.4GHz and 2.6GHz). The Skylake processors are probably both faster and lower power.
Second, it's actually a pretty nice machine (assuming that you can stand Windows): anybody complaining about the new MacBook with only a single USB C port should be pretty happy with this machine, which comes with a full complement of ports. And the price is certainly pretty good (even the high resolution model is about half the price of the new MacBook).
Third, the black finish looks really nice: I wish Apple would make nice black kit like that again.
I wonder if you can get OS X running on this somehow.
just a ghost in the machine.
I have this unit, and I get (Linux Mint 17.2) typically 5-6 hours with mixed workload. Interestingly, if I bring up full-screen Emacs and use only that (no Chrome in the background etc.) --- I get 10 hours, using the wifi for w3m and gnus, etc.
The UK price of the $699 tested 256GB SSD model is unbelievably expensive in comparson - it's over 800 pounds ($1200) which is sheer madness and will kill its UK sales. Add the fact that it's very hard to find it with Windows 10 Pro pre-installed (there's another 100 pounds - $150) and this will see near-zero UK business sales.
question chipschap: did the touchpad and the screen brightness keys work out of the box on Linux Mint? or you had to fix it?
I quickly tested asus UX305CA on GNU/Linux, with Mint, Ubuntu and Kubuntu and had issues with this two components. None of them worked on Ubuntu, the brightness keys did work on one of them, Mint if I recall properly, and the trackpad didn't work in any of them. Otherwise it felt quite fast, and google thinks there are drivers available for the trackpad, so I just bought one for myself and I'm waiting for it to arrive.
The main reasons why I choose this laptop are: 1) fanless (I hate the noise and they are always the first thing to break, unless the mechanical HD breaks first, but this is not an issue anymore with SSDd), 2) long battery life 3) serviceable battery (not as good as replaceable, but at least is supposed to be easy to disassemble, unlike the mac books, where everything is glued and unreachable) 4) light
My SO has been using one on windows for more than two months and she consistently gets +10h battery life on windows with the "battery savings mode" enabled (otherwise, with the default settings, she was getting less than half of that). She uses it mostly for taking courses on gaming (unity, blender...) and is very happy with it. Yes, some programs take a bit more time to load than on a more capable desktop, but once loaded they perform fine. At least for doing simple things, she expects to have to switch to a desktop computer when in the future she wants to work on more complex projects, but the laptop is ideal for taking it to classes and meeting with friends to discuss projects.
Windows has stability issues with the intel graphics drivers, but don't bother enough to spend time looking for solutions (yet). Other than that it doesn't have other issues, besides all the issues that windows always have :)