14 DAY TRIAL // Last week at Computex 2014, ASUS showed its latest flagship from the Zenbook Ultrabook range and it didn't take long for the company to officially launch the device.
The new machine comes boasting a really premium feel, taking advantage of an elegant all-aluminum chassis that will fulfill the expectations of the most stylish notebook bearers.
The Zenbook NX500 has just been launched, but it has already been bestowed with the prestigious 2014 IF Design award that emphasizes the great quality of the product.
What certainly draws attention to this new product is the beautiful display. The Zenbook NX500 arrives with a 15.6-inch IPS touchscreen that offers 4K/UHD resolution, which will supposedly bring about stunning images.
ASUS claims this is the world’s first 15.6-inch laptop to arrive with 3M QDEF technology that makes use of quantum dots, enabling an ultra-wide color gamut of 100% NTSC, 108% Adobe RGB and 146% sRGB.
More than that, the new Zenbook incorporates TruVivid direct-bonding technology used to minimize reflections, factory-calibrated color temperature and pixel density meant to make individual pixels invisible to the naked away.
ASUS goes as far as to claim that the NX500’s display is the best you can find on a laptop, a statement that will be tested once the device makes it into the real world.
Moving on with the specification, the Zenbook NX500 packs an Intel Core i7 quad-core processor and discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 850M graphics with 2GB DDR5 of video memory.
Other specifications include a 512GB PCI Express (PCle) x4 solid-state-disk SSD and up to two SATA 3 SSDs (configurable as RAID 0 array), three USB 3.0 ports, next-gen Broadcom dual-band three stream 802.11ac Wi-Fi and integrated Bluetooth 4.0.
Another positive point that should certainly get a mention in this article is the sound capabilities found on the device. ASUS has added in the NX500 stereo speaker grills with a laser-engraved ripple-effect design, which takes advantage of ICEpower and Bang & Olufsen technology.
Even more, MaxxAudio Master by Waves, which has received the Technical GRAMM Awards, adds professional-level sound processing to NX500.
The ASUS Zenbook NX500 certainly sounds like quite the machine, and you have to consider that all we’ve detailed above has been cramped under the hood of a device that weighs just 2.2 kg / 4.8 lbs.
At this point, we don’t know when the Zenbook NX500 will make an appearance in retail or how much we will have to pay for it.