ASUS UX550GE-XB71T Zenbook Pro 15.6" UHD 4K Touch Laptop, Intel Core i7-8750HK, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Win10 Pro, GTX1050Ti

The media could not be loaded. People whine about thermal throttling and coil whine, no pun intended! ;) But seriously, I bought this used like-new condition from Amazon warehouse which was most likely a return and CDI showed only a couple hours on the SSD. I love this laptop and have had it for about a month now. I hardly ever write product reviews, but it seems like there are a lot of complaints about this laptop and it doesn't get the credit it deserves. For these specs while maintaining slim and light profile good luck finding a better deal. I did pay $1400 plus tax which is slightly lower than the current price but I challenge others to comment on laptops with similar specs and design quality to compare this to. The Dell XPS 15 is in the archetype but lacks the specs unless you want to pay $2000. And sure, it has a 4k display, but at the cost of earlier GPU model, on a 15" with the pixel density, 4k is just marketing unless you need 4k for visual design projects there is not much point, you have to render 4k and then increase zoom anyway. There are some drawbacks though and 1. I am not super impressed with the keyboard. It performs fine and no problems with ghosting, but when I'm really hammering away at the keys like I'm used to doing on my desktop pc, there is a slight rattle, but that's just me being too rough on the keyboard due to my fast and high-actuation force typing habits. The next issue is that I really liked the silver design of the UX430UN, and I wish they would have incorporated that design into this build rather than the black spun metal which is very attractive and has class, but also attracts fingerprints. So have an anti-static microfiber cloth and screen/keyboard cleaner handy (which you should when you own a touchscreen laptop anyway), but it's not as bad as I might make it sound. It's not a fingerprint magnet, it's just that the silver spun metal design didn't show any fingerprints, greasy or clean barely. Lastly, sure, there is some thermal throttling if you are playing graphic intensive games, but I can play Destiny 2 on Medium settings with a few things tweaked at 60FPS no problem. It will start to slow down as it heats up a little bit, but a Havik cooling pad eliminates that problem. Keep in mind this is not a gaming-designed laptop although it plays most games very well. The thermal engineering was done well and the keyboard never gets hot, only the back and only when you're running the GPU at full load for an extended period. Any other case it runs cool, setting it on your lap and browsing, editing office files, watching videos, it will stay nice and cool for around 10-11 hours of basic mixed use.

I do lots of video editing and music production so I needed something portable and powerful as I'm always on the go. I decided to go with Asus because my Vivobook from 2013 was keeping up with my workload pretty well and it was extremely reliable. Yes there's some coil whine and no the battery doesn't last that long but I don't care. I just need it to look nice and be efficient and it is. I can edit 4K raw footage with no problems and render times are absolutely incredible. When working with music production I can open a project with 50+ plugins and have many other programs running and it works flawlessly. This laptop handles thermals well and I don't experience very much throttling at all when working. It is all metal and it is really thin for what it's packing inside. Yes, it has keyboard flex if you try but you have other problems if you are pressing the keys that hard. If you just want to get some work done and look good doing it then I highly recommend this laptop.UPDATE: If you're editing short videos here and there this will be perfect. My workload increased and I'm doing a film a day and they range from 5 minutes to 60 minutes and all the footage is 4k. I've recently discovered the disadvantages of editing on a laptop. It does get warm over time and it also suffers from Power Limit Throttling since it is a 45w processor and not a 95w like you would find in a desktop. SInce it is a laptop the CPU is locked so you can't override it. Sometimes while editing and definitely while rendering the CPU clocks down to as low as .80 GHZ and fluctuates between that and 2.00 GHZ. I still have great render times but it makes life hard when trying to edit. Also, if you have large timelines, (30-90 minutes) 16GB of RAM is not quite enough so keep that in mind. This laptop still works incredibly well for music production and I have had no issues there. Video production is just very demanding on systems so I recommend a desktop if you edit a lot of videos. I still give it 5 stars because this laptop is currently making me a lot of money and it's been very reliable. I plan to keep it for a while.