Asus ZenBook 3 Deluxe UX490UA

Super-thin and light, but stumbles if heavy lifting.

- Alan Dexter

ULTRABOOKS MAY HAVE been with us for over six years now, but it still feels like we haven’t quite hit the perfect balance of performance in a slimline package. One brand that has gotten intriguingly close to this portable nirvana is the ZenBook from Asus, and this latest iteration looks to build on the strengths of previous models, with bang-up-to-date components, and an even sleeker chassis. Color us interested.

The headline component on the spec sheet is the processor, and in this machine that’s just half an inch thick, you’ll find a quad-core, eight-thread Core i7-8550U (Kaby Lake R). This chip has a base clock of 1.8GHz, but generally runs quicker, thanks to the joys of turbo boost. But how much it boosts is a bit of a contentious affair: Intel says it’ll peak at 4GHz, Asus says it’ll run at anything up to 3.7GHz, while in testing we witnessed it reach 4GHz under heavy workloads (our benchmarks).