Asus Zenbook ux303ub

I can say that this laptop is one of the most powerful ultrabooks available in the market nowadays with affordable price.

Specifications:

Intel Core i7 6500U Processor
Windows 10
nVidia GeForce 940m (dedicated) & Intel HD 520 (integrated)
12 GB RAMs
13.3″ QHD+(3200 x 1800)
512GB SSD Storage

The device is of wonderful screen/display with good sound quality and neat design. I’m not going to make a full review. Rather, these are quick notes about some screen resolution issues.

The Resolution:

I believe 13” laptops are best with resolution of 1920×1080. But this one is capable of 3200×1800 truly with almost no lags or glitches. In both cases, there are some troubles!

Let me explain more through the following points in the two cases.

3200×1800 Resolution (the default one)

• As not all apps are following the Windows guidelines, Scaling (here 250%) won’t solve tiny display (text) for some applications. Can you imagine that MS SQL 2014 isn’t scaled correctly?!
• Firefox will crash a lot running on Intel and will have glitches/lags if it is on nVidia. I know I could disable hardware acceleration, but this is not why I’m using Firefox for.
• Chrome is almost perfect here. But it’s not if running on nVidia
• Corel Paintshop isn’t slow at all!
• The system might suddenly hang and a restart is required – after around 2 hours of working with graphics, SQL, and web browsing.

1920×1080 Resolution

• Some display issues here and there. Updating Intel driver didn’t minimize it (actually, it’s better to keep the one from Asus)
• No tiny display/text in apps – better scaling
• Firefox works perfectly. It needs to run with nVidia to avoid graphic driver crashes though. When that happens, you can minimize Firefox and maximize it again. It also shows some strange lines (pipe symbols |||) among letters when you backspace in text areas often. I saw this on Yoga 900 too but not on Yoga 2 Pro.
• Chrome is working good but the font clarity isn’t as good as in 3200 resolution; which is not the case in Firefox!
• Corel Paintshop have some graphic strange behavior but in general is stable.
• A little bit better battery performance.

So, how I manage it?

As you could see, my main pain is coming out of the web browsers. It’s also more painful on lower resolution than on the default (recommended) one. So, I was better to stay on 3200×1800 and use Chrome. Or, to use Firefox (my preferred browser) on this high display; but it has to run on nVidia where Power Management Mode for Firefox profile is set to: Prefer Maximum Performance.

You can do the same for Chrome if you like.

Some might argue that using the Max. Performance means the CPU is at high clock most of the time. For normal use, this hasn’t affected me. But when trying to open 7 Firefox tabs of YouTube, the CPU was above 90%… Anyhow, I believe this is more into energy consumption (battery life). Unfortunately, this is how Firefox works normally – it uses a lot of the device’s resources! Chrome on other hand was doing better on CPU with Maximum Performance nVidia Mode.

P.S., 3200 display on this laptop is better & smoother than the ones I tried of Yoga series. However, Lenovo is better when it comes to drivers’ updates.