Asus ZenBook Pro 15 goes for creatives with Intel Core i9, wider color gamut 4K display
If you like your laptops powerful and your screen's color accurate, this one's for you.
- More than two decades experience writing about PCs and accessories, and 15 years writing about cameras of all kinds.
Asus is updating its thin 15.6-inch laptop made for creative professionals with one of the most high-performance mobile processors, Intel's eighth-generation hexa-core Core i9-8950HQ.
The new ZenBook Pro 15 UX550G uses the same body as the current UX550VE version, so if that pic above looks familiar, that's why. Replacing the UX550VE's seventh-gen quad-core i7-7700HQ chip is that new hexa-core processor. It's joined by a 4GB Nvidia GTX 1050Ti graphics card, up to 16GB of 2,400MHz DDR4 RAM and up to 1TB PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD. That should make this a screamer, for both CPU- and GPU-intensive tasks and a competent thin-and-light gaming laptop.
To attract creatives, Asus updated the ZenBook Pro 15's 15.6-inch 4K UHD-resolution display to a Pantone-validated one that's capable of 100 percent Adobe RGB and 132 percent sRGB color gamut with a Delta-E color difference of less than 2.0.
The rest of the laptop seems unchanged from earlier models, but that's a good thing. Despite the new processor, the body remains thin at 18.9 millimeters (0.7-inch) and weighs 1.86 kilograms (4.1 pounds). The body is just thick enough to have room for a full-size HDMI output and two USB-A ports, but you get two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports, too. Apparently getting an SD card slot on here was a no-go, though there is a microSD slot. Asus also says the laptop's dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi will deliver faster-than-wired speeds.
Asus didn't announce pricing or availability for the updated model, but if the timing is the same as the UX550VE, you can expect it this summer.