This is a great ultrabook if you are willing to upgrade it w/ a SSD (Samsung 830) and some RAM (8GB Mushkin). After that it's the most powerful gaming laptop will you need (for now). I installed Windows 7 on the new SSD and Windows 8 on the built-in 24GB SDD to dual-boot. It's very light and it's one of the very fun ultrabooks that can be upgraded. The pros:i7 ivy bridge processor
Upgradeable memory (2GB + 8GB)
Upgradeable hard drive (SSD). Use the old 500GB with an enclosure for some portable storage
Upgradeable wireless card (maybe later to the 802.11ac standard)
Discrete graphics card Nvidia 620M
3x USB 3.0 ports
Normal sized HDMI port
1920x1080p resolution
Built-in 24GB SSD
Decent sound
**** UPDATE 07/11/2013***
After having this for a while I must say it is quite a good powerhouse after the upgrades. It's still not as powerful as my desktop but for travel it works great. The only gripe about this is that the trackpad isn't as good as what I would like. I would definitely recommend a mouse if you are planning to use it for long periods of time as the trackpad is very sensitive. Sensitive to the point when I want to double click that it moves the mouse ever so slightly and on this high resolution that slight movement will cause you to miss your target at times. Hopefully they will replace a software upgrade to fix that.
Everything else works as expected. :)
First of all here and on BB there are suggestions for user upgrades. I seriously suggest you wait until using the machine for six months. Three weeks in mine suffered some serious failures ending in a catastrophic failure of the display panel which would have left me holding a thousand buck brick if I had done any upgrading. Asus support is bad enough. If I had opened the case I'd have been right in the center of Dante's inferno instead of simply one or two rings in. Don't upgrade until five or six months of burn in -there is a good chance you will need your warranty.
That brings the first thing you will notice after a few days of ownership: even though the specs look good, performance is significantly sub par. That is precisely why there are so many discussions about upgrading. It has an i7 but performs like an i5. It has a screen on paper that looks good but the panels must have been bought off the back of the truck.
Yes, 1080 IPS. Sounds great right? Wrong. You are better off with 768 given the light bleed and failure rate which I learned later on this. I am not finickly about a little light bleed but I promise you have never seen as much light bleed as this. I have hundred buck box 36" store TV's with less light bleed.
Even minor things are glaring and show bad engineering choices. I wanted an back-lit keyboard. The backlighting on this keyboard is so bright at minimum setting, that if you are using it in dark situations where you need it you will be lighting up the room and making the screen experience terrible.
What is up with the track-pad? Was that bought by the same corporate buyer who got the garbage display panels? I can image dozen a pallets of these being bought in some back ally! "30% off" because 30% of the pad a dead zone. Yes I have applied the Asus patches on the trackpad and along with other users see no improvement.
The implementation of the hdd cache boggles. It literally does nothing. It is as if the machine was engineered and built, and someone raised their hand at a final meeting and said "we can't put on the ultra-book logo without a cache" to the dumfounded looks of the rest of team. That must have been a meeting that looked like NASA trying to figure out how to scrub the CO2 from Apollo 13 -"how much duct tape is on board?" Solution? Solder some flash onto the MB, call it a hybrid, and shrug at the fact that it decreases performance from a standard HDD! They may as well scotch tape 24g of flash unconnected to the outside of the case and call it hybrid.
Processor: my precious i7, performs as implemented like an i5
Backlight keyboard: Sounds good, implementation worse than no backlight
Battery life: Average on paper, real life worst in its class
Display Panel: great on paper, poor in reality
Casing: looks good until you touch it and see it is paper thin
Wifi: dual band reads nice on paper, implementation (antenna placement?) poor
HDD: 500GB with cache good on paper, not good in reality
Touchpad: What the heck Asus!?!?
User upgradeable": You read about this so much precisely because it is a DOG out of the box relative to what the specs should deliver. I suspect like me people get it and say: "what is wrong here, let me bump it up." Ask yourself why are their youtubes on replacing wifi cards that are dual band out of the box? Why are people dropping four hundred bones on 500gb ssds when that shoudl only only be a minor real world improvement over a proper cache hybrid? Why are people downgrading to windows 7 (Answer: to try and get around the fact that win8 and proper drivers were an afterthought this model.)
Sorry to be so negative on this unit. But I have never in my 20 years of ownership of dozens of laptops seen a better example of good on paper, terrible in reality -especially at the premium slot.
Buy ASUS UX32VD-DH71 13.3-Inch Zenbook ( Silver Aluminum ) Now
Let me start off by saying if you just want a regular laptop for daily use, do not buy this. There are a plethora of thinner, better build quality, and better supported ultrabooks that don't have discrete graphics (UX31 series, MB Air, Samsung 9, etc... the list goes on and on). Alright all the regular daily users gone? Good.This laptop is meant to be a portable powerhouse for the tech savvy. Do not try upgrading from Win 7 to Win 8 as trying to port over your drivers will result in a horrible array of keyboard, wifi, bluetooth, and graphics headaches. In fact it usually works out better if you do a clean install of Win 8 without the Asus bloat and install only the drivers off the Asus support website or download directly from the manufacturer of each part (Asus support blows, get your drivers from the source when possible at all times) which you're going to do anyways when you replace the junk HDD with an SSD. Then you need to throw in an a thin form factor SSD (a GOOD one, like the Samsung 840 pro) and an 8GB stick of RAM.
Now you might ask why you would ever bother doing this since it sounds like a huge PITA. Well... do you want the fastest, most powerful, highest resolution, best graphics (excluding Acer which is made of plastic and overheats GT640M vs GT620M) ultrabook on the market? If the answer is yes, then do it. This laptop is a tease, it tells you it can be amazing if you put the right stuff in it, but if you don't it will be junk.
Read Best Reviews of ASUS UX32VD-DH71 13.3-Inch Zenbook ( Silver Aluminum ) Here
The laptop works great and is perfect for what I wanted . Which was light as possible and still have enough power to game. The screen is great and all the bleed talk is trash yeah if stare at it looking long enough you can see it. How often does a complete black screen be productive unless your looking for faults? There are a few other laptops out there and each have thier points mine was the the HD screen and for a 13 Inch I havent found another. And dont let those " I have been an IT guy for 20 years" fool you as they are a dime a dozen and all have great opinions and if they knew so much maybe they wouldnt have bought it to start with???Want ASUS UX32VD-DH71 13.3-Inch Zenbook ( Silver Aluminum ) Discount?
I've had this laptop for one month now.I've put in my own Samsung 840 SSD from my previous laptop and an additional 8gigs of ram just in case it went up in price if/when DDR3 is phased out. The negative reviews are right on the hard drive; if used with the original 500gig hybrid drive this computer is beyond disappointing. Perhaps that's because I've had an SSD for a while in my previous laptop and I'm used to it.
I am writing this to rebut some of the other reviews. My laptop doesn't crash, has very fast wireless (consistently ~8MB (bytes, not bits) per second on my university network), wakes up as it should, the touchpad works and I don't get any stray movements when I type, it has an amazing screen with maybe the slightest bit of bleed in dark room with the brightness up (why would you do this anyway? gaming? maybe?). I can actually only ever see the bleed on the boot screen when the screen is full bright with a full black background once in Windows it's hard to reproduce this. Mine came with Windows 8 preloaded and now with the SSD it boots in about 12-13 seconds from totally off which is amazing, the product key is embedded in the BIOS so you can reformat the laptop at will. Some caveats the keyboard is not as good as other laptops (thicker ones especially) I make more mistakes on it, but it's by no means uncomfortable or bad. UPDATE: after one month of lots of typing, the keyboard has loosened up noticeably and is much easier to type on it feels like the keys have a bit more travel. The battery life is kind of short coming from a UL30A which could do 7 hours of actual use. This one does maybe 4.5 of actual use. It also suffers from the same issue as many other thin note books if you carry it in a bag put something between the screen and keyboard before the keys transfer crud and make abrasions on the screen surface. My UL30 had permanent etching on the screen from something getting transferred from the keys. Anyway, if you're thinking you want an ultrabook that has some power and is upgradable, I would recommend this.
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