When the Zenbook 13 laptop came out, manufacturer ASUS claimed that it is the thinnest laptop in existence. While that may be true, it still lacked one important thing: a dedicated graphics card. The recent release of the new Zenbook 13 UX331 tries to remedy this shortcoming.
The new Zenbook 13 UX331 is now fitted with a dedicated graphics card courtesy of Nvidia, which mostly does the graphics-crunching on demanding programs. The GeForce MX120 is a 2 GB GDDR5 graphics processing unit (GPU) that is relatively powerful by laptop standards.
What's more impressive is that ASUS manages to maintain the dimensions of the new Zenbook 13. Measuring 0.42-0.55 inches thin, the company still claims it is "the thinnest laptop in the world with a discrete GPU." The laptop weighs around 2.47 pounds.
The addition of the dedicated graphics card alone puts the new Zenbook 13 above its predecessor in performance. It certainly is better than the Ultrabook that have integrated Intel UHD video cards.
The laptop also features two universal serial bus (USB) 3.0 ports, a dual band 802.11ac Wifi receiver, and a microSD card reader. It has an output jack for headphones and an audio input jack, as well.
It sports 8 GB of random access memory (RAM), has a 256 GB solid state drive, and is powered by a quad-core Intel Core i5-8250U processor.
The battery is reported to last up to 14 hours, although this does not account for times of intensive use, like high-end gaming. However, the battery does charge up to 60 percent in about 49 minutes, so it is expected that there will be less time spent charging the device.
Despite the graphics card upgrade, no one really expects really heavy gaming on the new Zenbook's 13.3-inch, full high definition (FHD) touch screen display. However, it can still run games like "Overwatch," which are designed to work with a number of different PC configurations.
The new ASUS Zenbook 13 UX331 is available now for $999.
