Asus Zenbook UX305 Ultrabook Review: Core M Powered

Asus includes a few extras on the UX305 but for the most part, the system is fairly clean. In the Start menu, you’ll see tripadvisor, FreshPaint, Netflix, Asus WebStorage, and a few other apps. There’s also a free trial of Microsoft Office 2013 on the UX305.

As we mentioned earlier, Asus includes a couple of extras with the UX305 including a USB to LAN adapter, cable ties, and screen cloth. The charging cord for the UX305 is relatively small, measuring about 2.5 inches square and about one inch thick.

To get a feel for multimedia performance on the UX305, we fired up a few HD movie trailers on YouTube to see how well this ultrabook could handle the workload and see how Intel’s Core M would behave. Here’s how things looked when playing a 1080p Guardians of The Galaxy clip:

As you can see from the Task Manager chart, Intel’s Core M 5Y10 doesn’t reach its top clock speed, because it doesn't have to. CPU utilization hovered around 8%, though there were spikes up to 20% during our playback tests. We didn’t experience any dropped frames or stuttering during playback.