ASUS Zenbook UX305 Core-M Ultrabook Hands-On

Posted on 03 September 2014, Last updated on 17 March 2023 by

P1200072

At a press event in Berlin today ASUS launched a laptop based on Core M. The ASUS Zenbook UX305 is just 12.3 mm thick and weighs 1.2KG. There’s no price available yet but it’s clearly a Q4 product.

The ASUS Zenbook UX305 that I had hands-on with has a 45Wh battery inside along with a 128GB SSD. It runs on a Core M 5Y10a CPU at 1Ghz. The non-touch screen is QHD (3200×1800) and there’s a nice keyboard.

Zenbook UX305 (3)

Surprisingly, for an Ultrabook, there’s no touchscreen but perhaps we’ll see that in the near future but at 1.2KG this is quite the ultra mobile laptop. Is it fanless? We think it might be but haven’t confirmed that yet.

P1200073 Zenbook UX305 (7)

Video hands-on below. Lots more live images here.

10 Comments For This Post

  1. Don says:

    Certainly is light for a 15.6″

  2. Dan says:

    It’s 13″.

  3. Don says:

    and hopefully this will start the flood of core Ms.

  4. Joe says:

    I wonder how a 1GHz Core M chip compares with a higher clocked Bay Trail or Braswell Atom.

    As for Asus I hope they stay way from the ugly shiny lids with circular swirls for their next crop of notebooks.

  5. DavidC1 says:

    It’s actually 800MHz Base clock.

    Base clock is only relevant when its running CPU AND GPU intensive applications anyway. It’s very likely that it can reach very near its top Turbo clock of 2GHz.

    Haswell Y in thermally constrained scenarios like Sony Vaio Tap can clock way higher than its supposedly only 800MHz minimum in “SDP Mode” to be fanless.

    Based on available info Core M should be noticeably faster than Haswell Y.

  6. peter kwoczek says:

    hey Steve,
    das muss doch asus zenbook heißen und nicht acer zenbook, oder?

  7. admin says:

    Danke Peter.

  8. 1234 says:

    Small error in the title: “Acer Zenbook UX305”, you mean “Asus” i guess :)

  9. RakSiam says:

    Looks awesome to me. My current Dell is nice too so I’m in no hurry to replace it. I almost never use the touchscreen. I am guessing most people using laptops don’t use the touchscreen for anything either. Not sure why you think an Ultrabook must have a touchscreen to be considered an Ultrabook. So I believe it’s wise for Asus to cut out the cost and potentially some weight related to a touchscreen.

  10. 2noob2banoob says:

    This seems to be the entry level Core M. I hope there’s also a version coming with the Core M 5Y70, whose performance seems to be on par with the Core i7 4500U, at least according to the preliminary benchmarks I’ve seen. 8 GB ram would also be nice. Apart from that this sounds like the perfect laptop for me.

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