ASUS ProArt StudioBook Pro X – Creative laptop

ASUS ProArt StudioBook Pro X – Creative laptop

With the ProArt StudioBook Pro X, ASUS is taking its first step into the competitive market of workstation notebooks. This segment is dominated by players such as HP and Lenovo who have earned their position by supplying highly reliable laptops over a long period of time. We have been allowed to work with the notebook for a while and in this review you can read about our findings.

ASUS ProArt StudioBook Pro X W730G5T

Recommended retail price €5,999
Screen 17.0-inch 1920×1200 (second 5.65-inch 2160×1080 screen in touchpad)
Processor Intel Xeon E-2276M 6-core with HyperThreading
Memory 64GB DDR4 ECC RAM
GPU Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 with 16GB GDDR6
Storage 1TB Intel NVMe SSD
Connections Card reader, 3x USB 3.1 Type A, 2x USB 3.1 Type C with Thunderbolt, 1x headset / microphone combination, 1x RJ45 ethernet, 1x HDMI
Wireless 802.11ax WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0
Battery 95Wh 6-cell (replaceable)
Weight 2.5 kilos
Website www.asus.com

Techzle review score: 90/100

Pros

  • Screen
  • Performance
  • Housing

Cons

  • High price

The suggested retail price is hefty for a laptop, but there is very little competition from other laptops with the same level of hardware. The only competition actually comes from the HP Zbook and Lenovo ThinkPad P73, which are evenly priced with a similar configuration. However, the Asus StudioBook has a few nice extras that you will have to miss at HP and Lenovo.

ASUS ProArt StudioBook Pro X

Housing and screen

In the age of ultrabooks and other thin laptops, this ASUS is quite thick. Nevertheless, the company has done everything to keep the laptop as small as possible, for example, the edges around the screen are very thin, so that the size in length and width is actually not that bad. The thickness is also useful because the device is built like a tank and offers many possibilities for upgrades.

The housing is made of a combination of insulating plastic and luxury metal with a ripple structure on all surfaces that you regularly touch. Although that might get a bit dirty sooner, it is very effective in hiding fingerprints and gives it a premium look.

ASUS ProArt StudioBook Pro X

As you would expect from a professional laptop (are we reading Apple?), Many parts are easily accessible via the bottom. Only a few screws remove you from the two M.2 slots, two from the four RAM slots and perhaps most importantly: the removable battery. In addition, we also get a good first impression of the cooling here. Four heat pipes transfer the heat from the hottest parts to the fans. Unlike many other manufacturers, ASUS ensures that the power supply is also actively cooled. This is particularly important with long-term workloads such as video rendering.

The screen is another big plus. The panel is calibrated before delivery and has a Pantone certificate. The specifications mention a 97% coverage of the DCI-P3 spectrum and our measurements confirm that. In addition, the screen achieves 100% of the sRGB spectrum, 84% of the NTSC spectrum and 84% of the AdobeRGB spectrum. The range of 2.2 is perfect and that also applies to the white balance at 6500K (at 100% brightness).

ASUS ProArt StudioBook Pro X

Unfortunately, the panel does suffer from one of the typical limitations of an IPS panel. With a completely black background a little glow can be seen in the lower corners in low ambient light. In practice you will have little trouble with this, but it is something to be reckoned with. The same applies to the light gradient banding that is visible with smooth transitions from light to dark. With photos you won’t be bothered by that, but a gradient generated by a computer can make this visible.

Performance

With an Intel Xeon processor, Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 video card and ECC memory, you can expect two things: stability and speed. The long-term stability we can of course say little about in our short review period, but all important components have been selected with reliability in mind. Unlike normal memory, for example, ECC memory continuously checks for errors and improves them if necessary. This prevents data corruption in the memory, but we still recommend that you make regular backups.

Benchmark results

  • Blender CPU: Classroom 24:20 minutes
  • Blender GPU: Classroom 4:50 minutes
  • Blender CPU: BMW27 7:14 minutes
  • Blender GPU: BMW27 1:14 minutes
  • Blender Benchmark CPU total 1:50:17 hours

PCMark10 Extended 7112 points

– PCMark10 Essentials 9150 points
– PCMark10 Productivity 7590 points
– PCMark10 Digital Content Creation 6959 points
– PCMark10 Gaming 14314 points

The results of the benchmarks show that the laptop is an excellent workstation replacement. The CPU is fast, but is clearly limited by the cooling and the available power. The maximum boost of 4.7 GHz is rarely tapped and the processor sometimes becomes 95 degrees under short loads. With prolonged loads, the available power of 45W seems to be the limiting factor, because with a temperature of 80 degrees the clock frequency stays at 3 – 3.1 GHz. These types of processors often benefit from undervolting, a process where you reduce the voltage on the processor. You have to know what you are doing, because a lower voltage can influence the stability of the chip.

There is a Turbo button in the MyAsus software that gives the fan a more aggressive profile. This results in a 5% higher score in PCMark10 Extended, with the biggest improvements in productivity and rendering tests. Still, the cooling remained surprisingly quiet in both modes. Of course the fan is audible, but it barely exceeds the noise in an office. Asus could have made the fan profile in turbo mode even more aggressive for an even better result, because sometimes you just want that little extra performance regardless of the noise.

ASUS ProArt StudioBook Pro X

The CrystalDiskMark for the ASUS ProArt StudioBook Pro X W730G5T.

The sense of speed with normal use of a computer is nowadays mainly influenced by the speed of your storage medium. This notebook has a fast 1TB SSD from Intel. There are few SSDs on the market that are much faster than what Asus delivers with this notebook.

The battery is big with 95Wh, but that is also necessary because of the powerful hardware and two screens (more about that in the next section). With simple use such as browsing and word processing, the battery will effortlessly last a working day and you can continue even in the evenings. Video streaming also keeps the battery full for around 12 hours. However, if you are going to pay off or perform other heavy-duty tasks, the battery life will quickly drop to an hour or two depending on the workload.

Keyboard and touchpad

This StudioBook has a full keyboard with numpad and a standard layout. The keys can be pressed quite far, which makes for a pleasant typing experience. It is not yet a real mechanical desktop keyboard, but this is certainly one of the better keyboards that we have encountered in laptops. The keys are of course illuminated with a white background illumination that is equally distributed among the various buttons.

The touchpad is a nice surprise: it is actually a touchscreen with a fairly high resolution. It functions as a standard screen with keyboard shortcuts for laptop settings, but can of course also serve as a traditional touchpad. This works great and is very accurate. If you always connect a mouse to the notebook, the screen can also serve as a complete second screen or as a screen with shortcuts for supporting applications such as Microsoft Office.

Advertisement?!

It is not the first time that we encounter a laptop on the editorial board that occasionally shows pop-up advertising, but in a business laptop of thousands of euros we have not seen that before. It is crazy for words, but Asus has – in addition to the standard advertising in Windows 10 – also added advertisements in collaboration with McAfee. You would expect that if you deposit almost 6000 euros for a laptop, there is enough margin that all the necessary advertising has been paid off. We don’t want to see this again in the future Asus!

ASUS ProArt StudioBook Pro X

Misplaced scandery advertising (with errors) on a notebook of thousands of euros is not good.

Conclusion: Buying Asus ProArt StudioBook Pro X?

The Asus ProArt StudioBook Pro X W730G5T has a far too long name, but is also a fantastic laptop. The housing is excellent and the performance is not inferior to many modern workstation desktops. A multi-GPU desktop or sender server will of course always stay faster, but for most professionals and hobbyists this is more than enough. Unfortunately for the latter group the suggested retail price of almost 6000 euros is likely to be too high.

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