ASUS is taking its first step into the competitive workstation notebook market with the ProArt StudioBook Pro X. This segment is dominated by players like HP and Lenovo who have earned their footing by delivering highly reliable laptops over a long period of time. We have been able to work with the notebook for a while and in this review you can read about our findings.
ASUS ProArt StudioBook Pro X W730G5T
MSRP €5999,-Screen 17.0-inch 1920x1200 (second 5.65-inch 2160x1080 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 USB3.1 Type A, 2x USB3.1 Type C with Thunderbolt, 1x headphone/microphone combo, 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 9 Score 90
- Pros
- Housing
- Performance
- Display
- Negatives
- Price
The suggested retail price is hefty for a laptop, but there's 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 with HP and Lenovo.
Case 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, the edges around the screen are very thin, so that the size in length and width is actually not that bad. The thickness has also been put to good use, as the device is built like a tank and offers many possibilities for upgrades.
The housing is constructed from a combination of insulating plastic and luxury metal with a ribbed structure on all surfaces that you regularly touch. While that may get a little dirty sooner, it is very effective at hiding fingerprints and gives it a premium look.
As you would expect from a professional laptop (are we reading Apple?), many parts are easily accessible from the bottom. Just a few screws removes 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. Four heat pipes transfer heat from the hottest parts to the fans. Unlike many other manufacturers, ASUS ensures that the power supply is also actively cooled. This is especially important for long-term workloads such as rendering videos.
The screen is another big plus. The panel is calibrated before delivery and has a Pantone certificate. The specifications state a 97% coverage of the DCI-P3 spectrum and our measurements confirm that. In addition, the display gets 100% of the sRGB spectrum, 84% of the NTSC spectrum and 84% of the AdobeRGB spectrum. The gamma of 2.2 is perfect and so is the white balance at 6500K (at 100% brightness).
Unfortunately, the panel suffers from one of the typical limitations of an IPS panel. With a completely black background, a small glow can be seen in the lower corners in low ambient light. In practice, you will not be bothered by this, but it is something to take into account. The same goes for the light gradient banding that is visible with smooth transitions from light to dark. This will not bother you with photos, 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. We can of course say little about the long-term stability in our short review period, but all important components have been selected with reliability in mind. Unlike normal memory, ECC memory, for example, continuously checks for errors and corrects them if necessary. This prevents data corruption in 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 4.7GHz is rarely tapped and the processor sometimes reaches 95 degrees under short loads. With long-term loads, the available power of 45W seems to be the limiting factor, because with a temperature of 80 degrees the clock frequency remains at 3 - 3.1GHz. These types of processors often take advantage of undervolting, a process in which you lower the voltage on the processor. You have to know what you are doing, because a lower voltage can affect the stability of the chip.
A Turbo button can be found in the MyAsus software that gives the fan a more aggressive profile. This leads to a 5% increase in score in PCMark10 Extended, with the biggest improvements in productivity and rendering tests. Still, the cooling remained astonishingly quiet in both modes. Of course the fan is audible, but it barely rises above 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 want that little bit of extra performance regardless of the noise.
The sense of speed in normal use of a computer nowadays is 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 ships with this notebook.
The battery is substantial at 95Wh, but that is also necessary due to the powerful hardware and two screens (more on that in the next section). With simple use such as browsing and word processing, the battery lasts effortlessly for a working day and you can even continue in the evenings. Streaming videos also keeps the battery full for about 12 hours. However, if you are going to render or perform other demanding tasks, the battery life quickly drops to an hour or two depending on the workload.
Keyboard and touchpad
This StudioBook has a full keyboard with number pad and a standard layout. The keys can be pressed quite far, which makes for a pleasant typing experience. It's not a true mechanical desktop keyboard yet, but this is certainly one of the better keyboards we've come across in laptops. Of course, the keys are backlit with a white backlight that is evenly distributed over the different buttons.
The touchpad is a nice surprise: it's actually a fairly high-resolution touchscreen. By default, it functions as a 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 shortcut keys for supporting applications such as Microsoft Office.
Advertisement?!
It is not the first time that we have come across a laptop in the editorial office that occasionally shows pop-up advertisements, but we have never seen that in a business laptop of thousands of euros. It is too crazy for words, but Asus has - in addition to the advertising that is standard in Windows 10 - also added advertisements itself in collaboration with McAfee. You would expect that if you put down almost 6000 euros for a laptop, there is enough margin that all necessary advertising has been paid off. We don't want to see this in the future Asus!
Conclusion: Buy Asus ProArt StudioBook Pro X?
The Asus ProArt StudioBook Pro X W730G5T has a much too long name, but is otherwise a fantastic laptop. The housing is excellent and the performance is not inferior to many modern workstation desktops. A multi-GPU desktop or render server will of course always be 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 will probably be too high.
