How does that make sense :Asus ZenBook Pro UX501 is $1000 cheaper but has better specs than mbp2015

[cbautis2]

The main problem here is that current hardware has no 4k video acceleration support. So it basically runs in software. That would be the same on Apple hardware. It is the same chips with the same lack of video acceleration.
You'd run the CPU with very high load even on MBP and the battery would be dry in less than 2h while watching 4k video on a Mac. It is not really a practical use case for mobile use on todays hardware.

But have you tried looking into the Windows powerplans. Usually one can decide how much general throtteling one wants under certain power plans.

Not really. Haswell iGPU (HD4400 and up) and Nvidia support 4K 30 FPS hardware decoding. He might be using Flash which cause extra unnecessary CPU cycles. Then power consumption significantly increases due to elevated CPU and Nvidia GPU load which leads to power throttling due to crappy battery. No Windoze power plan can do anything about that.

FYI, a Surface Pro 2 or 3 can output 4K 30FPS smoothly on battery mode as long as it doesn't use Flash (Only HTML5 and IE11). I can confirm this with my friend.

The bottom line is that there is no Windoze "gaming" laptops that give good experience (i.e. long battery life and lag free experience) when running on battery. Any SSD equipped Macbooks or a $300 Windoze laptop with i3, HD4400, 4GB RAM, SSD will outperform this POS Asus on battery performance.

 

[Freyqq]

If you look beyond the price on paper you'd come to realize that the rMBP is actually cheaper. That's because macs tend to last longer than their PC counterparts. So would u rather pay $1500 every two years for a PC or pay $2500 and have a mac that lasts 5+ years.

Eh, say the Asus lasts 3 years and the mac lasts 6. If you bought another Asus in 3 years, you get a brand new computer with the latest technology. I wouldn't say this is even true though, as PCs and Macs use the same internal components these days. Macs just tend to use the highest-end parts except for average GPUs. Apple is always keen on making the customer-facing parts like keyboards and trackpads amazing though, and no PC i've used has done it as well as Apple.

Further, you can't just lump all PCs into a big group. PC vendors all have high-end lines and low-end lines. The high-end lines are getting to be pretty impressive.

 

[mizerab1e]

The main problem here is that current hardware has no 4k video acceleration support. So it basically runs in software. That would be the same on Apple hardware. It is the same chips with the same lack of video acceleration.
You'd run the CPU with very high load even on MBP and the battery would be dry in less than 2h while watching 4k video on a Mac. It is not really a practical use case for mobile use on todays hardware.

But have you tried looking into the Windows powerplans. Usually one can decide how much general throtteling one wants under certain power plans.

In fact, I've tried everything I can think of before deciding to return the laptop. As I said in my original post, I REALLY WANTED TO LIKE THIS LAPTOP!! It was great looking and performance was great as long as it was plugged in. I tried setting power settings to high performance at first, when that did not work, I manually turned up every single performance related boxes in the power settings, but no dice. Then I went into intel graphics settings and allowed only the 960m to be used for every application, changed the power/performance setting, to no avail. Then I updated the nvidia driver, went into nvidia settings and changed to manual settings for smoothness but that didn't work also.

Lastly, I submitted a ticket with ASUS and they recommended that I uninstall the battery driver from device manager and restart. Crossed my finger and BOOM, still crappy. Seems that the throttling cannot be changed no matter what I tried to do.

I packed it and shipped it the same day. I'm writing this on my new 2015 15" MBP and still beating myself up for wasting all my time and effort with UX501.

 

[mizerab1e]

Not really. Haswell iGPU (HD4400 and up) and Nvidia support 4K 30 FPS hardware decoding. He might be using Flash which cause extra unnecessary CPU cycles. Then power consumption significantly increases due to elevated CPU and Nvidia GPU load which leads to power throttling due to crappy battery. No Windoze power plan can do anything about that.

FYI, a Surface Pro 2 or 3 can output 4K 30FPS smoothly on battery mode as long as it doesn't use Flash (Only HTML5 and IE11). I can confirm this with my friend.

The bottom line is that there is no Windoze "gaming" laptops that give good experience (i.e. long battery life and lag free experience) when running on battery. Any SSD equipped Macbooks or a $300 Windoze laptop with i3, HD4400, 4GB RAM, SSD will outperform this POS Asus on battery performance.

One of the first thing I did was to turn OFF flash in chromelugin, since that was the first recommendation I found on google for 4K choppiness with certain laptops. Also, you are absolutely correct that no windows power plan made ANY difference whatsoever for performance on battery power.

I just simply cannot fathom that ASUS didn't realize this flaw before releasing it to the public. Either they have extremely incompetent quality control process, they did not care, or they thought it was GOOD ENOUGH for people to accept.

It is absolutely amazing how much performance there is between the UX501 and MBP, considering the spec difference. Yes, 4K display is goddamn gorgeous, but Retina is close enough, and it works flawlessly regarding of power.

The odd thing was, that performance on Internet Explorer was pretty good on battery power. Also, local video playback using windows media player was a lot better than using VLC for example. For some reason that I cannot understand, windows related programs ran better than non-windows program such a chrome or firefox. Perhaps someone can shed a light on why that is.

 

[gngan]

Eh, say the Asus lasts 3 years and the mac lasts 6. If you bought another Asus in 3 years, you get a brand new computer with the latest technology. I wouldn't say this is even true though, as PCs and Macs use the same internal components these days. Macs just tend to use the highest-end parts except for average GPUs. Apple is always keen on making the customer-facing parts like keyboards and trackpads amazing though, and no PC i've used has done it as well as Apple.

Further, you can't just lump all PCs into a big group. PC vendors all have high-end lines and low-end lines. The high-end lines are getting to be pretty impressive.

Though we are assuming that the 'user experience' is the same. Agree to your logic but it's too much hassle to worry about my PC (e.g. medias, etc.) every 3 years.

 

[cbautis2]

One of the first thing I did was to turn OFF flash in chromelugin, since that was the first recommendation I found on google for 4K choppiness with certain laptops. Also, you are absolutely correct that no windows power plan made ANY difference whatsoever for performance on battery power.

I just simply cannot fathom that ASUS didn't realize this flaw before releasing it to the public. Either they have extremely incompetent quality control process, they did not care, or they thought it was GOOD ENOUGH for people to accept.

It is absolutely amazing how much performance there is between the UX501 and MBP, considering the spec difference. Yes, 4K display is goddamn gorgeous, but Retina is close enough, and it works flawlessly regarding of power.

The odd thing was, that performance on Internet Explorer was pretty good on battery power. Also, local video playback using windows media player was a lot better than using VLC for example. For some reason that I cannot understand, windows related programs ran better than non-windows program such a chrome or firefox. Perhaps someone can shed a light on why that is.

WMP and Internet explorer HTML5 can utilize and are fully compatible with Direct2D and DirectX Video Acceleration which pretty much offloads all video playback tasks to the GPU. NVidia supports DXVA too. It's just that VLC, Flash and Chrome HTML5 doesn't have "full" access to GPU hardware decoding (not using the most efficient DXVA API) or that chrome has limited access due to "sandbox". Also VLC has DXVA, but it's buggy and can cause stuttering, weird color rendering, etc... if it works well, it should get less than 5% CPU usage/core instead of 10-35% usage/core and therefore consume far less wattage which the weak ASUS battery can provide.

 

[Dead0k]

Why would anyone run those heavy tasks on a battery?

Asus has a smaller battery than MBP

Somehow, I guess, MBP runs all the hardware with max performance on a battery and thanks to a larger battery it works longer.

Asus here (and I know from my own exp. that other windows laptops have that too) throttles the performance to make it last longer, i guess.

So could it be a Windows feature?

and don't forget that the idea behind apple's devices is to be: thinner, portable (based on wireless). Their presentations, new products are full of that

 

[cbautis2]

@Dead0k

Video playback (even 4K playback) is now a heavy task lol. It's not Windoze that throttles the performance IMO (unless you force the max processor state to <100%), it's the EFI/EC detecting power consumption exceeding the maximum rate that the crappy battery is designed to provide.

Also, crappy Windoze has this "scheduled tasks" and "services" that consume 100% CPU power while "idle" because Windoze defaulted those triggers as "run while idle". That's the reason Windoze will never catch up to OS X in battery life and battery performance (add that crappy battery too compared to Macs). Windoze pretty much consider web browsing as "idle" and as such a user will get very annoyed that the fans spin like crazy for no reason.

 

[ChinkyBob]

What do you expect from a crappy Windoze OS with atrocious power management? Plus Crappy battery that can't pump out high amperage to supply CPU/GPU decently. Mac OS / Apple hardware is designed with efficiency on battery power while Windoze is only good for desktops. I learned the hard way so I now never buy a crappy mobile Windoze device no matter what specs it says. One will realize how much money they wasted on a laptop since it can't even function properly when use as a mobile platform. Hell my 2011 MBA will outperform that crap ASUS in UI performance and multitasking when both are running on batteries.

Asus is a fine laptop, we have one in office and its great. The screen and performance are amazing.
As for performance in battery vs plugged-in, go into power-management and set performance settings on battery to Max, not power save. Don't blame laptop for user ignorance.
Who watches 4k video on a laptop anyway?

 

[Quu]

Asus is a fine laptop, we have one in office and its great. The screen and performance are amazing.
As for performance in battery vs plugged-in, go into power-management and set performance settings on battery to Max, not power save. Don't blame laptop for user ignorance.
Who watches 4k video on a laptop anyway?

1. Already been shown that having the performance setting up doesn't work properly because the components consume more power than the battery can output when under load.

2. People who buy a laptop with a 4K display would watch 4K video, obviously.

 

[ChinkyBob]

1. Already been shown that having the performance setting up doesn't work properly because the components consume more power than the battery can output when under load.

2. People who buy a laptop with a 4K display would watch 4K video, obviously.

1 On our laptop in the office it is a beast working on AutoCAD and Revit when plugged in (which i admit is most of the time). On the occasions when it is in used in the conference room on battery power for 3d demos it appears as fast as ever, and we run it hard. Granted, not for more than an hour or so and the battery is mostly gone by then anyway, but we use demanding software with no noticeable effect on performance.
I take your point about the battery under load - but I believe he just had a poor sample.

2. Ive never seen anyone watch 4k video - even in the TV shops 4k tvs just run regular videos with just one or two exceptions playing demo 4k. On a 55" TV I get that 4k is great, but a 15" laptop?
4k for photography yes, 4k for graphics software yes (if you can see the icons) but for video??

 

[cbautis2]

1 On our laptop in the office it is a beast working on AutoCAD and Revit when plugged in (which i admit is most of the time). On the occasions when it is in used in the conference room on battery power for 3d demos it appears as fast as ever, and we run it hard. Granted, not for more than an hour or so and the battery is mostly gone by then anyway, but we use demanding software with no noticeable effect on performance.
I take your point about the battery under load - but I believe he just had a poor sample.

2. Ive never seen anyone watch 4k video - even in the TV shops 4k tvs just run regular videos with just one or two exceptions playing demo 4k. On a 55" TV I get that 4k is great, but a 15" laptop?
4k for photography yes, 4k for graphics software yes (if you can see the icons) but for video??

Gaming have constant max GPU usage unlike Autocad and battery can't provide the amps needed for that.
4K video is only playable using IE Metro on an external 4K display only since IE has full access to the DXVA API by Microsoft which reduces CPU usage down to less than 10% @ 800 - 1 GHz unlike Chrome where CPU usage goes above 30% usage @ Turbo boost speeds (3.4 GHz or more). Battery can't provide the CPU power draw it needs when DXVA is not being used.

Those are a huge fail for ME and some people (other's won't care since they don't game on batteries anyway). Other Windoze laptops actually have good batteries that can provide more than enough power while CPU is on Turbo boost thus allowing SMOOTH 4K playback even without GPU acceleration.

 

[ChinkyBob]

Gaming have constant max GPU usage unlike Autocad and battery can't provide the amps needed for that.
4K video is only playable using IE Metro on an external 4K display only since IE has full access to the DXVA API by Microsoft which reduces CPU usage down to less than 10% @ 800 - 1 GHz unlike Chrome where CPU usage goes above 30% usage @ Turbo boost speeds (3.4 GHz or more). Battery can't provide the CPU power draw it needs when DXVA is not being used.

Those are a huge fail for ME and some people (other's won't care since they don't game on batteries anyway). Other Windoze laptops actually have good batteries that can provide more than enough power while CPU is on Turbo boost thus allowing SMOOTH 4K playback even without GPU acceleration.

Well, back in the box for me, I can't argue with that.