ASUS Zenbook UX301LA: A Nice Intel Ultrabook For Linux Users

For getting an idea for the ASUS Zenbook UX301LA-DH71T performance with its Intel Core i7 4558U processor, dual SSDs, and Intel Iris Graphics 5100, a range of other Intel notebooks/ultrabooks were benchmarked while all running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

The systems being compared in this review were subject to the mobile systems I had available for installing the latest daily ISO of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS at the time of testing for conducting comparison benchmarks. The test systems on Ubuntu 14.04 included:

Lenovo ThinkPad W510 - An Intel Core i7 720QM "Clarksfield" laptop with 4GB of RAM, 160GB Fujitsu HDD, and NVIDIA Quadro FX880M graphics.

HP EliteBook 161C - An HP EliteBook that served as an Intel Software Development Vehicle with an Intel Core i5 2520M "Sandy Bridge" CPU with HD Graphics 3000, Intel 160GB SSD, and 4GB of RAM.

ASUS K56CA - An ASUS laptop with Intel Core i3 3217U processor with HD Graphics 4000, 4GB of RAM, and 500GB Hitachi HDD plus 24GB SanDisk SSD.

ASUS ZenBook UX32VDA - An older Zenbook with Intel Core i7 3517U "Ivy Bridge" processor with HD Graphics 4000 being used (the NVIDIA GPU was disabled), 4GB of RAM, and dual 128GB SanDisk SSDs.

Acer C720 - An Intel "Haswell" Chromebook with Celeron 2955U processor and Haswell-ULT graphics, 2GB of RAM, and a 16GB Kingston SSD.

ASUS Zenbook UX301LA - The "Haswell" ultrabook being reviewed today with its Intel Core i7 4558U processor with Iris Graphics 5100, 8GB of RAM, and dual 128GB SanDisk SSDs.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the Linux 3.13 kernel, Unity 7.1.2, and GCC 4.8.2 was the base operating system used across all of these systems. All of the Linux benchmarking was handled in a fully automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.