Asus ProArt StudioBook One Preview – Vertical cooling through ingenious screen flap
We know Asus in laptops as the manufacturer of neat laptops such as the Vivobook, RoG gaming laptops and of course the thin Zenbooks. At the IFA, however, Asus took the plunge, resulting in a slightly less neat laptop: the ProArt StudioBook One. That laptop is equipped with about the fastest and most expensive parts that you can currently assemble in a laptop. The processor is an i9 CPU with a maximum clock speed, on one core, of 5.0GHz and the video card is the Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000 introduced at the IFA. The most interesting thing about the StudioBook One? All that hardware is mounted behind the screen and cooling air is sucked in by opening a valve behind the screen. Reason enough to take a closer look at how that works.
The StudioBook One has, as we mentioned, fast hardware. The i9-9980HK processor is the fastest mobile processor Intel can offer in a laptop and features eight cores. Strangely enough, Asus has not opted for a Xeon processor for the StudioBook One, while a Xeon variant of the 9980HK is available, in the form of the Xeon E-2286M . In other Studiobooks, such as the StudioBook Pro X , Asus can mount a Xeon processor. The Xeon processor adds, among other things, vPro, which is often used in large companies.
However, the Quadro RTX 6000 GPU is the most impressive chip that Asus has put in the Studiobook. For those who are not so familiar with Nvidia’s Quadro GPUs: the RTX 6000 is a GPU with 4608 Cuda cores, 72RT cores, 576 Tensor cores and 24GB of gddr6 memory and is therefore comparable to the GPU that Nvidia uses in the Titan. RTX used. The RTX 6000 is a lot more powerful than the fastest mobile GeForce GPU to date, the RTX 2080, which has ‘only’ 2944 cores and 8GB of gddr6. If you buy the RTX 6000 as a separate plug-in card, you will have lost around 4000 euros , and it will cost 6615 euros if you order the card from Nvidia itself. That is already an indication that the StudioBook One will not be a cheap laptop.
‘Cheap’ is also not Asus’ idea behind the new ProArt laptop series. Asus had been using the ProArt name for some time for high-end displays and at IFA it will also apply to laptops. Those laptops are aimed at professional use and that includes the professional video cards, which are intended for use with design and simulation software, rather than games like the Geforce cards.
Housing
Asus could have mounted the hardware under the keyboard, as is usual with laptops. The manufacturer has not opted for that and instead the hardware is behind the screen, just like a tablet. However, unlike the economical hardware in a tablet, the hardware in the StudioBook One is a lot faster, but it also produces more heat. According to Nvidia’s specifications, the RTX 6000 can generate a maximum of 250 watts of heat and the processor adds another 45 watts to that, according to Intel’s specification. Now the consumption is completely dependent on the clock speeds and limits that Asus has configured, but that a few hundred watts of heat is generated under full load is a safe assumption.
In any case, the ‘fold-open construction’ feels sturdy, you cannot pull the cover open further by hand and when you close the screen, the cover closes neatly and no open crack is visible. The mounting of the screen, on the other hand, could have been a bit firmer, because when we pressed the corners of it, it bounced along. Perhaps that will be improved with the production version of the StudioBook One. We didn’t have the opportunity to put the StudioBook One through its paces at the show to see if the fans are audible and to feel how much warm air is blown out at the top of the screen. At least with that laptop you felt that warm air was blown out at an angle upwards, so it seems that it is not blown directly into the user’s face.
According to Asus, the advantage of the folding StudioBook One is that you can use the laptop on your lap without it getting hot there. In addition, we suspect that the cooling will work even more efficiently than the usual horizontal cooling, because convection occurs when the components heat up. At first glance, a disadvantage of the construction is that the laptop falls over easily because there is a lot of weight in the screen, but that seems to be not too bad; the laptop seems to have a good weight distribution and, according to an Asus employee, the keyboard part is also weighted to compensate for the extra weight in the screen.
Screen and keyboard
That screen deserves a separate mention, because the laptop must have a 4k screen with a refresh rate of 120Hz. Until now, the fastest laptop screens at that resolution were still 60Hz. We could not control the model that Asus showed at the stand in Windows with more than 60Hz, but the StudioBook must eventually have a 120Hz-4k screen, Asus employees told us.
We cannot leave the keyboard undiscussed either, because the hardware is behind the screen, so the housing around the keyboard hardly needs to house any hardware, which is why Asus has made it quite thin, but has not chosen to use that space for a good keyboard. The manufacturer itself does not speak of ‘butterfly switches’, but the key feel and the very low amount of travel reminded us of the keys that Apple uses on its MacBook Pro.
Preliminary conclusion
The StudioBook One is a very interesting laptop and in our opinion it is mainly because of the screen construction and not really because of the hardware. Of course, it is currently the only laptop with Quadro RTX 6000 GPU, but otherwise the StudioBook One has to lose out to the StudioBook Pro X , which Asus also introduced at IFA. For example, that laptop can be equipped with 128GB of memory and there is also room for two SSDs, a hard drive, more connections and faster WiFi. However, you have to make do with a Quadro RTX 5000 GPU, which, to be fair, will be a lot slower than the RTX 6000 with 3072 Cuda cores.
The best thing about the StudioBook One is that Asus has taken a critical look at the construction of a laptop and has come up with a solution for the warm legs you get from working with a laptop on your lap. In addition, we suspect that the cooling in this vertical way is more efficient than the usual horizontal cooling. We also see some drawbacks to the StudioBook One, because the screen didn’t seem to sit too firmly in the housing and the keyboard had almost no travel. In terms of hardware, we would have preferred a wireless network card with Wi-Fi 6 instead of Wi-Fi 5, but Asus may fix that before the laptop hits stores in early 2020. It is not yet known how much the laptop will cost by then, but given the price of 6615 euros that Nvidia asks for a desktop Quadro RTX 6000,