CES 2016: ASUS Product Tour

It’s almost hard to believe that ASUS started as primarily just a motherboard company. Their CES showcase for 2016 had a huge array of products, including of course motherboards, but also smart home, smartwatches, phones, laptops, all-in-one systems, monitors, and more. Let’s take a look at some of the new devices for 2016.

ASUS had a couple of all-in-one PCs, including the ASUSPRO model. This is a 20” AIO designed for commercial applications, and it can include a smartcard reader, VGA port, COM port, HDMI, and a tool-less back cover to access the internal components. There was nothing flashy about this model, but it certainly should fit the bill for specific instances where things like a COM port are necessary.

The Zen AiO Pro was a much more consumer oriented model, with the ASUS Zen spun circle finish on the back. It’s a Full HD (1920×1080) model which can be had with up to a GTX 960M graphics card, which should actually be pretty decent for gaming at that resolution. It also features a USB 3.1 Type-C port with 10 Gbps transfer. CPU is up to Core i7 Skylake (T Series 35 Watt Desktop chips) with 16 GB of DDR4, and 512 GB of PCIe storage. The speakers are 16 Watt models which should provide decent audio for a monitor mounted solution. The model on display was the Z220IC, which is a 22-inch version, but there is also a Z240IC which has an optional UHD display. Intel RealSense 3D camera is also available for Windows Hello facial login. ASUS has a very nicely designed AIO here with the beautiful aluminum stand.

ASUS’s VivoMini VC65 Series of Mini-PC was pretty interesting. They feature desktop class processors and support for up to four storage devices, meaning you could turn one of these into a very compact NAS. The VC65R model supports RAID as well. These were announced quite a while ago, but it was good to see them in person. They really are very compact, and with room for up to four drives, there are a lot of applications for this.

ASUS also had the MX34 Curved monitor, which is a 34-inch display with a 3440×1440 resolution. These 21:9 displays can be a nice way to eliminate the need for dual monitors. This model also features Qi wireless charging on the base, as well as HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.2 connections.

ASUS also had their mini PCs on display, with the Chromebit and VivoStick models shown in a couple of colors. The Chromebit is unsurprisingly Chrome OS, and the VivoStick is Windows 10. Neither is going to wow you with performance. The Chromebit is powered by a Rockchip quad-core RK3288C and has 16 GB of eMMC and 2 GB of memory. The Vivostick is based on Intel’s Cherry Trail Atom processor, and also has 2 GB of memory, but 32 GB of eMMC storage. There are 2 USB 2.0 ports available on the VivoStick.

Next on display was the MB169C+ monitor, which has a terrible name, but a great set of features. It’s a 15.6-inch Full HD display, with the cool feature that it is completely driven off of a single USB-C cable. The USB-C can provide enough power for this display, so you can just plug it into your notebook and that’s all you need. It also comes with a sleeve case to protect the display when not in use.

Before moving on to laptops, I’ll just mention a couple of networking items as well. ASUS had on display the AC2600 router, which offers 4×4 MIMO support, and to go with that, they also have a PCIe wireless networking card which supports 4×4 802.11ac for up to 3.1 Gbps theoretical speed. ASUS put a big heatsink on this card to help it keep cool under load, but the antennae required is, frankly, massive. If you can’t run Gigabit to your desktop, this should give you the best result. ASUS also had a DOCSIS 3.0 cable model on display, so it seems they are expanding their networking to that side as well.

ASUS didn’t have any new laptops for CES, but I did get a chance to check out some that had been announced over the last couple of months with the launch of Skylake. The 15.6-inch ZenBook Pro is arguably ASUS’s flagship laptop, with a full aluminum chassis and 45-Watt Skylake CPUs. It also features an NVIDIA GTX 960M GPU, and PCIe storage. Optionally there is a UHD display with 100% Adobe RGB color space coverage. It’s a great looking laptop, and plenty powerful as well.

Moving down in price and performance is the UX303UA, which is a 13.3-inch Ultrabook with U series Skylake processors. It’s fairly light and thin, and is an incremental upgrade over the previous model. ASUS also had the UX305CA, which is the Skylake powered version of the UX305 that we reviewed in 2015, and ASUS sent us the new Skylake model to put through its paces so look for a review of this soon. The UX305 was one of my favorite Ultrabooks of 2015, and it offers some great value with 8 GB of memory and 256 GB of SSD storage for just $699.

UX303UA

UX305CA

As always, ASUS has a huge amount of product on display at CES. They have branched into almost every aspect of computing, including phones and smartwatches. They seem to aim for the value proposition, offering more product for the dollar than a lot of their competition.