ASUS Zenbook UX301LA: A Nice Intel Ultrabook For Linux Users
Now onto some thermal and power consumption numbers... ASUS does advertise the UX301LA as having up to an eight-hour battery life, but in my tests under Ubuntu 14.04 LTS I've found it to come up way short. While Linux has its share of power consumption regressions and isn't known for being the most power-efficient OS, in my tests of the UX301LA of using real-world workloads of Thunderbird, Firefox, LibreOffice, and other relatively modest tasks, in the past few weeks I've only been getting a full charge to last for 3~4 hours while traveling. A 3~4 hour battery life isn't too far off from many other Linux notebooks and ultrabooks I've tested in the past, given that Linux has a ways to improve with dynamic power management, etc. There's also tweaks that can be done to extend the battery life further, but this was the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "out of the box" performance.
For some power consumption and performance-per-Watt benchmarks, I fired up some more Phoronix Test Suite workloads.
During a variety of CPU, GPU, and disk tests, the average power use of the UX301LA was at 27 Watts with a peak of 44 Watts and it bottomed out at 6.3 Watts. The numbers were higher than the Ivy Bridge notebooks tested but ahead of the Sandy Bridge notebook. Fortunately, when idling at 6.3 Watts the power use was only outdone by the Acer C720 Chromebook that could drop down to 5.6 Watts.
The CPU temperature did get fairly warm during testing... When the Core i7 Haswell ultrabook processor was fully stressed by running GpuTest, then C-Ray, then building the Linux kernel, during each of these processes the reported CPU temperature was around 88 Celsius. The Core i7 4558U is rated to run up to 100 Celsius but seeing the CPU quickly jump to around 80~90 Celsius during any kind of CPU workload was a bit concerning.