[Review] Asus Transformer 3 Pro – Taking a stand

Performance & Conclusion
In terms of hardware, the Asus Transformer Pro 3 for Malaysia comes with quite an impressive raft of specs. The display is a 12.6-inch, 2,880 x 1,920 pixel resolution IPS LCD display. The slate runs Windows 10 on an Intel Skylake i7-6500 2.5GHz processor paired with 16GB of RAM and a swift 512GB SSD. The provided ports take it a notch up over the competition with the full sized HDMI port allowing you to hook it up to a larger display while the USB Type-C Thunderbolt port and the USB 3.1 port allow for fast data transfers, fast charging as well as the ability to hook up peripherals like a portable hard disk, a mouse or whatnot.

The choice of a USB Type-C charging port is a stroke of pragmatic genius as you don’t need to tote a proprietary cable around just to juice it up unlike other similarly designed alternatives. If you’re a recent tech adopter, you’ll likely have a Type C cable or two lying around and assuming you have a charger capable of providing sufficiently high wattage, you’re able to juice it up without undue trouble.

The Microsoft Surface Pro 4 (left) and the Asus Transformer Pro 3 (right) side by side.

When fired up, the Transformer Pro 3 booted up in seconds into the start menu. There’s relatively little bloatware on the Windows 10 install though it comes with McAfee antivirus pre-installed and has a bunch of optional downloads of dubious value though it does have 25GB of free storage on Dropbox for six months tied to the device which is a pleasant bonus.

All Keyed Up with the Keyboard
The folio keyboard is a full sized affair with matte suede palm rests and a relatively large touchpad along with a somewhat small set of direction keys. The keyboard is fortunately backlit, allowing for use in low light. The key travel is relatively firm and, with some practice, allows for fast typing speeds. The touchpad itself is highly responsive as well with gesture support as gesture support. While it is strong enough to latch on to its own to the tablet body without support, the same cannot be said if you held it up by just the keyboard alone as the magnets are insufficient to support the weight of the tablet itself. Word: don’t try this at home kids.

In use, the keyboard proved to be highly responsive and offered just enough key travel to make touch typing a comfortable and viable experience. The generously sized touchpad allows for gesture support and two-finger scrolling while having a left and right mouse click button in the corresponding lower ends of the pad. Combined, both allowed for the author to hammer this review straight off the Transformer 3 Pro, albeit on a desk in the office. The classic conundrum of this form factor requiring a larger sized footprint for stability on account of the rear kickstand means using it on your lap is not the most viable option.

Benchmarks & Performance

In terms of benchmarks, the Asus Transformer Pro 3 yielded a PC Mark score of 2598 on standard Home settings, which makes it better than 26% of comparable notebooks. That’s more than sufficient seeing its intended function as a portable productivity and media consumption device.

On the Unigine Heaven benchmark test, it yielded a score of about 122  with an FPS of 4.8 on Extreme settings with Ultra graphics and extreme tessellation though the app wasn’t able to accurately size the display to the 3K dimensions of the display. In practical terms, it was able to handle  something relatively taxing like Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak on low settings without it keeling over . On Geekbench, it got a very respectable single core score of 3337 and a multicore score of 6808, putting it in the upper tiers among its convertible peers. This isn’t a gaming machine though if you happen to have it docked to an Asus ROG X3 Gaming Station 2 it will be able to handle any game thrown at it in a pinch.

Asus Transformer Pro 3 Geekbench score

On its own in the field with a realistic usage scenario, the Transformer Pro 3 was an adept productivity workhorse and was easily able to take on all the word processing and spreadsheet duties asked of it. Watching and streaming content on it was a real treat too with the display serving up excellent colours onscreen; no surprise seeing as it’s rated to be able to display 121% sRGB and 85% NTSC colour gamut.

What takes the cake are the harman kardon tuned front-facing speakers. When tested with a suitably explosion-laden movie like Die Hard, they didn’t disappoint with beefy explosions and distinct weapon reports when the lead starts flying. When tested with tunes including a selection of Cantopop, jazz and Claude Debussy’s sublime Clair de Lune, it was capable of handling it all with a decent soundstage, good detail along with clear vocals without any distortion even when dialled to maximum volume. Bass was middling but to be expected since it lacks a subwoofer but seeing the form factor and design, this is one of the best speakers we’ve seen on a two-in-one in ages.

Unfortunately, this is contrasted by the noise of the Transformer Pro 3’s cooling fan. It does the job and even under heavy loads, the back panel remains relatively cool though this comes with a trade off of a rather audible racket. Under light loads like web browsing and the like, you’ll get a subtle whirring that you can hear in a quiet room but under heavy loads like gaming the volume ramps up quite a bit. The rear 13-MP camera offered perfunctory performance sufficient to take a snap of a page of text or maybe a parking spot in a stretch though you shouldn’t be taking snaps with a humongous tablet in any case. The front selfie camera does the job for video calls.

The other main quibble with the Transformer Pro 3 is middling battery life. Even with battery saver mode kicked in, the notebook managed just over four hours with moderate use web browsing, typing texts and a few YouTube videos though the charger is relatively light so it’s simply a matter of judiciously hopping between power points when you’re getting your work done. Assuming you’re not doing trans-Atlantic flights as part of your work commute, four hours should be plenty in between Tube transits and Grab rides.

Conclusion
As it stands, the Transformer Pro 3 has a lot going for it with an excellent display paired with great front-facing stereo speakers along with hardware to match including Thunderbolt 3 support. All this clocks in at a cheaper price tag than a Surface Pro 4 of similar provenance. If you can live with the occasionally loud fan noise and middling battery life, this is an exceptionally powerful and portable two-in-one that is worthy of consideration for power users who need serious hardware on the go.

Specifications
Price RM6,999
Display 12.6-inch WQHD LCD, 2,880 x 1,920 pixels
Processor Intel Core i7-6500U
Storage 16GB RAM/512GB SATA3 M.2 SSD
Graphics Intel HD Graphics 520
Battery Life 39Whrs (4 hours quoted)
Size/Weight 298.8 x 210.1 x 8.35 mm / 790g

WHAT WE LIKED Excellent build quality, good speakers, impressively specced,Thunderbolt 3 support
WHAT WE DIDN’T Middling battery life, pretty loud fan, Asus Pen stylus somewhat fiddly still
WE SAY A powerful, svelte and high performing convertible with a few minor quibbles that make it fall a wee bit short of being one of the best convertibles out there in the market.