ASUS Zenbook UX333/433/533

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Reason: Stub (Discuss in Talk:ASUS Zenbook UX333/433/533)
Hardware PCI/USB ID Working?
GPU (Intel) Yes
GPU (Nvidia) Yes
Wireless Yes
Audio Yes
Touchpad Yes
Webcam Yes
Card reader Yes
Bluetooth Yes
Face recognition sensor Yes

ASUS announced UX333, UX433 and UX533 models. Since these models share almost the same hardware (the only difference is screen size and discrete NVidia GPU), this article covers hardware specific configuration for all ZenBook 13 (UX333), ZenBook 14 (UX433) and ZenBook 15 (UX533).

Configuration

Secure Boot (option)

In order to boot any Linux operating system, navigate to BIOS, then hit F7 or click on "Advanced Menu", then the "Security" tab and set "Secure Boot" to Off.

If the aforementioned "Secure Boot" option is a menu rather than an on-or-off option, click on "Secure Boot", "Key Management", then "Reset to Setup Mode" and confirm in the dialog.

Sata configuration

If your device is not seen with fdisk -l, you may need to put your sata in AHCI mode.

Navigate to BIOS, then hit F7 or click on Advanced Menu, then the Sata configuration tab and set it to AHCI.

Video

See Intel Graphics and Hardware Acceleration. For models with discrete Nvidia graphics card, also see NVIDIA Optimus.

Audio

See PulseAudio.

Touchpad

See Libinput.

Facerecognition login

This computer has built-in face recognition sensor. You can use it with the project Howdy [1]. See the howdy page for further informations.

Battery charge threshold

The procedure decribed at ASUS Zenbook UX534#Battery charge threshold works for the UX333, UX433, and UX533.

Troubleshooting

Microcode

During boot you might get the message [Firmware Bug]: TSC_DEADLINE disabled due to Errata; please update microcode to version: 0x52 (or later). See Microcode to resolve it.

Nvidia issues with Bumblebee

It is likely that it is one of these issues:

Suspend

Linux (4.17 at least) default to suspend-to-idle which is not very power effective. This is probably due to this change in 4.14-rc1. For better power effective you can use suspend-to-ram by adding mem_sleep_default=deep to the kernel cmdline.

Tips and tricks

Power saving and performance

As advertised by ASUS, these laptops are capable to last up to 9 hours on battery. In order to achieve this, see:

  • BIOS update - It is generally recommended to update BIOS, as it usually brings performance, power-saving and security features.
  • Power Saving - List of general recommendations to increase battery life.
  • SSD - Tips and tricks for Solid State Drives. These three laptops ship M.2 SSD by default.
  • Undervolting CPU - Decrease voltage for Intel CPU (reduce battery drain, reduce heat and therefore - reduce fan speed)

Extract Windows 10 license key

The laptop comes with Windows 10 preinstalled and the activation key is hardcoded into the firmware. If you replace Windows with Linux, then hardcoded activation key is useless. You might want to extract it and use somewhere else (e.g. virtualized Windows 10):

# grep -aPo '[\w]{5}-[\w]{5}-[\w]{5}-[\w]{5}-[\w]{5}' /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
Note: Microsoft online support confirmed that the code is valid, but because you are unable to activate it (Windows fails to activate and asks for another code), they offered 2 options - replace activation code with another one for 40$ or contact OEM (ASUS) about this issue. ASUS confirmed, that in order to "use" this activation key, you need to bring this laptop to repair service so they can "restore" system using ASUS OEM Windows 10 image. They do not provide this image for download.