Bought the red one from JV, same 6.9k retail cash. you can never go wrong with this phone.
Rooting somehow had an advantage when it comes to battery standby as i can control startup ang trigger apps (ex. disabled facebook autorun when wifi/3g is turned on), underclocking helps too, from a 1.6ghz clock down to 1.3ghz. There was no notable difference in terms of performance, only in synthetic tests like antutu, from 23k down to 20k.
the 2nd zenfone version is out, with a beef 10k price tag coupled with a snapdragon 400 with LTE. the zenfone 5 v1 is still the best option IMHO.