Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Review (2024): Unassumingly Aiming For Best In Class
- Beautiful and vivid display
- Tons of performance
- Gaming is a real option
- More than a day of battery life
- Quality construction
- One USB Type-A port
- Some keyboard flex
- Fingerprint magnet
Asus is one of the best hardware manufacturers and they have been releasing solidly built laptops with great performance at aggressive prices for some time. Gamers may be familiar with Asus' gaming lineup, like the ROG Zephyrus G14, but their mainstream lineup doesn't get the same brand recognition that Apple, Dell, or HP have. This is a shame, as the Asus Zenbook line has been one of the best in laptops for a few years.
The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (2024) takes last year's Zenbook 14 OLED and dials things up a notch. It even gives laptops like the highly regarded Macbook Air M3 a run for its money and provides a great alternative for people who prefer Windows. Asus has provided a Zenbook 14 OLED (2024) laptop for this review.
Design
The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED offers a subtle design that does its best to blend into its surroundings. With the lid closed you get a matte Jade Black finish, with glossy lines etched into the lid. It may be too bland for some, but I find the design elegant and quite striking. At just 12.30 x 8.67 x 0.59 inches, the Zenbook 14 is compact for a device that has a 14-inch display. It's also easy to carry around for an extended period thanks to its light 2.82-pound frame.
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You also get a pretty good selection of ports on the laptop. The right side houses most of your connection options: an HDMI 2.1 port, a USB 4 Type-C port, a USB 3.2 Type-C port, and a 3.5mm audio combo jack. The left side of the laptop has an exhaust fan and a single USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 port. Another USB Type-A port or an SD reader would have been nice, but the Zenbook 14 OLED covers the essentials.
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It's a well-built laptop, with little to no chassis flex to be found. The Zenbook 14 OLED carries a MIL-STD 810H military rating for reliability and durability. Laptops that carry this rating have been thoroughly tested against shocks, vibration, altitude, and extreme temperatures.
Display
The quality of the panel that the Asus Zebook 14 carries is simply superb. This laptop has a 14-inch, 1920 x 1200, OLED panel that is just beautiful. The extra vertical makes the 14-inch display a little more spacious than your standard Full-HD display. The Zenbook's touchscreen display has a 60Hz refresh rate and is easy to use both indoors and outside thanks to its 500 nits of brightness when in HDR mode.
Consuming content on this laptop is a pleasure. The OLED display makes more inky blacks and the 100% DCI-P3 color gamut ensures accurate color reproduction.
Dark scenes are a joy to behold. The image of "Guardian of the Galaxy Vol. 2" with its dark tones, coupled with some fantastic coloring allows you to see just what this display is capable of. There is a lot of contrast, especially black, which is inky. In the photo above you'll see how the system's wide range of color allows the blue in the character "Yondu's" face to practically pop off the screen. The detail is also quite good, which is also apparent on the face of the raccoon character, Rocket.
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The 500 nits of brightness and punchy colors allow for light scenes to excel as well. You can see the vivid image and color representation on full display in a movie like "Up". This is easily one of the best full-HD displays I have seen on a laptop at this price. There is an optional 4K, 120Hz display that would take this display to a whole different level.
Performance
The Zenbook 14 OLED is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS processor, 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and a 512GB M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD drive. To put it simply: this computer should have little trouble keeping up with most workloads.
The Ryzen 7 8840HS processor is particularly impressive. With 8 cores and 16 threads, this 3.3GHz processor can ramp up to 5.1GHz for more intensive workloads. It also includes an XDNA neural processor that can perform at up to 16 TOPS (Tera Operations per Second).
The 8840HS processor is one of the first laptops to incorporate Ryzen AI and including the neural engine, hits a maximum of 38 TOPS. This is unfortunately slightly lower than the rumored upcoming 40 TOPS requirement for AI to run locally on Windows 11. It's still an impressive number considering no laptop currently exists that meets that requirement.
This laptop is impressive for everyday use. It'll chew through your routine day-to-day applications with ease and is well-suited for more complicated tasks. Programming and even video editing are possible on this laptop thanks to its excellent integrated GPU.
The Zenbook 14 OLED is powerful and performs similarly to the Apple Macbook Air M3 with 16GB of RAM. The Zenbook gets a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 13,082 and a single-core score of 1,713. In Geekbench 6, it managed to get a multi-core score of 11,060 and a single-core score of 2,491. The M3 Macbook Air gets a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 9,051 and a single-core score of 1,903. In Geekbench 6, the Macbook Air gets a multi-core score of 12,091 and a single-core score of 3,135.
Gaming
Normally, a laptop without a dedicated GPU doesn't warrant a section dedicated to gaming, but the Ryzen 7 8840HS is not your normal laptop processor. The 8840HS is equipped with a Radeon 780M integrated GPU that has some serious gaming chops. With a graphics core count of 12 and an operating frequency of 2,700MHz, the iGPU of the 8840HS gets similar performance to an NVIDIA GTX 1650M GPU, which is just insane.
At medium settings, games like "Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 + 2" and "Red Dead Redemption 2" can be run at 1080P at about 45 FPS. "Cyberpunk 2077" clocks in at around 50FPS with a mixture of low and medium settings. "GTA V" will easily run above 60FPS at 1080p medium settings, as will "Forza Horizon 5."
The Zenbook 14 is sneakily a decent gaming machine. It's not going to rival a laptop with a mid to high-end dedicated GPU, but it'll satisfy your occasional gaming itch. This also makes the Zenbook 14 a great retro gaming laptop.
Keyboard and touchpad
The chiclet keyboard is also a real pleasure to use. Anyone who does a lot of typing on their device will love this laptop. The backlit keys are spaced perfectly and you get 1.4mm of key-travel for a satisfying feeling with every key press. The keyboard doesn't feel too stiff, nor is it mushy. It finds a comfortable space in between for a great overall experience. The keyboard is also quiet, which is nice if you find yourself doing work in quiet environments. There is a bit of deck flex, but only if you push down on the keyboard with a bit of force.
Riding the AI wave, the Zebook 14 OLED has a dedicated Copilot key. Pressing the Copilot key instantly activates Microsof'ts Copilot, allowing you to interact with the built-in Windows AI. As someone who doesn't do too much with AI, my use of the Copilot key was very limited, but as AI continues its dominance, it's nice to have.
The precision touchpad is large and accurate. It's not as large as the one you will find on Apple notebooks, but it doesn't feel restrictive. It also has an Asus NumberPad 2.0 virtual numeric keypad. This allows the touchpad to show a virtual set of numbers and operators, allowing you to quickly input calculations. It's a nice compromise for keyboards that lack the space for a full-sized keyboard setup.
Battery life and audio
With all this power, you would think that battery life would be mediocre, at best. In reality, this Zenbook 14 includes a 75WHrs battery and it gets staggeringly good battery life. Asus claims the Zenbook gets over 17 hours of non-stop entertainment and that proved accurate in my testing.
During normal use and with brightness set to just below half, the Zebook 14 OLED gets anywhere from 16 to just over 17 hours of battery. Obviously battery will diminish much quicker if you increase brightness or do more intensive tasks like playing games or video editing. If you do find the battery getting low, the 65W USB Type-C charger is capable of quick charging.
Asus put some solid-sounding Harmon/Kardon speakers in the Zenbook. They have decent bass, and the sound is quite good throughout its entire range. It doesn't matter if the volume is set low, or increased to its maximum. The sound remains clear and it has one of the best-sounding speaker systems of any laptop I have had the pleasure of testing.
Final verdict
The Asus Zenbook was an absolute pleasure to put through its paces. Last year's Zenbook was already a great device, but this year's version improved on its predecessor's shortcomings, namely its processing speed and slower memory. Asus created one of the best sub-$1000 laptops you can buy. Starting at $799, there isn't much to dislike about the Zenbook 14 OLED. The display is beautiful, the laptop is powerful, and it has top-notch performance and surprisingly great battery life.
It can even play many of the latest games at satisfying graphical fidelity, making it a well-rounded laptop. The design might be a bit bland for some, but I find it elegant. It's part of the charm of the Zenbook 14 OLED. Asus has a real winner on its hands with this 14-inch laptop.
If you are looking for a premium laptop and aren't looking for an Apple device, or a gaming laptop, then the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (2024) should be your go-to option. It's simply that good. This laptop can be purchased from Walmart for approximately $800 (for the version we reviewed, with 512GB storage) — or you can grab the 1TB version directly from Asus for around $1000.