This is the new ZenBook for 2024, the ASUS ZenBook 14 OLED 2024 edition and when this arrived in offices, my first question was what’s new in 2024? Turns out this brings upgrades to design, the battery, the performance with the new core ultra CPUs, the display, so let’s get into detail.
So let’s face it, the ASUS ZenBook series has been quite popular. They have been kind of the MacBooks in the Windows world and one of the biggest reasons for that has been the design. I mean the design is one area where ASUS always kills it with the ZenBooks and this year things are even better.
Look on first look it looks like a usual Zenbook design with the Asus monogram logo, the minimal Asus Zenbook text and that’s not a bad thing this looks like a premium laptop with the aluminium build all around be the lid or the keyboard touchpad area.
Now what has changed from last year is the fact that this is even slimmer at 14.9 millimeters and even lighter at just 1.2 kgs. I mean that is the first thing you will notice when you unbox this laptop and I also like the sleeve Asus bundles for carrying it around.
Now the sleeker more lightweight design does not mean that Asus has compromised on the build quality of this laptop. This is still military grade certified and more importantly this feels solid. The 180 degree hinge here is solid you can open the laptop with a finger and there’s almost no wobble or flex.
I also like that even in the slim design ASUS has managed to put in the necessary ports. The right has the HDMI 2.1 port the 3.5 mm jack and a couple of Thunderbolt 4 ports and on the right you have the lonely USB-A port. Now if you’re wondering there’s no fingerprint scanner here, but the FHD webcam here is an IR camera so windows hello works and it works well. Also I like that this has a physical privacy shutter, this indicator, dual mics with AI noise cancellation that actually make a difference and the camera quality is good too along with features like automatic framing, eye contact and background blur.
Coming to the display, the Asus Zenbooks are known to have great OLED panels and this is no different. The variant we have has a 14 inch OLED touchscreen with sharp 3k resolution, 16 is to 10 aspect ratio, great for work, 120 hertz refresh rate, 550 nits of peak brightness, 100% DC IP3 coverage, Gorilla Glass protection, yeah this display is packed with flagship grade features, I mean this is almost a perfect display be it for work as it’s colour accurate, sharp, 6-10 like I said, bright enough to use outdoors or you know be it for entertainment because movies and shows look awesome on this OLED screen and add to that the stereo speakers here are tuned by Harman Kardon and these are super linear speakers and they’re loud and crisp, there’s even a volume booster option to further increase the volume if you want, now coming back to the display. And this is a touch screen and the touch response is good. And this has stylus support so you can even get an easy spin and you know draw or you know just get more creative.
Now third big upgrade here is the performance. This is powered by the new Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor which Intel is not calling 14th gen anymore or i7. But that whole rebranding apart this is powerful. This has 16 cores including 6 performance cores, 8 efficiency cores and there’s 2 new low power efficiency cores that make a huge difference in the battery life. Trust me, there’s also 22 threads, new Intel Arc GPU that’s by the way 2x faster brings ray tracing and there’s the new Intel AI Boost NPU for 70% faster generative AI performance. Also this is an Intel Evo Edition laptop so it comes with all the features in the latest Intel Evo standards.
Look the Ultra 7155H is a powerful processor considering this is a thin and lightweight laptop. We compared the benchmarks versus the 1360p on the Galaxy Book 3 Pro and when the difference Cinebench single core and multi-core score aren’t that big, just look at the GPU score. It’s clear that the new ARC GPU is way more powerful compared to the Iris Xe graphics. As for the NPU, it’s still fairly early days for the new Intel Core Ultra CPUs, so when we tested out some local AI models to you know upscale images or even some LLMs, tasks were not allocated to the NPU, so I guess we’ll just have to wait for more apps to support the new Intel AI Boost NPU. That apart, the ZenBook 14 OLED is one smooth laptop apps launch up quickly running multiple apps side by side is no issue and no matter how many chrome tabs you have opened the laptop does not slow down we even tried some Photoshop on the laptop doing some extensive edits with multiple layers and the performance was what you expect from a premium work laptop like this the multitasking is also very good I mean this has fast 32 GB LPDDR5X RAM and 1TB of Gen4 SSD storage so it’s no surprise that multiple apps are no problem for this laptop. As for some casual gaming games like say rocket league or CS2 run at high frame rates even at high graphic settings which is very good. Now in terms of thermals this has a big heat pipe along with this fan.
