There’s a lot of talk about lifestyle tech, you know — stuff that looks so cool, sleek that it will have mass market appeal instead of just us total nerds. Well, I generally think that is hyperbole but in the case of the Asus Zenbook 14X OLED, I might just drink the cool-aid.
This slick, 14-inch laptop is only 1.6cm thick and weighs a mere 1.5Kg making it one of the thinnest and lightest OLED laptops in the market. Additionally, the chassis goes through military-grade chassis to ensure that even though its thin, its still tough as nails.
The Zenbook 14X OLED starts at $1,799 for the i5 version but I had the more expensive i9 version with 32GB of memory and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 GPU costing $2,599. Avid readers of PowerUp will find these prices a breath of fresh air compared to our usual subject laptops that cost over $4000.
And yes, the specs can’t quite compete with something like the Razer Blade 14 or ROG Zephyrus G14 when it comes to gaming, but not everything is about high framerates and ray-tracing, am I right?
Asus Zenbook 14X OLED
Let’s get one thing out of the way — this thing is gorgeous. And it should be having won a prestigious Red Dot Product Design Award. The slim metal chassis is finely crafted
It comes in two colors, the Sandstone Beige being the visually superior but sadly I got the more mainstream Inkwell Grey for review. The deep etchings on the lid when looked at in context make the shape of the new Asus Starfleet logo. Asus uses a special coating called plazma ceramization that makes it feel almost like a ceramic tile. This also protects it from annoying fingerprints and smudges.
At 1.5 kg, the Zenbook 14X is pretty light and should even fit in a large ladies handbag with ease. Thankfully, a thin and light chassis is no longer a death sentence for ports. The Zenbook 14X OLED has just enough with two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports that support Power Delivery and video out to compatible 4K monitors.
There’s also an HDMI 2.1 for 4K120Hz video, a 3.5mm audio combo jack and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port. The Zenbook 14X OLED also comes with Wi-Fi 6E for superfast internet connectivity and Bluetooth 5.3.
Open the lid for a nice, tactile keyboard with chiclet keys that have 1.4mm of travel. They feel crisp and responsive and I enjoyed typing quite a few articles on it. The backlighting is single zone white light that will disappoint the RGB lovers but I found it a nice change to be honest. It gets the job done.
The trackpad is sizeable and I found it smooth and responsive to my swipes and taps. I never once felt like, oh, I need an external mouse to get things done which is always a good thing.
Looking above the display you get a FHD camera with IR function to support Windows Hello which is always welcome. Sadly though, I found the Zenbook 14X rather slow to sign me in with this camera, often failing to recognize me even in good light. I found myself using a PIN to sign in more times than I’d have liked.
The stereo speakers are supplied by Harmon Kardon and they sound nice with rich tone and warmth. They won’t win any awards for power and bass but they do a good enough job for something so small. You’ll likely be using Bluetooth earbuds or headphones anyway.
Display and performance
Turning our attention to the 14.5-inch display, we get the usual glorious picture quality that we’ve come to know and expect from an OLED panel. Asus calls it a NanoEdge OLED HDR display which is to say it has an 89% screen-to-body ratio, 2880×1800 resolution in 16:10 with 120Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 600nits in HDR that earns it a VESA Display HDR True Black 600 certification.
True Black becuase its an OLED which has perfect blacks and an infinite contrast of 1,000,000: 1. Throw in wide color gamut with 100% coverage of DCI-P3 color space and you have a beautifully vibrant yet accurate display that’s perfect for color accurate work in photos and video.
The Zenbook 14X OLED has integrated ASUS Splendid software that lets you switch color gamuts quickly. You can choose between Native OLED, Display-P3 for movie grade colors, DCI-P3 for original cinema color and sRGB for web content and graphic design. This makes the Zenbook 14X OLED very appealing to content creators who want to do work on the go without lugging around a big, heavy machine.
To power that display, Asus gives the option of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 running Nvidia Studio drivers for better performance in creative applications like Photoshop and Davinci Resolve. I found this quite puzzling though — i mean its 2023 and the 40-series laptop GPU’s have been around for months now.
The 4GB 3050 isn’t the greatest thing in the world. It will certainly work fine when it comes to productivity workloads and video encoding but then it falls off a cliff when you start gaming. Just look at my benchmarks from a few games and you can see how much the Zenbook struggles to even hit 60fps at 1080p, let alone at native resolution.
You will have to make some serious compromises to get a decent framerate, including running games at low to medium settings. Even with DLSS, performance is lackluster but I will allow as as Asus never claims that this is a gaming machine. Its a shame given how fast and responsive this particular OLED panel is. Even the bigger, more powerful Gigabyte Aero 16 OLED that I recently reviewed has a much slower 60Hz refresh.
Running the Zenbook at load really got the chassis hot and I wouldn’t attempt to do any kind of gaming with this sitting on your lap. Surprisingly, the fans aren’t the loudest I’ve heard which is a testament to the IceCool thermal tech that allows the CPU to run at 45W while keeping temperatures to around 70C.
The Zenbook 14X has three performance modes; Performance, Standard and Whisper Mode. You can switch between these with a quick press of Fn + F keys. There’s a marked difference in performance between them and you’ll likely use the Whisper mode mostly when the laptop isn’t connected to a charger.
The 70Wh battery will last you somewhere between 7-8 hours on a charge too which is enough to get you through a work day. That obviously depends on what you are doing and any intense rendering tasks will bring that number down very quickly.
Thankfully, you can charge it with any compatible USB-C charger from 5-20V. This is super handy because you are never left helpless. The Zenbook 14X also supports fast charging which will get you 60% battery with 49 minutes. The bundled charging brick is nice and compact and you can use that for both your laptop and other smart devices.
Verdict
The Asus Zenbook 14X OLED is a masterful example of how to make a power, slim and light laptop for content creation. I love the tasteful design and that gorgeous OLED display is just too hard to beat. Throw in some great internal components and you have a genuinely great laptop. I do wish Asus could plug an RTX 4050 in there with at least 6GB — that would seriously improve graphical and games performance. That said, if you are someone who does any kind of creative work and simply can’t afford an Apple MacBook Pro 14 M2, then take a serious look at the Zenbook 14X OLED.
Asus Australia kindly loaned the Zenbook 14X OLED to PowerUp for the purpose of this review.
