Asus ExpertBook Ultra Review

We do like a good business laptop at High Performance Laptops, even more so now that Intel’s Panther Lake processors are proliferating. They’re light, they’re very well built and the new Intel chip means that they can even play games. This new model promises best-in-class performance across the board, so just how high up our rankings will the Asus ExpertBook Ultra land?

Table of Contents

• Asus ExpertBook Ultra Specs
• Features, Ergonomics & Design
  • Ports & Connectivity
• Performance
  • General Computing & CPU Tests
  • Graphics & Gaming Performance
  • Cooling
• Portability & Battery Life
• Price, Availability & Value
• Conclusion: Should You Buy The Asus ExpertBook Ultra?
• Awards

Asus ExpertBook Ultra Specs

Features, Ergonomics & Design

Many thin-and-light Asus notebooks have been sporting the company’s special Ceraluminum (ceramic-aluminium hybrid) chassis, in recent years. But the ExpertBook Ultra uses a newer ‘Nano Ceramic’ coating that apparently registers 9 (out of 10) on Mohs hardness scale (9 is corundum and 10 is diamond for all you non-geologists), meaning that most (but not all) scratches can be easily rubbed away. Brushing your fingers over it feels like earthenware. It’s also pretty good at fending-off fingerprints.

The overall result is a matte-black laptop with a barely there, glossy black Asus logo. It’s not flashy, but it feels high-quality, understated and cool.

Opening it up activates a light bar beneath the screen to tell you (and any support engineers) that it’s turned on, even if there’s nothing on the screen.

And about that screen… this 14-inch display might just be one of the very best on the market. It’s a very-bright (600-nit with 1,400 peak HDR brightness), 14-inch, Tandem-OLED display with a very-high, 2,880 x 1,800 resolution. That means contrast is generally excellent, blacks are true and colours are vibrant. But, it gets better. The Tandem OLED technology means it gets brighter than regular OLED and that its HDR capabilities are dialed-up a notch with details remaining visible in both very bright and very dark areas, simultaneously.

We’ve seen similar on Asus ProArt PX13 Creator laptops, but the Ultra goes further still. Despite its business-class credentials, it has a 120Hz screen which renders fast-moving objects that bit sharper when they move around the screen. It’s certainly no gaming display, but it’s significantly better in this are than the PX13’s 60Hz display.

Also unlike the PX13, the display has a matte finish, so distracting reflections are entirely banished (yay!) when using it outside or in bright environments. While this can make a screen physically weaker and more-prone to scratches, Asus addresses this by using tough, Gorilla Glass.

Furthermore, while the ExpertBook Ultra is no convertible tablet (the screen also doesn’t lie flat) it is a responsive touchscreen and it’s excellent at repelling fingerprints.

The screen’s multimedia chops are further-boosted by the six-speaker array – two tweeters and two, dual-direction woofers. Music gets loud, fidelity is excellent from the top to the bottom end and there’s punchy bass to boot. We’ve been told that business laptop speakers are better than those found on many other laptops because the target-market executives that it’s designed for don’t like wearing headsets or earbuds in important videoconferences.

That said, the Full HD webcam (with hardware privacy slide) is a little disappointing in this context. While it does an ok job in low light, it can be grainy in well-lit settings. I’ve seen better from Asus laptops. It also provides Windows Hello facial recognition log-in.

Fortunately, the microphone array is very good, capturing clear audio in noisy environments.

Below the screen resides an excellent Scrabble-tile keyboard that’s very well-weighted and comfortable and accurate to type upon for extended periods. There’s no number pad (not surprising for a 14-incher) and up-and-down arrow keys are squished, but they’re isolated on the bottom right and intuitive to reach for. It’s also worth noting that the power button doubles as a Windows Hello-compatible fingerprint reader.

So far, so good, so it’s a bit of disappointment that the trackpad (of all things) blights an excellent ergonomic score. Haptic touchpads (which use artificial feedback to ape actual button actuation) have not convinced me of their usefulness, yet.

Apple’s dual-layer ‘Magic’ MacBook equivalent appears to have got the PC manufacturers is scrambling to copy it, but it still feels like they’re trying to find a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Asus says that having six haptic motors reduces the number of moving parts that might, potentially, need servicing in the future, but I don’t feel like the traditional trackpad, with two buttons, has been an overcomplicated point of failure, all this time.

The PX13 GoPro Edition’s was appalling – you couldn’t draw a box around Windows icons to select them and right-clicking was a perennial bugbear. While the UltraBook’s is nowhere near that bad, I never had total faith that it would fulfil its purpose… it’s a trackpad for pity’s sake. Engineers and marketers will say it facilitates additional shortcut gestures but I had to turn all of these off (in Windows and Asus’ app) just to stop the entire screen changing because I’d lightly grazed it with a palm when typing.

Ports & Connectivity

Inside there’s Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. That’s an excellent complement of connectivity.

Features, Ergonomics & Design Score: 4.6 / 5

Performance

Inside the Asus ExpertBook Ultra is an Intel Core Ultra (Series 3) processor (aka Panther Lake) with four Performance cores, eight Efficient cores and four Low Power Efficient cores that operate between 1.5GHz and 4.8GHz. It also has a 50 TOPS NPU (for casual AI-workloads) and an integrated Intel Arc B390 GPU that has 12 Xe cores running at 2.5GHz. The latter has shown some serious gaming chops in the past.

This is all backed-up by a 1TB NVMe drive and 64GB of LPDDR5 RAM.

General Computing & CPU Tests

As ever with our laptop reviews, we post a star rating out of five where one is the lowest score we’ve seen in our labs and five is the highest. You can read how we test laptops, here.

For a thin and light, ultraportable laptop, these are impressive scores – almost all are above average in a market containing high-powered gaming laptops. The ExpertBook Ultra can even perform some rendering tasks without taking an age to complete.

General Computing & CPU Score: 3.7 / 5

Graphics & Gaming Performance

To establish the ExpertBook Ultra’s 3D and gaming potency, I started by running 3DMark’s gaming tests. The results were as follows…

While some of these numbers might look low, it’s again worth reminding ourselves that the ExpertBook Ultra is now being compared to top-tier gaming laptops. While it will struggle with the latest-and-greatest, eye-candy-rich games at 4K with ray-tracing, it will play most games at least at Full HD with very high settings.

One of my favourite GPU tests is the UL Procyon Video Editing benchmark which uses Adobe Premiere to encode four different (900MB) UHD video files. Here it scored 12,313 (Score: 1.6 / 5). For real-world context, this means the most difficult encoding workload (UHD, H.265, 60fps) took 212 seconds. A top-end Nvidia-wielding laptop might take 33 seconds but some other ultraportables have taken 10 minutes in the past. So, while it’s not ideal for day-to-day video rendering, it can certainly handle occasional workloads without obscenely long delays.

Graphics & Gaming Performance: 2 / 5

Cooling

For the most part, Asus’ ExpertBook Ultra runs cool and quietly. We only heard the fans ramp up when performing extended rendering tests, but they only reached a low whoosh and the base barely got more-than warm. In our extended Cinebench R24 test, the score dropped less-than one per cent, so thermal throttling isn’t an issue.

Portability & Battery Life

I’ve been using the ExpertBook Ultra on the road for international travel for the past two weeks which meant I haven’t been able to put it down and run a (potentially) 24+ hour battery benchmark. However, I’ve no doubt that it will comfortably last over 22-hours as it’s got a similar battery and insides as the HP OmniBook 7 which lasted for 23-hours. That was larger (16-inches) and the screen didn’t get very dark, so this is likely to stretch to nearer 30 hours. I’ll update the scores later.

While it’s not got a full, military-grade toughness rating, it has survived 24 of the MIL-STD-810H requirements (including water-spill resistance). The Gorilla Glass screen is simultaneously tough and can survive being picked-up by its corner. The main chassis is rock solid.

It also only weighs 1.09KG so you barely notice carrying it around. The only odd choice is the inclusion of a full-size charger rather than a lighter phone-style unit.

At the end of the day, it will survive life on the road without being near the mains for a very long time. When the official battery-life figures come in, I suspect it will be our new, Best Ultraportable laptop. It’s certainly in that conversation right now.

Portability & Battery Life Score: 5 / 5

Price, Availability & Value

A bleeding-edge, executive laptop is not going to come cheap and this (very high end) variant of the Asus ExpertBook Ultra costs an eye-watering $7,999. There are lesser and slightly higher variants starting from $4,999, though(!)

Ultimately, however, pricing for laptops like this is negotiable with the target market, as MSPs will be buying them in bulk and leasing them to clients with different levels of support and service agreements.

Price, Availability & Value: 2.3 / 5

Conclusion: Should You Buy The Asus ExpertBook Ultra?

Asus’ ExpertBook Ultra is a seriously desirable laptop. It does everything well. While the trackpad is a slightly annoying foible, it’s no dealbreaker.

It’s certainly not cheap, but you get a lot of laptop for the money (metaphorically if not physically).

Awards

Last Updated on 10 June 2026 by Nick Ross