Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Review (2023)

Asus’ Zenbooks have been impressing the pants off us lately. They might not excel at all tasks, but they are phenomenal, all-rounders that will suit many tasks. We reviewed the 14’s sibling, the Zenbook 14X, last year and it had more bells and whistles – like an OLED trackpad. But that’s overkill for some and this cheaper, more-sober model might well hit a price-performance sweet spot. Indeed, the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED has the potential to suit Creators and anyone who wants portable power. It also has a slightly faster screen than other OLEDs. So, what can it do and who should buy it?

Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Specs 

Design, Features & Ergonomics

Asus’ Zenbook 14 OLED is available in two colours: Ponder Blue and Aqua Celadon. A non-OLED spec is also available in Foggy Silver. Our review unit seems to be black. So, either someone’s been Ponder-ing very dark things or Celadon is something that poisons water. The lid is matte-finished with a few geometric glossy lines plus a barely-there Asus Zenbook moniker in the bottom corner. Nomenclature aside, it looks pretty cool for all environments. 

Opening it up reveals a 14-inch glossy screen that’s surrounded by a very thing bezel. There’s an HD webcam at the top which provides an impressively sharp image, even in low light. There are several microphone modes which can be optimised for single and multiple presenters. It did well at cancelling out extensive ambient noise meaning the Zenbook 14 OLED is very good for web conferencing. Just note that the webcam does not support Windows Hello facial recognition. 

The screen itself is impressive. It has a UHD, 2,880 x 1,800 resolution and supports 100 per cent of the difficult DCI-P3 colour gamut, which will suit Creators and design professionals. It displays a very crisp and clear Windows desktop and colours are vibrant. It also gets impressively bright – up to 550 nits – and Asus provides extensive options to help preserve it by preventing image burn-in.  

Normally, when you turn HDR on with a Windows Desktop, you can end up with an unwatchable, over-sharpened display but it’s useable on the Zenbook 14… just. However, using it for multimedia is a joy. Colour gradients are essentially perfect. Remarkably, so are monochromatic gradients. Detail is preserved in both light and dark areas, colours are vibrant and contrast? Sublime. That’s in movies and games. Just note that, as usual, the glossy screen acts as a black mirror with very dark content. 

Interestingly, the panel can run at 90Hz. It’s noticeably not as silky smooth as 120Hz panels – even with the fast pixel response, there’s some noticeable motion blur in fast moving objects – but it’s noticeably superior to 60Hz panels. Competitive gamers will want more, but any game without very fast-and-frantic movements should be good. 

We’ve experienced some ungodly (impressive) speakers in ultraportables in recent times and the Zenbook 14 joins that club. We can’t fathom how they get so loud… all while delivering good fidelity from top to bottom end. That includes some punch bass. It’s incredible for a 17mm-thick chassis.

The keyboard is white back-lit (to three levels) and offers low-travel, Scrabble-tile keys. They’re very accurate and comfortable to type upon for extended periods. Our only gripe is the squished arrow keys.  

The trackpad is smooth, accurate and has a nice, low-effort clicking action. It also sports Asus’ impressive, latest-generation, backlit number pad. You activate this by touching the button in the top right corner while the top-left corner dims the brightness by one level. The trackpad remains active and accurate while the numbers are displayed. It works very well.

While there’s no webcam-based Windows Hello log-on, the power button doubles as a fingerprint reader which does. 

All in all, Asus’ Zenbook 14 OLED is a joy to interact with in every way. 

Performance

Inside this Zenbook 14 OLED is a 3.4–4.7GHz Intel Core i7-1260P CPU with its four Performance cores and eight Efficiency cores. This is flanked by 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and (a rather stingy) 512MB NVMe hard drive. 

Nonetheless, they combined to score an impressive 5,847 in the general-computing-illuminating PCMark 10 test which is impressive for an ultraportable. It also scored 1,732 and 9,967 in the CPU-based Cinebench rendering tests (R15 and R23 respectively). Renderers won’t be hanging around. This all gives a combined score of 2.5 Stars out of 5 which might sound average (it literally is) but that’s across the entire market which includes behemoth gaming laptops with intrinsic overclocking. For a 14-inch ultraportable, it’s excellent. 

Not surprisingly, 3D performance isn’t great due to the integrated, 1.4GHz, Intel Xe GPU. This managed 1,958 in the AAA-gaming-like test, 3D Mark Time Spy which is an average of 10fps. In the similar, Fire Strike Extreme test, it scored 2,470 (average 11fps). It can’t double as a gaming laptop.  

It wouldn’t run the difficult, ray-tracing, 3DMark tests, Port Royal and Speed Way. However, it did score 18,271 in the easier Night Raid test which is an average of 105fps and shows it’s capable of playing casual and competitive games. 

We also ran our new(er) CS:GO test which stresses the whole system and is dramatically affected by the action on screen. It averaged a ‘playable’ 33fps in the whole benchmark, but this dropped to a slideshow-like 4fps for the slowest one per cent of the benchmark (1% Low test) when smoke and fire grenades were going off. 

It’s worth noting that it could get a little warm under load, but that the fans never got too loud and remained unobtrusive. 

Ultimately, it’s not a gaming machine but it can play some lesser games and they will look good on the faster-than-average, 90Hz screen. 

Connectivity

Inside there’s Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 6E. It might be a lopsided connectivity complement but the important connectors are there. Just note that the power supply uses one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports. 

Portability

The Zenbook 14 OLED 2022 weighs just 1.41KG and the power supply and cables only add another 340g. That’s an impressively lightweight package. The build quality is robust enough to survive life on the road. 

Inside, the sizeable 75Wh battery ran our PCMark 10 Modern Office test for 12 hours 43 minutes which is easily more than a full day out of the office. Impressive. 

Conclusion

All in all, Asus’ Zenbook 14 OLED is another winner from Asus’ understated Zenbook line. It suits every requirement of a portable laptop for every use case… including, to a minor extent, gaming. At $1,799 it’s also relatively affordable. It’s our new, number 10 Best Laptop which puts it in second place behind Asus’ impressive, ultraportable gaming laptops, the Zephyrus G14. That makes it the best business-friendly ultraportable we’ve seen. An incredible achievement.

Pros

Fast ultraportable
Hasty 90Hz OLED screen
Well built
Good battery
Great ergonomics

Cons

Screen could be faster
Poor 3D performance

Last Updated on 5 July 2024 by Nick Ross