Asus Zenbook S 14 Review (Core Ultra 2 | 2024)

It seems to have taken an eternity, but Intel’s much-hyped, next-gen Lunar Lake laptops are upon us and first off the rank is the latest and greatest Asus Zenbook S 14 – a laptop line that’s been impressing us greatly over recent years. Can Lunar Lake fulfil its promise of portable power? Will it redefine laptops? Will it make ARM-based CoPilot+ laptops redundant? Let’s find out…

Asus Zenbook S 14 Specs

Features, Ergonomics and Design

The Zenbook S 14, once again, looks great thanks to its innovative, ‘Zumaia’ Grey, ‘Ceraluminum’ lid which is aluminium with a ceramic coating. The pottery effect is unique in the market, but it remains incredibly sturdy and lightweight – just what you want from an ultraportable. On top of that, there’s the scored, metal, geometric lines and Asus monicker in the top-left corner. As with its Zenbooks forbears, it both looks and feels very high quality.

Opening it up reveals the bright (400-nit typical, 500-nit peak) high-resolution, 2,880 x 1,800 OLED display which, as expected, offers-up vibrant colours and excellent contrast in addition to a crisp and clear Windows Desktop. It’s HDR compatible too which doesn’t just further-augment contrast and true black performance, it means both colourful and monochromatic transitions are completely smooth. Our only gripes are that some, bright areas can see details blow out and that the glossy surface can act like a mirror when viewing dark content.

Still, it’s Pantone Validated for colour accuracy, TÜV Rheinland-certified for low blue light and it displays 100 per cent of the tricky DCI-P3 colour space which designers will like.

Furthermore, the quick, 120Hz refresh rate marries to the fast, OLED pixel response time to keep fast-moving objects rendered smooth and relatively blur free – only competitive FPS players might grumble.

On top of all that, it’s also a touchscreen and Asus even supplies its Asus Pen 2.0 stylus for you to use. It’s certainly responsive to touch interactions but perhaps a little unnecessary on a laptop that’s not a convertible and whose screen doesn’t even lie flat. Still, it’s a nice feature to have.

All, in all, it’s a very good screen.

Above it is a Full HD webcam (that’s Windows Hello compatible for face-recognition login). We were particularly impressed by its clarity, even in low light. Its microphone array is also very good at capturing clear audio, even in noisy environments. There’s no privacy slide but you can deactivate it with the F10 key and a light will go on to reassure you that it actually did something.

Below the screen is a Scrabble-tile keyboard that’s particularly comfortable and accurate to use for extended periods. I’m not a big fan of the squished arrow keys, but at least they’re isolated from the rest of the keys and therefore, intuitive to access.

Next to them is the CoPilot+ key which activates the full-blown CoPilot+ features which we’ve only seen on ARM laptops, so far. The more we use these Ai-based features, the more we’re impressed by them. We won’t write them all up here, but you can read more about them in this article.

The trackpad is very smooth and accurate and it has very-well-weighted buttons.

Inside, there is, what’s officially described as, a ‘built-in speaker.’ Whatever its specs are, its performance is stunning. There’s great fidelity from top to the bottom, punchy bass and it gets very loud without distorting. Amazing.

All in all, the latest Asus Zenbook S 14 is great to interact with.

Connectivity and Ports

Inside there’s Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. While I wouldn’t mind seeing another USB port, what’s there is fast and current. I do like seeing 108MBps wireless transfers, too! I should add that as a new benchmark test in 2025.

Features, Ergonomics and Design Score: 4.8 / 5

Performance

I won’t dwell too much on what makes Lunar Lake special. I fully recommend watching the general explainer video, here. The tl;dr is that it’s a stripped-down Meteor Lake CPU where all-manner of legacy architecture has been removed in order to improve responsiveness and power efficiency. Other benefits are the improved Ai chops (enough to run CoPilot+) plus a greatly enhanced, integrated GPU. Hyperthreading is gone and most tasks now run on tweaked, Low-Power Efficient cores with Performance cores instantly kicking in when more grunt is needed. We’ve been force fed gallons of Kool-Aid by Intel on the benefits, but finally we can see if the claims match the promises…

Inside this Zenbook S 14 is an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor with four Low-Power Efficient cores and four Performance cores that operate between 2.2 – 5.8GHz. There’s also an NPU (capable of 47 Trillion Operations Per Second – TOPS) plus an enhanced octa-core GPU which sees eight Xe cores running at 1.95Ghz (and is capable of 64 TOPS). It’s flanked by 32GB of low-power, LPDDR5600-RAM which is the maximum amount that Lunar Lake supports. So, how did it fare?

In our scoring system below, 1 represents the lowest score we’ve seen across the whole laptop market while 5 is the highest.

In the general-computing PCMark 10 test, which utilises all components of a system, the Zenbook S 14 scored 6,971 which is very impressive for an ultraportable. That said, this score is on a par with its previous iteration S 14 (7,007) which used a Core Ultra 7 115H processor. The ARM-based Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 wouldn’t run the test due to its limited compatibility. (Score: 3.2 / 5)

We were very interested to see how the loss of Hyperthreading would affect rendering and indeed, in the Cinebench R15 and R23 tests, the performance plummeted compared with the previous generation. In the drag-race-like R15 test, the Zenbook S 14 scored 1,633 while in the longer, R23 test, it scored 10,121. That’s a relative score of 1.8 / 5. Just watching the test blocks render – eight at a time – could be a bit painful to watch. The previous-generation Zenbook managed 2,565 and 11,926 respectively (a score of 2.3 / 5). The ARM-based, Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 managed 2,370 and 10,338 (a score of 2.1 / 5).

In the 3DMark gaming benchmarks, the Zenbook S 14 got off to a flying start by actually being able to run the difficult ray-tracing tests, Speed Way and Port Royal – something that previous Intel GPUs couldn’t do. It scored 943 (average 9.43fps) in the former and 2,052 (average 9.5fps) in the latter. While these are far from playable framerates, they’re a significant improvement over the previous generation and they suggest that some eye-candy features will be usable on lesser games. You can find out more about the new, ‘Lion Cove’ GPU cores, here.

In the AAA-title mimicking Time Spy and Fire Strike Extreme tests, the Zenbook S 14 scored 4,410 (average 25.3fps) in the former and 4,141 (average 19.2fps) in the latter. While these aren’t particularly playable either, the door is opened to mainstream gaming if you’re prepared to drop resolution and detail settings. The previous generation S 14 scored similar with a higher-clocked (2.25GHz) GPU.

In the lesser 3DMark Night Raid test the Zenbook S 14 scored 35,344 which is an average of 222.2fps. The previous generation managed 191.1fps.

I’d like to say that this latest version of Asus’ Zenbook S 14 feels more responsive than predecessors, but I want to live with it a bit more, first. I also ran the following tests and will be doing a deep dive into performance comparisons in the near future. The tests’ component scores should give an answer to this question, too.

UL Procyon Microsoft Office: 7,248
UL Procyon Adobe Photo Editing: 5,884
UL Procyon Adobe Premiere: 10,702
UL Procyon Ai Vision (CPU):70
UL Procyon Ai Vision (GPU): 246
3DMark Solar Bay: 15,228
3DMark Steel Nomad: 886

Ultimately, the Lunar Lake Zenbook S 14 does offer the sort of stripped-down, more-efficient performance boosts we were expecting, but the results do demonstrate the lower ceiling for overall performance. Rendering is naturally the big loser, but other scores have improved, to varying degrees, while supposedly saving considerable power, which we’ll (hopefully) see below. It’s also important to remember that the overall, enhanced, Ai chops provide access to CoPilot+ and this is a significant plus point.

Asus’ cooling technology mostly keeps the Zenbook silent although the fan can ramp up to a light whoosh when straining. It tends to ramp-down quickly again, though. While the base can get a bit hot when under serious load, it rarely gets more-than warm. It feels very efficient and performance only dropped by less-than half a per cent in our extended Cinebench R23 30-minute test, so there’s no significant issue with thermal throttling.

3D Performance Score: 1.9 / 5

Portability and Battery Life

ARM’s two main claims to fame, with its CoPilot+ laptops, were that they ran CoPilot+ and that their battery life dwarfed what was available with Windows laptops. Without saying as much, we suspect Intel’s number one focus with Lunar Lake was to rival ARM’s reduced processors (which are efficient but can’t run nearly as many applications as Intel’s x86 architecture) for power efficiency and battery life.

Asus says the Zenbook S 14 can last 27 hours. Manufacturer claims can mean anything, though – some say (in the footnotes) that it will stay turned on, doing nothing, for that amount of time. Asus based its claim of video playback. What we can reveal is that the S 14 ran our PCMark 10 Modern Office test for a best-ever, 24 hours 2 minutes. It also ran our UL Procyon Microsoft Office benchmark for 23 hours 15 minutes. These scores are extraordinary and, to achieve this without ARM’s application limitations, suggests Lunar Lake has succeeded in its primary aim.

On top of all that, the robust ceramic-aluminium chassis weighs just 1.19KG and the phone-like charger and USB-C cable only add an extra 184g, not that you’ll need them.

In short, Asus’ Zenbook S 14 is by far the most portable laptop we’ve yet seen.

Portability and Battery Life Score: 5 / 5

Price and Availability

The Lunar Lake Zenbook S 14 launches today and is available from Asus’ E-shop, JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman and Officeworks for $3,399. While it’s not cheap, you’re getting a lot of laptop in this tiny chassis, meaning it’s very good value.

Price: 2.5 / 5

Value: 4.4 / 5

Conclusion

With such great ergonomics, features and portability, the Asus Zenbook S 14 becomes our new, Number 1 Best Laptop. It’s the perfect showcase for what Lunar Lake can do. It won’t be for everyone, especially those who do regular rendering on the move and power users who leave a gazillion Chrome tabs open along with Teams and other weighty apps. They also might feel limited by the 32GB RAM limit. However, we’re seeing a generational leap in terms of portability and power efficiency. The practical boost of having CoPilot+ operational, owing to the Ai enhancements, is very real.

I feel a bit bad for ARM and its CoPilot+ PCs but, at the same time, it had a head start with CoPilot+ and chose to charge a premium for it rather than build market share. Its laptops are arguably moribund now, but time will tell. As we recently saw in the MSI Vector 16 HX, power-hungry, powerful, 14th-Gen, Raptor Lake processors look like they won’t be going anywhere soon. It will be interesting to see how long 14th-Gen Meteor Lake Core Ultra CPUs remain in play. Time will tell. For now, I’m keen to see how Lunar Lake CPUs (which, it seems, will officially be known as ‘Core Ultra (Wave 2)) will be used in other types of (non-ultraportable) laptop, sooner rather than later. I’ll report back once I’ve more information.

Overall: 5 / 5

Last Updated on 26 April 2025 by Nick Ross