Review: Asus Zenbook 14X OLED (model UX5400EA)
The Asus Zenbook 14X OLED notebook could be for you if high quality screens float your boat.
ASUS is known for its competitively priced, compact quality notebooks. That reputation continues with the Zenbook 14X OLED (model UX5400EA), a 14-inch notebook with a high-quality organic LED display.
The Zenbook is suited to general and business use, and at 1.4kg is lightweight and portable. The aluminium alloy chassis and lid means it is strong as well as light.
The first thing you notice when you switch it on is the quality of the 2.8K, 16:10 screen. This laptop is about the screen. An organic LED (OLED) display emits its own light, offers precise colours without bleeding between bright and dark areas, and can be thinner without a backlighting layer.
OLED TVs are the best-in-market and that OLED quality is evident with bright, detailed images and stunningly vivid colour quality on this laptop.
ASUS says the screen supports 3840x2400 resolution, has a 0.2 millisecond response time, is Pantone validated with 550 nits of peak brightness, and supports HDR, which offers clearer images in bright and dark screen areas.
The downside is that you won’t enjoy the battery life achieved on some Apple and Microsoft devices. For example last year’s 16-inch MacBook Pro ran almost 16 hours on one charge playing 1080p video continuously; here, ASUS itself cites only up to 8.3 hours of battery life with its 63 watt hour battery.
OK, you won’t fly from Sydney to LA and watch movies on a single charge, if you manage to fly. But you can watch three movies back to back in eight hours if that floats your boat.
ASUS uses a brick charger attached to a USB-C cable for juicing the Zenbook. The charger itself is small and square. In 2022 I’ll be looking for laptop makers brave enough to include small Gallium nitride (GaN) wall chargers and dispense with laptop house bricks altogether. Who will lead the way?
This Zenbook includes the latest ASUS ScreenPad. The trackpad on these devices doubles as a display with its own functionality, which is what the ScreenPad is. You can use it to trigger messaging independently of the main screen, for handwriting, as a number keypad, calculator or for spreadsheet shortcuts. It’s a novel way to multi-task.
You can drag an app from the main screen to the ScreenPad, such as a movie. I found that the ease of this depended on the app I chose to drag. The keyboard is comfortable to use with well spaced keys.
This Zenbook supports fingerprint login accessed by touching the power key; the Windows Hello face recognition option comes up as incompatible with the Zenbook camera.
My review system had an Intel 11th generation i7 (1165G7) processor. New 12th generation chips will come to market soon. The unit also had 16GB of memory, with one terabyte SSD storage.
I’d class the port connections around the sides as good rather than spectacular: 2 USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, full sized HDMI 2.0, and one USB-A port. Having both USB-A and USB-C is a plus, but you will need an adaptor for more connections.
Audio quality is somewhat on the treble side, nothing to write home about.
I used the Cinebench R15 benchmark to gauge performance. The Zenbook supported 78 frames per second screen refresh rate, so this unit will handle games with faster frame rates. The processor score of 842 cb suggests decent performance.
This Zenbook isn’t as finely tuned performance wise, when compared to, say, an Apple Mac laptop, but if you love bright screens with great colour on OLED displays, this may be the laptop for you. Price from $2299.