The Asus Zenbook 14X OLED is almost everything you could nee…

Asus ZenBook 14X OLED

MSRP $1,000.00

“The Asus ZenBook 14X OLED is best judged by its stunning OLED display and attractive price.”

Pros

• attractive price

• solid build quality

• very good productivity performance

• Great OLED display

• Excellent keyboard and touchpad

Shortcoming

• The value is not as strong with a discrete GPU

• creative performance is not great

• Battery life is absolutely average

The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED is easily the best value laptop you can buy. For $700, it’s the complete package.

However, the ZenBook 14X OLED takes it a step further. It swaps out AMD for Intel, adds a faster refresh rate display, and boosts performance. And while it’s not a huge deal, the ZenBook 14X is still one of the best laptops you can buy, especially if you’re looking for a slightly more premium option.

Specifications and configuration

Asus has three configurations available for the ZenBook 14X OLED. The entry-level model is $800 for a Core i5-13500H CPU, 8GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, Intel Iris Xe graphics, and a 14.5-inch 2.8K OLED display. My review unit cost $1,000 and came with a Core i7-13700H and 16GB of RAM. The high-end model is $1,500 for a Core i9-13900H, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050. The ZenBook 14X OLED is priced at the most attractive of its two lower-end configurations.

At $1,500 it’s well equipped and still competitive, but it doesn’t stand out as strongly. Compared to the ZenBook 14 OLED, the base model is $100 more, but it has double the storage space and with the upgraded CPU it’s about $130 more expensive. This makes it roughly as great a value. Another solid competitor is the Acer Swift Go 14, which has the same price and configuration for about $1,000, but its OLED display had inaccurate colors, which hurt its review rating.

Another excellent design for the money

I feel like I’m repeating review after review, but many Windows laptops have adopted similar minimalist designs. For the most part they’re attractive, but a few stand out. The ZenBook 14X OLED fits that trend, with simple taper lines on the edge and a solid Inkwell Gray color that looks a lot like black. Asus has added some charm with the geometric lines in the lid, but once again, this is a laptop meant to blend in with the crowd. There’s a Sandstone Beige model that has a ceramic matte finish with a plasma “ceramization” (yes, that’s not misspelled) coating that’s more protective and resists fingerprints. However, I haven’t seen that model in person, so I can’t speak about the difference in appearance.

The all-aluminum construction is of high quality, with no wobbles, bends or twists in the keyboard deck or lower chassis, and just a little bit of wiggle in the lid. It’s not as solid as more expensive laptops like the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8, but the build quality is great for the money.

With small display bezels on the top and sides, the ZenBook 14X OLED is a reasonable size. It’s just 0.67 inches thick and weighs 3.44 pounds, which is a bit heavy for a 14-inch laptop. The ZenBook 14 OLED has nearly the same width and depth, and it’s just as thin, but it’s 3.06 pounds lighter.

You’ll also love the ZenBook’s keyboard, which has plenty of travel and fast switches with a light bottoming action. The keycaps are a good size and have plenty of space. It’s not the best keyboard I’ve used — HP’s Specter Keyboard and Apple’s Magic Keyboard have earned that title — but it’s good enough for long sessions of typing without experiencing fatigue. The touchpad is large and comfortable, and my only complaint is that the buttons sound a little loud and snappy.

Asus has incorporated its NumberPad 2.0 embedded LED numeric keypad into the touchpad, which is great for anyone who enters a lot of numbers. The touchpad also has a hydrophobic and fingerprint-resistant coating making the surface easy to clean and increasing wear resistance.

Finally, webcams run at 1080p, which is becoming the new standard. The technology has been built in to further enhance the image, and the ZenBook 14X OLED promises a stunning videoconferencing experience. Windows 11 Hello has an infrared camera for facial recognition, making login easier.

Performance is better, but battery life suffers

The ZenBook 14X OLED joins a number of 14-inch laptops that use 45-watt 13th-generation Intel CPUs matched with integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics. It’s a combination that delivers fast productivity performance and good speed in CPU-dependent creative tasks. But many creative apps use GPUs to speed up performance, and these laptops aren’t a good match.

You can buy the ZenBook 14X OLED with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050, but even that won’t make much of an impact on applications like Adobe’s Premiere Pro.

However, if you’re primarily concerned about demanding productivity workflows, the ZenBook 14X OLED is a strong performer. Its performance in our CPU-intensive benchmarks, as well as PCMark 10 Complete Suite, is about the same as other laptops with the Core i7-13700H in our review unit, and it’s much faster than the ZenBook 14 OLED with its 15-inch display. Watt AMD processor.

Given the slight difference in price between the two, you’ll be happier with the ZenBook 14X OLED when it comes to better performance.

Battery life is where the ZenBook 14 OLED has the advantage, thanks to both the CPU’s lower power rating and AMD’s general efficiency. However, compared to other similarly equipped laptops, the ZenBook 14X OLED was more competitive. Note that it won’t meet our video-looping battery test, which I’ve only seen with a few other laptops.

But in our web-browsing test and PCMark 10 Application Battery benchmark, the ZenBook X14 OLED performed around average, which typically translates to less than a full day of battery life. Apple MacBook Air M2 is the best laptop here, its battery life is very good which can last even for another day. The ZenBook 14 OLED was significantly longer-lasting than our other comparison laptops.

Even better OLED display

Asus has taken a lead by not only implementing OLED sooner than many manufacturers, but also by putting OLED displays in very affordable laptops. You’ll find few in the same price range that can match the display quality, which is stunning with lots of colors and deep blacks. Asus has also included various methods, including special screen savers and pixel shifting, to help avoid burn-in, a potential pitfall of OLED. The ZenBook 14X OLED display was a great example of the technology according to my colorimeter, with detailed colors at 100% sRGB, 98% AdobeRGB, and 99% DCI-P3. This is average for OLED and much wider than the 95% sRGB and 75% AdobeRGB of the average IPS display. Color accuracy was also great at a deltaE of 1.04 (less than 1.0 is considered excellent).

My colorimeter will not return contrast ratio results, which I have seen with many recent OLED displays. But with the right black levels, you are guaranteed extremely high contrast, on par with other OLED displays and mini-LED panels. One advantage over the ZenBook 14 OLED, which performed similarly, is the ZenBook 14X OLED’s 120Hz refresh rate. The ZenBook 14 OLED tops out at 90Hz.

Overall, this is an excellent performance that will delight productivity users, creators, and media consumers alike. Audio quality was just fine, with two down-firing speakers providing enough volume and quality for general computing needs. If you’re streaming an action movie or listening to music, you’ll need a good pair of headphones.

Another great laptop with a great price

There’s a natural comparison between the ZenBook 14 OLED and the ZenBook 14X OLED, both representing great values, especially in their entry-level configurations. Which one is better value depends on how much you value extra storage and a faster CPU. Again, you have to balance high performance with long battery life.

It’s a tough call. I went back and forth on how to rate the ZenBook 14X OLED. Yes, it’s more powerful than the ZenBook 14 OLED, but it also offers less battery life. And it’s a little more expensive. In the end, I think it’s a little undervalued, so although I highly recommend it, I don’t think it deserves that high of a ranking.