Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (UM3402)

The ultraportable is, in many ways, the platonic ideal of the laptop concept: Thin and portable, it's a capable machine for productivity anywhere and everywhere, with a battery that lasts all day. Our favorite ultraportables all weigh around 3 pounds or less and feature long battery life, along with varying selections of ports and other features. The latest Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (UM3402; $869) combines many of the features found in the most premium models but manages to deliver them for less than most high-end laptops. It's a remarkable bargain for under $900, though we do wish its AMD processor had more punch to it.

The Zenbook 14 OLED model UM3402 seen here is the AMD-powered version of a slimline also sold with Intel processors. It's available with either Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 silicon.

The cheapest AMD option is a $699 model that combines a Ryzen 5 7530U chip, 8GB of memory, and a 256GB solid-state drive. Our test unit steps up to an eight-core, 2.0GHz Ryzen 7 7730U CPU and doubles the memory and storage to 16GB and 512GB respectively. Asus lists this model at $899.99, but the same configuration is sold through Walmart for a more affordable $869.

As an ultraportable, the Zenbook 14 OLED is defined by its dimensions and weight, measuring just 0.67 inch thick and edging barely over the 3-pound mark. It's a bit heavier than the Acer Swift Go 14 (2.9 pounds), but right in line with the Editors' Choice award-winning HP Pavilion Plus 14 (3.09 pounds).

The metal chassis is surprisingly firm and flex-free for such a slim design, and the aluminum construction is quite handsome in a near-black finish that Asus calls Jade Black. If that name causes you the same initial confusion that I had—jade makes you think of shades of green, but the laptop actually has a subtle brown tint—I wouldn't blame you. During this review, I learned of such a mineral known as black jade, found in a range of shades including a deep black flecked with brown and other earth tones.

The rigidity of the laptop contributes to its durability, and the Zenbook 14 is surprisingly stout for such a svelte machine. Asus has put the design through 12 MIL-STD-810H military-grade tests and it's rated to survive shock, vibration, temperature extremes, and even light blowing sand and dust. While it won't survive the conditions faced by actual rugged laptops, it's more than ready to survive the bumps and spills of office life or the occasional road trip.

Like many Asus laptops, the Zenbook uses a riser hinge that tilts the system to an angled position when open. Lifting the rear of the chassis has the dual benefit of improving airflow and giving the keyboard a slightly more ergonomic typing tilt. The design accents this hinge with a silvery flourish. If you need it to, the lid will actually open a full 180 degrees, letting the laptop lay flat.

The keyboard is comfortable enough, with well-spaced keys and a subtle dished shape that curves each keycap ever so slightly. The power key has a built-in fingerprint reader for effortless secure logins, and the touchpad does double duty as a numeric pad—press the num pad icon in the corner, and the touchpad lights up with an LED grid of numbers. It's not as tactile as a physical numeric keypad, but for occasional data entry, it's a welcome and clever addition.

Asus fits an ample number of ports on the sides of the Zenbook 14, with a mix of dual 10Gbps USB-C ports (which support fast charging and 4K external displays via DisplayPort adapters), full-sized USB-Type A, and an HDMI monitor port and microSD card slot. Compared with ultraportables that have only Thunderbolt ports, it's exciting to get a few handy connections without having to reach for a dongle. (Looking at you, Apple and Dell.)

The 3.5mm audio jack works with headphones and headsets. It also gets a boost thanks to Dolby Atmos audio and a dual-channel smart amplifier, which also drives the system's Harman Kardon speakers.

Wireless connectivity is also taken care of, with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth as standard equipment.

Finally, the star of the show isn't the Zenbook's chassis or ports but its 14-inch OLED panel. Framed by a barely-there NanoEdge bezel, the touch screen has a slightly taller-than-average 16:10 aspect ratio and a sharp 2,880-by-1,800-pixel resolution.

With a 90% screen-to-body ratio, it looks larger than its 14 inches, and benefits from Pantone-validated color and DCI-P3 support, not to mention a Gorilla Glass touch overlay. It even looks excellent when dealing with fast-paced video or light gaming, thanks to a 90Hz refresh rate.

For our benchmark charts, I pitted the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED against a number of 13- and 14-inch ultraportables ranging from the abovementioned HP Pavilion Plus 14 and Acer Swift Go 14 to the latest Dell XPS 13 Plus and our test unit's slightly smaller stablemate the Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED. All five contenders have top-quality OLED displays, so if you're perusing your local retailer, it's likely you'll find them on the same shelf.

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.

Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Finally, we usually run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. But we've seen a number of compatibility problems running the test on recent systems, and the Zenbook 14 OLED was another that balked at this particular test.

Looking over the productivity test results, we see a few things that stand out about the AMD-powered Zenbook. First, it was occasionally the lowest-scoring system in the group, though still well within an acceptable range generally speaking. Second, the Zenbook never neared the gold medal among these thin-and-light machines. While it's more than fine for office apps, like Word and Excel, if you're looking for more power, opt for the Intel version or one of these Intel-based competitors.

For general-use laptops, we run four synthetic graphics benchmarks. These include two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Also thrown into the gauntlet is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL performance. Our two GFXBench tests are rendered offscreen to accommodate different native display resolutions; more frames per second (fps) means higher performance.

The Zenbook 14's AMD Radeon integrated graphics delivered lower performance than the Iris Xe Graphics provided by Intel Core CPUs. With almost no ultraportables containing discrete GPUs, they don't focus on gaming or CGI rendering but rather on the basic tasks of online media, such as streaming video at 4K and lower resolutions. AMD's integrated solution can handle 4K, but it might not be the best choice for Adobe creative apps or other visually demanding software. With lower scores in 3DMark and GFXBench, you're more likely to notice the Asus topping out for anything beyond casual gaming, though it'll certainly handle the demands of daily use.

We test laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

Additionally, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Clocking nearly 16 hours in our video rundown, the Asus Zenbook 14 is a standout even in a category known for its long battery life. It didn't break the 20-hour mark, as some Apple MacBooks have, but the laptop is still a superb pick for anyone who values time away from a wall outlet. It's also worth underlining how excellent the Zenbook 14 OLED's screen is, even amid this group of premium OLED panels. Color-wise, the laptop proved about as broad and vibrant as it gets, matching some of the best displays we've seen on deluxe mobile workstations. Finally, this panel is plenty bright enough, but it's difficult to tell from these charts. (OLED's ultra-high contrast looks vibrant even with numbers below the 400 nits we like to see from IPS screens.)

The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (UM3402) stands out, thanks to a mix of premium design, excellent connectivity, and a gorgeous high-res display. If you want an ultraportable with long battery life and professional-class color, it's a slam dunk for less than $900...if not for that AMD chip inside. The only real negative—which is enough to impact its score—is that its AMD Ryzen 7 CPU isn't a match for Intel's Core i7 chips in this implementation. So, if pure performance is your priority, you might accept shorter battery life from a competitor such as our current top laptop, the HP Pavilion Plus 14.