ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA) Review — Intel is back!

ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA)

8.6

The ASUS Zenbook S 14 is a laptop that truly has it all. If you're looking for a premium laptop that can keep up with your demanding lifestyle, the Zenbook S 14 is an excellent choice.

What's Good?

• A symphony of style and substance
• Thin, light, and mighty
• Landing a moonshot by Intel!
• A surprising gaming contender?
• Realizing the all-day battery life dream
• Yet another sweet ASUS Lumina OLED display

What's Not?

• Keyboard could be slightly better

Last month we managed to take the ASUS Zenbook S 16 (UM5606W) for a spin and came away very impressed. And interestingly enough, that was our first taste of Strix Point. This time we have the ASUS Zenbook S 14, which is our first look at Lunar Lake. In terms of aesthetics, the two laptops are very similar, aside from the obvious screen size difference and the processor under its hood. With that out of the way, let’s go through what this laptop offers.

ASUS Zenbook S 14 — What’s Good?

A symphony of style and substance

Just like its larger brethren, the ASUS Zenbook S 14 is an ultra-slim marvel is designed to impress with its sleek, minimalist design and premium build quality. Featuring a lid crafted from the tongue-twisting Ceraluminum in Scandinavian White, paird to a keyboard deck and bottom lid crafted out of smooth, sand-blasted aluminum, it exudes an air of sophistication. The ASUS monogram machined into the lid here further accentuates its premium aesthetics that will turn heads without even trying.

The fine CNC-machined holes above the keyboard that we first saw with the ASUS Zenbook S 16 is also here. There are fewer of them here — 2715, to be exact — owing to the narrower dimensions of the ASUS Zenbook S 14, but similar to the Zenbook S 16, these holes are here to provide an avenue for hot air to exit the chassis, without unsightly vents on the sides or back of the laptop. All the more space for you to appreciate the fantastic Ceraluminum lid.

Thin, light, and mighty

One of the most striking features of the Zenbook S 14 is its incredible thinness. It’s so slim and light that you’ll barely notice it in your bag. It measures 11.9mm at its thinnest point, just like the ASUS Zenbook S 16. But thanks to its more compact dimensions, comes in at just 1.2kg. Not like the ASUS Zenbook S 16 was heavy by any measure, but the ASUS Zenbook S 14 just takes portability to a new level.

And once again, just like the ASUS Zenbook S 16, the ASUS Zenbook S 14’s assortment of ports remains uncompromised, despite its incredible portability. We still get a full-sized HDMI and USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, along with two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a standard headphone jack. I still remember the days when ASUS tried to convince us a 3.5mm jack was unnecessary… Glad that they changed their mind.

Landing a moonshot by Intel!

Lunar Lake is a huge leap of faith for Intel. Intel practically slept with the competition to come up with it, having it manufactured by TSMC. Intel dropped HyperThreading too with the Lion Cove core architecture, a technology they’ve been championing since the days of Pentium 4. Not just that, Lunar Lake debuts with the new Xe2 graphics architecture and an all-new NPU 4 that delivers 47 TOPS, exceeding the requirements for Microsoft Copilot+. Does all that effort pay off?

From the get-go, we can see that dropping HyperThreading has lowered multi-core performance versus its predecessor. In fact it doesn’t even compare that well against the Core i5-1340P. But we do see an improvement in single-threaded performance. The biggest gains of course come from its new Intel Arc Graphics 140V iGPU. This iGPU is finally able to go toe-to-toe against AMD’s RDNA 3 integrated graphics.

We included the ROG Flow Z13 in the comparison charts as it was a good way to see how does the Intel Arc Graphics 140V stack up against discrete graphics. According to these benchmarks, we’re seeing Intel come out on top of AMD’s Strix Point offerings, and is even better at raytracing than the GeForce RTX 3050 mobile chip, albeit one hobbled by its 35W TGP. Another thing I would like to mention is that NPU performance has also made a big leap, going from 10 TOPS in Meteor Lake to 47 TOPS here. However I have yet to be able to measure any real-world gains from the huge uplift in NPU performance.

A surprising gaming contender?

While this is far from a gaming laptop, we did put it through its paces with Zenless Zone Zero, Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong. In Cyberpunk 2077, we saw 30FPS at 1800p with FSR set to Balanced, while in Wukong we got average framerates of 47FPS at 1800p, with FSR set to 40% and Frame Generation on. We aren’t looking at insane FPS figures, but for a laptop that measures less than 12.9mm at its thickest point, this is an incredible showing. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370-powered Zenbook S 16 outperforms the Zenbook S 14 in Wukong, but is also outpaced in Cyberpunk 2077, so I would say that the gaming performance in on par for these two laptops. But I will also add that for this laptop to perform on this level is even more impressive, as its smaller.

Realizing the all-day battery life dream

While all that performance gains are exciting and all, the goal of Lunar Lake is to counter the efficiency advantage that Arm has over x86 chips. And we would say that they have gotten somewhere with Lunar Lake. Over 19 hours of battery life in PCMark’s Modern Office benchmark marks a new high for us, and even in daily use, I found myself getting close to two days of use. It would probably take more testing for us to really identify if it can consistently outperform the Snapdragon X Elite-powered Vivobook S 15 in terms of battery runtime, but I am really liking what I am seeing here.

Yet another sweet ASUS Lumina OLED display

Just like all its recent ASUS Zenbook brethren, the ASUS Zenbook S 14 here touts an incredible 3K ASUS Lumina OLED panel. There’s the quick 120Hz refresh rate, 100% DCI-P3 and Pantone Validated colors, ensuring that this is among the smoothest and most vibrant yet color accurate display you can find in a laptop. Narrow bezels deliver a stunning 90% screen-to-body ratio, and yet ASUS manages to cram a webcam complete with IR facial recognition supporting Windows Hello for convenient security. It lacks touch though despite its glossy glass screen cover, so if you want touch and stylus input, you will have to look at the larger ASUS Zenbook S 16 for now.

ASUS Zenbook S 14 — What’s Not?

Keyboard could be slightly better

Being the absolute nitpicker I am, I have to come up with something to put the ASUS Zenbook S 14 in its place. And its pretty clear that the one compromise ASUS made here is the keyboard. With that said, the keyboard is well-spaced, with keys that are satisfyingly tactile. The large touchpad with gesture support is smooth and responsive, making navigation effortless. I just wish that the keyboard had more travel to it. It’s already way better than any recent MacBook I have touched, but still, prior ASUS Zenbooks often offered 1.4mm of travel, making the 1.1mm here feel a bit limited.

ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA) Specifications

ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA) — should you buy this?

The ASUS Zenbook S 14 is a laptop that truly has it all. If you’re looking for a premium laptop that can keep up with your demanding lifestyle, the Zenbook S 14 is an excellent choice. RM6,999 might seem like a huge sum to fork out, but if you consider just how incredible a laptop you’re getting, it’s really quite reasonably priced.

Performance is on par with entry-level gaming laptops from a few years back, but the ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA) delivers that in a sleek, ultra-thin design. You also get all-day battery life, which I must say is probably Intel’s biggest win after all the “L”s they took this past few years. There are surely going to be cheaper options that will tout the same Intel Core Ultra processors, but they won’t come in this sleek, ultra-thin, CNC-machined, Ceraluminum-lidded design of the ASUS Zenbook S 14. Whether that’s worth a premium over the competition, I will leave it to you.

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