Zenbook S 14 with Lunar Lake Review: Is It Worth It?
October 7, 2024
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The Zenbook S 14 with its Updated Chassis
Summary
The Zenbook S 14 with Intel's Lunar Lake processor is a much-hyped laptop with great features, but they've upped its starting price to $1.4k. So is it worth it?
Table of contents:
Introduction
ASUS’s new Zenbook S 14 with Intel's latest Lunar Lake processor has very minimal fan noise, feels cool to the touch, and has a new premium chassis that looks great. But should you actually buy it at its $1,400 MSRP? I mean folks, just 1 year ago we were recommending Zenbooks because they cost $800 or less. They used to be an incredible deal delivering a somewhat premium experience for a much cheaper price than other laptops. So today we're going to go beyond the hype and review the laptop in our normal Just Josh fashion, hopefully helping you decide if this laptop is right for you.
Let's start with a few Pro's and Con's:
| Pro | Con |
|---|---|
| Small and Portable | CPU underperforms in multi-core |
| 2.8K OLED Display | Expensive starting price |
| Phenomenal battery life | Trackpad is disappointing for the price |
| No heat and fan noise | Max display brightness of 370nits |
Chassis: Premium and Lightweight
ASUS has released a number of Zenbooks in the last 2 years, and we have them all in the studio. What we’ve consistently noticed is that even though they are their premium line, their build quality feels cheaper than competitors. Until now! We love the chassis update the Zenbook has gotten this time around. Its patented “ceraluminum” finish now matches its larger S 16 sibling, and we really dig the look and feel of this combined satin/metallic build. It looks stylish for using at the coffee shop and is also very fingerprint resistant.
As it is our job to nitpick, we did notice that the bottom corner didn’t quite sit flat on the desk. Though this was only noticeable when the screen was tilted back. We hope this is a one off with our unit because other than this it feels well built for such a small laptop. Deck flex and screen flex is very minimal. It is also very portable at 2.6 pounds, which is extremely light for a laptop with a 14inch display. One thing we want to call out is that because of how thin the laptop is, it's actually quite dense. When you hold it you may be tricked into thinking it’s heavier than it is.
Display: High Resolution; Low Brightness
With so many similar Zenbooks in the studio, we know these 2.8K OLED touchscreens pretty well at this point. This laptop’s display maintains its wonderful color accuracy covering 100% of the sRGB and P3 color gamuts and 96% of AdobeRGB. That means professional color work is viable.
Its 2880x1800 resolution in a 14 inch form factor also means your content looks nice and crisp, including small text. Developers and anyone working in spreadsheets are going to love this.
Where this screen starts to feel less premium is in its unimpressive max brightness of 370nits and its screen door effect. This means you can see colored pixels peeking through when looking at solid white content, like you often do on a website or word document. Both the screen door and lower brightness are unfortunately common for OLED panels in laptops. I think one of the only OLED panels we’ve seen that doesn’t suffer from these issues is the one in the Slim 7x. Due to the Zenbook’s glossy screen finish and middling brightness, you’ll likely find it difficult to use in a very bright room or outside. The reflections will become distracting.
Trackpad: Mechanical and Unimpressive
The trackpad is mechanical and not great. We think it’s nice that it includes additional gestures like volume and brightness along the left and right side of the trackpad respectively, but they are only convenient if you remember them. If a trackpad is make or break for you on a laptop like it is for Josh, competing premium laptops from other manufacturers have more accurate, haptic trackpads like the HP Spectre, Surface Laptop 7, and MacBook Air.
Keyboard: Good, but not Great
When it comes to the keyboard, the Zenbooks have taken us on a roller coaster ride. The 2023 models had superb keyboards for their price with good key travel and a satisfying click. But, in early 2024, Asus took a big step back with their Zenbooks that had Core Ultra series 1 and Ryzen 8000. Their keyboards felt noticeably low travel and a bit mushy. This keyboard is better but still not great. The keys feel more responsive, but it still feels noticeably low travel. Josh found his wrists were uncomfortable typing on it. On the plus side, we do appreciate the size, shape, and spacing of the keys. It also has a standard Windows layout other than the CoPilot key replacing the right control, so you're unlikely to mispress keys. The backlight is bright and easy to read behind the dark keycaps, so it'd be comfortable to use in a darker environment.
Speakers: Fantastic
The speakers are excellent! They have a good balance of sound in a small laptop, and we were all really surprised. It is very competitive with the MacBook Air, although they have different pros and cons. The Zenbook’s sound stage is fuller, and the MacBook’s sounds more dynamic with better sound separation.
Connectivity & Upgradeability: Pretty Decent
The ports on this laptop are pretty good. Starting on the left we have an audio combo jack, two USB-C ports that both support Thunderbolt, and an HDMI 2.1 port. On the right we have a USB-A 10 gigabit port. Our only nit is that all the charging and display out capable ports are on the left side which may be inconvenient depending on what you need to plug into it.
Looking at the inside of the laptop, which you can access after removing its 10 screws, these Lunar Lake laptops all have integrated memory, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.4 on the chip itself. This is great as you get fast speeds, but none of it is upgradeable. The non-upgradeable memory may be frustrating, but laptops have mostly had soldered memory for a while now. The only things that are replaceable are the SSD and battery.
Performance: Strong Single-Core; Poor Multi-Core
The new Lunar Lake chip in this Zenbook, the Core Ultra 7 258V, does better than comparable new processors in single core and graphics, but struggles in multi-core.
Its strong single core and faster integrated memory speeds means your applications will feel snappy and responsive, but not quite as much as you’d experience on the MacBook Air with M3. This is evident in both Geekbench, which tests a variety of common performance tasks, and Cinebench, which tests the processor when it’s maxed out.
Both of these benchmarks also show where the Zenbook’s performance in multi-core falls short. That is because these Lunar Lake laptops only have 8 cores: 4 performance and 4 efficient. This is significantly less than laptops with processors from other brands at this price point. This means these Lunar Laptops will be able to handle basic multi-tasking or even some productivity tasks such as coding, so long as the projects you are working on are simple. But, for applications that can take advantage of multiple cores or if you're working on complex workloads, these laptops won’t be able to compete.
Integrated Graphics: Awesome
Back on the plus side, these new processors have excellent integrated graphics. This is best demonstrated by our TimeSpy Direct X 12 gaming benchmark. You'll notice that Snapdragon processors don't do very well here, and that is because TimeSpy doesn't run natively on their hardware.
If you don't game much, but still require graphics for creative tasks, you'll be better represented by the Wildlife Extreme benchmark which runs on Vulkan.
Heat and Fan Noise: Barely Any in Light Use
When it comes to heat and fan noise, that’s really a thing of the past with these new Lunar Lake laptops. For my use case of this Zenbook, which was casual use like browsing the web and writing this article, I never heard fan noise and it never got warm.
If you are interested in how it performs under a torture test, we ran Cinebench on a loop for 10 minutes. In this unlikely usage scenario, its fan noise is noticeable but not that bad versus competitors. It does get a bit warm on the keyboard deck, but the underside gets even warmer. We wouldn’t advise doing heavy performance tasks with this laptop on your lap.
If you want more details about how this chip performs vs its competition and what Lunar Lake offers as a whole, check out our deep dive we just put out for the launch linked here. It has all the fun charts and graphs your heart desires!
Battery Life: Best in Class
Thanks to their lower core count and performance, we see huge boosts to the battery life in the Zenbook S 14. On an extremely optimized video playback test, it took nearly 19 hours to run out of battery. The only other laptops that come close to this are the older Yoga7i 2-in-1 with a similarly low-powered processor and the Slim 7x with the Snapdragon X Elite chip. What’s different about both of those laptops is that they are both cheaper, especially the older 7i which is significantly so. If you’re interested in which laptop is the best for battery life, we are currently working on a video on our YouTube channel that will go over this topic in depth, so get subscribed over there with notifications on the stay in the loop. Here are the results of comparable devices to the Zenbook.
One thing this battery test doesn’t do is test performance tasks while on battery. You’ll be glad to know that the Zenbook’s already low multi-core performance does not lower any more here. It also does well in maintaining its battery life when doing high performance tasks. After 30 minutes of running Cinebench on battery, it had 79% battery remaining. This is only beaten by the MacBook Air and the Zenbook with AMD’s older Zen 4 processor. The latter has a much lower resolution screen that helps its battery life.
Conclusion
The new Lunar Lake Zenbook is a great device for light users and even some professionals like programmers. It has extremely long battery life, snappy single core performance, solid integrated graphics, looks stylish, and feels premium. And, it just doesn’t have the application compatibility issue of Snapdragon laptops that run the ARM version of Windows. Many specialist applications just don’t run on that hardware, which undermines how good some of those laptops are.
Anyway, our main issue with the Zenbook S 14 is its sticker price of $1,400. It just isn't as premium as many other laptops in this price range. Its screen isn’t that bright, its keyboard feels low travel, and its trackpad is mediocre. For example, we like the other Lunar Lake laptop from the launch, the Lenovo Slim 7i Aura edition, more than the Zenbook for almost everything other than its portability and battery life. The Aura still has a pretty good showing in both those categories, though. It also has a brighter screen and a nicer keyboard, both of which are going to be better for the light users we like this laptop for. For the same price, if you're a light user who doesn't need broad application support, you could get laptops with better creature comforts in the MacBook Air with M3, Lenovo's Slim 7x, and the Surface Laptop 7.
We think the Zenbook S 14 becomes a good buy at around $1,200 and a great buy at $1,000. We just introduced a price tracker on our website, which should help you find out when it’s the best time to buy. As always, thanks for reading and have an awesome day!