Asus Zenbook A14 review: By ‘eck it’s gorgeous

When I first laid eyes on the Asus Zenbook 14, I was smitten. Not because it was the most attractive laptop I’d ever seen – although it is a bit of a looker – but because it was different. A premium Windows laptop that doesn’t cost the Earth, weighs less than 1kg and has battery life that runs and runs.

It’s a laptop that could have been as good or better than the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, which we gave our Laptop of the Year award to in our most recent Product of the Year Awards. Alas, it’s undermined by a small handful of weaknesses that see it fall just short of greatness.

Asus Zenbook A14 review: What you need to know

Before we get to the whys and the wherefores, let’s get down to brass tacks. This is a lightweight, 14in laptop that comes with a non-touch 1,920 x 1,200 OLED display. It weighs just 980g and measures a mere 16mm thin. Under the hood is a Qualcomm Snapdragon X chipset – the 3GHz, 8-core X1-26-100 – backed up by 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.

The laptop is available in matte grey or beige “Ceraluminum” finishes, and is Copilot+ certified, which means it can deliver a certain amount of local AI processing power, via its NPU (neural processing unit).

Asus Zenbook A14 (UX3407) review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: 8-core 2.97GHz Snapdragon X SoC, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 1,920 x 1,200 60Hz OLED display; Price when reviewed: £1,099

The model on review isn’t the only Zenbook A14 in existence but it is the only one you can buy at the time of writing. It costs £1,099 and, as detailed above, comes with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. The other model is built around the 12-core 3.4GHz Snapdragon X Elite SoC, comes with up to 32GB of RAM and will presumably be a lot more expensive.

As for laptops you might consider as alternatives to this machine, there are plenty of options in this price bracket:

• The big rival for the A14 is the 13.6in Apple MacBook Air, which starts at £1,049 for the M2 version and rises to a base price of £1,299 for the M3. Both are housed in the same slim, well-made aluminium chassis, have great battery life and impressive performance. They can’t match the Asus’ battery life or weight, however, and I prefer the OLED screen on the Asus. It’s also worth noting that you’re only getting 256GB of storage at these prices, half that of the Asus

• Next on our list of favourites is the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 – another Qualcomm Snapdragon X series laptop. The 13.8in model starts a little cheaper than the Asus Zenbook A14 at £1,049 and it’s a faster performer thanks to its 10-core chip. It’s nowhere near as light or slim as the Asus, though, doesn’t have an OLED screen and, again, only comes with a 256GB SSD

• Acer will do you a cheaper machine with similar specifications – for £999, the Acer Swift 14 AI (Snapdragon) comes with 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a faster 10-core 3.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus CPU. It has longer battery life, too, but it isn’t as slim, light or desirable as the Asus and it doesn’t come with an OLED display

Asus Zenbook A14 review: Design

I love the way the Asus Zenbook A14 looks and feels. My review sample is finished in smooth matte grey (it also comes in beige) and this is a finish that doesn’t seem to pick up fingerprints at all.

It’s almost completely free of aesthetic frippery, the geometric slashes that have characterised Asus’ recent Zenbook machines having been banished, and the underside of the laptop has been cleaned up so it doesn’t look so busy. The overall effect is very MacBook-esque, except I think I like it better.

Generally, all the design points I tend to look for in a laptop are on point, too. You can lift the lid with one finger – without the base moving a millimetre – you can press your fingers on the outer surface of the lid without causing undue rippling on the screen on the other side, and there’s no rattling or creaking when you twist the chassis or type heavily on the keyboard. It’s not surprising to me that the laptop is “military grade” tested (MIL-STD-810) against shock, high and low temperatures, vibration and altitude – and not unusual, either – but it is good to have that extra peace of mind.

Unsurprisingly, there isn’t much you can upgrade inside the laptop, but you can at least gain access to the internals relatively easily to clean the fans, replace the battery and upgrade the storage. You’ll need a decent Torx screwdriver bit set and a little patience (there are ten 4mm screws), plus a plastic pry tool of some description, but it’s not the hardest thing to get inside.

And, in a nice surprise, the Asus Zenbook A14 is well-appointed with physical ports and sockets. Not only do we have two USB-C 4.0 ports (40Gbits/sec), but there’s also a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port (10Gbits/sec), a full-size HDMI 2.1 output and a 3.5mm headset jack.

Asus Zenbook A14 review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

Typing on the Asus Zenbook A14 is a perfectly pleasurable experience. The tops of the keys have a smooth finish, similar to the rest of the laptop, which feels unusual but luxurious. There’s also plenty of depth (1.3mm) to each keystroke, not too much rattle and a reasonably firm action.

It isn’t the finest keyboard I’ve ever used on a laptop but it definitely isn’t the worst and it stacks up against the competition well. As for the layout, I’m not a huge fan of the half-height Enter and cursor keys, but the rest is acceptable and the three-stage white backlight is nice and bright, too.

The touchpad follows a similar theme: it has a mechanical click action, so you can’t physically click at the very top edge, but it isn’t too heavy or rattly and it’s perfectly responsive to taps, single-finger swipes and multitouch gestures.

The 1080p webcam is more problematic. It supports face unlocking, which is a nice bonus, and image exposure and colours are fine, even in low light. It’s a little on the soft side but not overly so. There is a problem here, though: if there’s a bright light source in the frame, all manner of weirdness kicks off, with strip lights, bulbs and bright windows casting vertical smears up and down the frame, which is distracting in the extreme. It’s not what I’d expect from a modern webcam and more than a little disappointing.

Asus Zenbook A14 review: Display and audio

The display, however, is anything but. It’s bright and vibrant, peaks at over 600cd/m², has effectively perfect contrast and is as sharp as you need it to be at 1,920 x 1,200. The refresh rate is 60Hz whereas a lot of laptops, including the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, are moving to 120Hz but I’m not too fussed about that since this isn’t a gaming PC.

As far as colours go, it’s a vibrant display, capable of reproducing a broader array of colours than even DCI-P3 at 117.5% of that gamut. It’s reasonably colour-accurate, too, in both sRGB and DCI-P3 colour spaces, but there is no precalibrated mode for AdobeRGB, which is a little bit of a disappointment. Brightness peaks at 624cd/m² during HDR playback and reaches around 400cd/m² with standard dynamic range content.

I fired up my usual selection of HDR material from YouTube and various other streaming services and the display looked incredible. It might not be as sharp as some at this price but the resolution is just about high enough to be called Retina class (given you’ll be viewing it from around 50cm to 60cm) and the OLED panel lends the image a punch and vibrancy that’s missing from the even the best IPS displays.

The same can’t be said for the stereo speakers, which I’d describe as functional at best. Compared with the best slimline laptop speakers, such as those found on the MacBook Air, they sound harsh, brittle and lacking in bass and warmth. They’re not all that loud, either: at top volume with pink noise playing I measured around 71dBA from a metre distance.

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Asus Zenbook A14 review: Performance and battery life

So far, I’ve only tested the 10- and 12-core variants of the Snapdragon X Series SoC and, by and large, I’ve been impressed. The chip inside the Asus Zenbook A14 is the newer, lower-spec, Snapdragon X chip.

This has eight cores running at up to 3GHz (0.4GHz slower than the slowest X Plus 10-core chip), no dual-core boost and a GPU that is rated at 1.7 teraflops, which is slightly under half as powerful as the slowest 10-core X Plus chip. There are a couple of 8-core X Plus chips, but both of these are still more powerful than the 8-core X found here.

Given that this is the slowest Snapdragon chip available, it feels remarkably snappy in day-to-day use. Apps launch quickly, the laptop wakes from sleep almost instantaneously and only really starts to feel sluggish and slow when you start to stress both CPU and GPU to the max.

In the benchmarks, as you’d expect, it’s slower than its main rivals, but the biggest surprise is how bad the GPU benchmark scores are. The flip side of this is the fan rarely, if ever, spins up and when it does you can hardly hear it.

For storage, the drive inside the A14 is pretty zippy, but it’s in the battery-life stakes that this laptop really shines. Helped along by a sizeable 70Wh battery, it lasted 20hrs 5mins in our video playback test, only beaten by the Acer Swift 14 AI (Snapdragon) and the Lenovo Slim 7i Gen 9 Aura Edition, and on a par with the Apple MacBook Pro 14 (M4).

That’s good enough for an entire day of away-from-the-mains working and a good solid evening of lazy, sofa-bound video streaming.

Asus Zenbook A14 review: Verdict

All told, the Asus Zenbook A14 ticks plenty of boxes as a lightweight, on-the-go machine. Not only does it look and feel great, it weighs barely anything, it’s built beautifully and both the display quality and battery life are superb.

There are some weaknesses. I would not want to use this machine for anything remotely graphics intense, certainly not gaming. The audio output is weak, too, and the webcam performance just odd. Plus, the price feels just a little too high, given the performance constraints.

However, if you’re after a lean and light laptop with battery life that runs and runs, the Asus Zenbook A14 fits the bill perfectly.