“Ceraluminum.” It’s a name for a material that can only come from a marketing department. I smirked the first time I heard the term, but the joke has died since then. Now that Asus has debuted the Asus Zenbook S 14, showcased last month at IFA, I can’t mock it anymore. Instead, I have to take issue with the laptop’s performance, at least for this model.
The Asus Zenbook S 14 is a good laptop, but more so because of its hardware, a multitude of ports, and lightweight design than its reliance on the new chip. There’s something to be said about a cover material that feels and looks unique. There’s also the new Lunar Lake Intel Core Ultra chip housed inside. Both those features are solid, though you have to ignore the hype.
Asus Zenbook S 14
It’s a unique looking ultra-light laptop with plenty of ports. Performance at $1,400 is lacking, so it may be worth checking out the version for $1,500.
Pros
- A nice and unique feel and finish
- Pretty and bright OLED display
- More ports than you normally get on a laptop this thin
Cons
- Performance with the Intel Core Ultra 256 V CPU isn’t as high as advertised
- Exterior is prone to fingerprints
- Features like “smart gestures” are relatively pointless
The latest 16-inch Zenbooks housed an AMD processor. This is the first Lunar Lake Gen 2 laptop I’ve had the chance to use in earnest. My review unit of the Asus Zenbook S 14 houses the Intel Core Ultra 7 256V, which is right in the middle of the pack of the full Core Ultra 200V lineup. This version of the laptop costs $1,400 from Best Buy, though the $1,500 version comes with an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V.
Does the chip model number and 32GB of RAM make a big difference when deciding on this or competing light laptops? According to Asus, it does. My machine benchmarked relatively well but was below the comparable lightweight PCs of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite or AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. The next step up in Intel’s chip lineup would supposedly meet or beat the competition, but I have no way to prove that just yet. This version didn’t settle too far below the curve, but the 256V wasn’t the spectacular showcase of the Lunar Lake chips I was hoping for.
And that’s a major difference if you were hoping to use the redesigned Zenbook S 14 for anything more than browsing or streaming. The device is packed with more ports than you typically get on such a thin frame, including an HDMI port nearly as big as the PC’s entire bottom frame. It’s not like this PC is compromised at the lower price point (though I was forced to redo all my benchmarks as the latest Windows security update drastically reduced performance). Instead, it doesn’t match its full potential for $100 less.
Asus Zenbook S 14 Review: Design and Usability
© Photo: Artem Golub / Gizmodo
The best thing about the redesigned “ceraluminum” cover is just how unique it looks for what’s become today’s exceedingly boring realm of work laptops. The unique material feels akin to plastic but with more texture. There’s a nice sound when you tap on the shell. Plus, the metallic lines running through it give the Zenbook a modern look that might fit in with your household decor far better than a regular thick lump of gray or black aluminum.
I would love to see “ceraluminum” in more colors than slate gray or white, but I know OEMs routinely say nobody buys more outlandish colors. And yet, imagine this material in a deep purple or an ocean blue and tell me it wouldn’t stand out. The only problem with the shell is how the dark gray tends to pick up fingerprints, especially since I enjoy touching the laptop as much as I do.
The laptop is only .47 inches thick and weighs 2.65 pounds. For comparison, a 13-inch MacBook Air clocks in at 2.7 pounds, and a Dell XPS 13 starts at 2.6 pounds. Neither of those laptops has a USB-A or HDMI port. The Zenbook S 14 has both, plus two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports for charging and connectivity. The laptop is so thin that the HDMI port is flush with the bottom of the chassis, only kept off the desktop by its sloping underbody.
It meant that I didn’t have to plug in a port hub to use an external monitor during use. That’s a pretty nice boon for an ultralight laptop, though size usually doesn’t do too much for the keyboard. The Zenbook’s keys took a bit of getting used to. The keys sport a limited 1.1 mm of travel with near-silent sound. It was simply okay to type on, but nothing stood out. At the very least, the frame was sturdy; there was no noticeable buckling, no matter the heavy falls of my fingertips.
The touchpad includes several “smart gestures,” but removing the sticker in the box makes it easy to forget where to slide your finger for volume or brightness. I certainly did, but the function row keys are where they’ve always been. I don’t need to learn new gestures for functions on every keyboard I’ve ever used.
The Asus Zenbook S 14 includes a 3K, 2880 by 1800 OLED display, which—if you had to guess— is colorful and a joy to use. It’s essentially the same screen as Asus’ ROG Zephyrus G 14 from earlier this year. It’s not the brightest display, maxing out at around 500 nits of peak brightness.
I don’t put much stock in laptop webcams, but the Zenbook’s was especially low-res. It does the job, but if you hope this will become your everything laptop, you will have the grainiest appearance in your weekly meetings.
Asus Zenbook S 14 Review: Performance
© Photo: Artem Golub / Gizmodo
I worked hard to push the latest Zenbook to its limit with its built-in Intel Core Ultra 256 V. Asus and Intel made it clear in all their press that they compared this chip to the recent AMD and Qualcomm CPUs, all gunning for the top spot in chip stardom. I do not know how the 258V performs in comparison, but in my tests, the 256V did fine in some benchmark tests but not as well as the competition.
In other tests, it was sadly subpar. Take, for example, our Blender tests, where we time it for how long the PC takes to render a scene of a BMW. The Zenbook S 14 took nearly five minutes to render on the CPU, while the M3 MacBook Air took just under four minutes. In our tests, where we encoded a 4K video via handbrake, Asus’ latest 14-inch PC took more than 8 minutes and 30 seconds, three minutes longer than a Microsoft Surface Pro with Snapdragon X Elite.
In Geekbench and Cinebench CPU benchmarks, the Intel Core 256V scored around a hundred points less than competing chips under single-core settings. The difference was around 1,000 points off in multi-core settings.
I would go as far as saying you should not be directly comparing this version of the Lunar Lake lineup to the top-of-the-line small-form, AI-centric chips from Intel’s competition. The Intel Core Ultra 7 256V has many of the same specs as the 258V, but there seems to be a big difference between the two under the hood. I’ve only seen the 258V and the top-end Intel Core Ultra 9 288V demos, but I would expect more from those chips.
But as much (or as little) fun there is with harping about benchmarks, the 14-inch Zenbook never slowed or stuttered despite hours of use. I had no issues with browsing tasks. As for its gaming potential, I wouldn’t tout this version of the Zenbook S 14 as a shoo-in. It got worse 3D Mark Time Spy results than a Dell XPS 14 with the last-gen Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. Intel promises users should be able to get 39 FPS without Intel’s AI upscaling XeSS running on the 258V. In my Cyberpunk benchmark, I could only achieve 25 FPS on low to medium settings with XeSS running.
Asus Zenbook S 14 Review: Battery Life
© Photo: Artem Golub / Gizmodo
The new 14-inch Zenbook has an all-day battery life for browsing and other work tasks. In multiple days of testing, it lasted an average of 8 hours before needing to be plugged in. That should be enough for practically anybody who’s not going out on the road without a wing and a prayer of finding an outlet or a USB-C cord anywhere.
However, we have to investigate that further because one of the big selling points of the new Lunar Lakes chips was that they promised over 20 hours of battery life when doing video playback tests. That’s as good, if not better, than the recent ARM, at least as promised by Intel. Take the Zenbook as an example of what battery life really means in actual usage. That’s not even considering the battery life when doing more intensive tasks.
The laptop has a 72Wh battery capacity, and when Asus showed it off, it was happy to declare it could do 20+ hours of battery life on video playback tests. I hope to finish these tests soon, and I’ll update the review once they’re complete. However, Asus is truly only promising the all-day battery, and in that way, it delivers.
Asus Zenbook S 14 Review: Verdict
© Photo: Artem Golub / Gizmodo
If I had one suggestion for anybody considering the Asus Zenbook S 14, it would be to go for the slightly more expensive model that sports the Intel Core Ultra 258V and 32 GB of RAM. I say that even though I don’t have direct experience with that version of the laptop. Even if I ignore Asus’ performance promises on the $1,500 device, 32 GB of RAM would offer better long-term use. It’s the direction PCs are heading anyway.
These new Zenbook laptops and all Lunar Lake-bearing devices are Copilot+ certified. If that matters to you, and if you’re one of the few excited to try out Recall when it eventually comes out, feel free to set that NPU loose. Otherwise, you’re not getting much out of the neural processing capabilities if all you want is to run Microsoft’s dull and pointless AI art applications.
It’s easy to recommend the Zenbook S 14 simply because it offers so many I/O ports and a unique design compared to other 14-inch laptops. It just feels somewhat diluted by middling performance, even if it’s quite capable of its price. Its design oozes cool, but you’ll want more power to match.
