Intel's Lunar Lake CPUs: Balancing Performance and Battery Life in the AI Era

Testing Intel's next-gen Core Ultra 200V CPUs: OK performance, great battery life

But it's too bad that Intel had to turn to TSMC to make its chips competitive. Two things can be true for Intel's new Core Ultra 200-series processors, codenamed Lunar Lake: They can be both impressive and embarrassing. Impressive because they perform reasonably well, despite some regressions and inconsistencies, and because they give Intel's battery life a much-needed boost as the company competes with new Snapdragon X Elite processors from Qualcomm and Ryzen AI chips from AMD. It will also be Intel's first chip to meet Microsoft's performance requirements for the Copilot+ features in Windows 11. Embarrassing because, to get here, Intel had to use another company's manufacturing facilities to produce a competitive chip. Intel claims that this is a temporary arrangement, just a bump in the road as the company prepares to scale up its upcoming 18A manufacturing process so it can bring its own chip production back in-house. And maybe that's true! But years of manufacturing misfires (and early reports of troubles with 18A) have made me reflexively skeptical of any timelines the company gives for its manufacturing operations. And Intel has outsourced some of its manufacturing at the same time it is desperately trying to get other chip designers to manufacture their products in Intel's factories. This is a review of Intel's newest mobile silicon by way of an Asus Zenbook UX5406S provided by Intel, not a chronicle of Intel's manufacturing decline and ongoing financial woes. I will mostly focus on telling you whether the chip performs well and whether you should buy it. But it's a rare situation, where whether it's a solid chip is not a slam-dunk win for Intel, which might factor into our overall analysis. About Lunar Lake Let's talk about the composition of Lunar Lake, in brief. Like last year's Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra 100 chips, Lunar Lake is a collection of chiplets stitched together via Intel's Foveros technology. In Meteor Lake, Intel used this to combine several silicon dies manufactured by different companies -- Intel made the compute tile where the main CPU cores were housed, while TSMC made the tiles for graphics, I/O, and other functions. In Lunar Lake, Intel is still using Foveros -- basically, using a silicon "base tile" as an interposer that enables communication between the different chiplets -- to put the chips together. But the CPU, GPU, and NPU have been reunited in a single compute tile, and I/O and other functions are all handled by the platform controller tile (sometimes called the Platform Controller Hub or PCH in previous Intel CPUs). There's also a "filler tile" that exists only so that the end product is rectangular. Both the compute tile and the platform controller tile are made by TSMC this time around. Intel is still splitting its CPU cores between power-efficient E-cores and high-efficiency P-cores, but core counts overall are down relative to both previous-generation Core Ultra chips and older 12th- and 13th-generation Core chips. Lunar Lake has four E-cores and four P-cores, a composition common for Apple's M-series chips but not, so far, for Intel's. The Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H, for example, included six P-cores and a total of 10 E-cores. A Core i7-1255U included two P-cores and eight E-cores. Intel has also removed Hyperthreading from the CPU architecture it's using for its P-cores, claiming that the silicon space was better spent on improving single-core performance. You'd expect this to boost Lunar Lake's single-core performance and hurt its multi-core performance relative to past generations, and to spoil our performance section a bit, that's basically what happens, though not by as much as you might expect. Intel is also shipping a new GPU architecture with Lunar Lake, codenamed Battlemage -- it will also power the next wave of dedicated desktop Arc GPUs, when and if we get them (Intel hasn't said anything on that front, but it's canceling or passing off a lot of its side projects lately). It has said that the Arc 140V integrated GPU is an average of 31 percent faster than the old Meteor Lake Arc GPU in games, and 16 percent faster than AMD's newest Radeon 980M, though performance will vary widely based on the game. The Arc 130V GPU has one less of Intel's Xe cores (7, instead of 8) and lower clock speeds. The last piece of the compute puzzle is the neural processing unit (NPU), which can process some AI and machine-learning workloads locally rather than sending them to the cloud. Windows and most apps still aren't doing much with these, but Intel does rate the Lunar Lake NPUs at between 40 and 48 trillion operations per second (TOPS) depending on the chip you're buying, meeting or exceeding Microsoft's 40 TOPS requirement and generally around four times faster than the NPU in Meteor Lake (11.5 TOPS). And there's one last big change: For these particular Core Ultra chips, Intel is integrating the RAM into the CPU package, rather than letting PC makers solder it to the motherboard separately or offer DIMM slots -- again, something we see in Apple Silicon chips in the Mac. Lunar Lake chips ship with either 16GB or 32GB of RAM, and most of the variants can be had with either amount (in the chips Intel has announced so far, model numbers ending in 8 have 32GB, and model numbers ending in 6 have 16GB). Packaging memory this way both saves motherboard space and, according to Intel, reduces power usage, because it shortens the physical distance that data needs to travel. I am reasonably confident that we'll see other Lunar Lake variants with more CPU cores and external memory -- I don't see Intel giving up on high-performance, high-margin laptop processors, and those chips will need to compete with AMD's high-end performance and offer additional RAM. But if those chips are coming, Intel hasn't announced them yet.

Intel Lunar Lake benchmarks -- here's how it compares to Snapdragon X and Apple M3

The first laptops packing the new Intel Lunar Lake CPUs have arrived, and we've put a few of them to the test in our lab. The Lunar Lake results are a big deal because Intel's laptop chip business has been on the ropes for a few years now. While long-time rival AMD continues to offer stiff competition, Intel's laptop chips really started to lose their luster when first Apple, then Qualcomm started shipping their own laptop SoCs (system-on-chip) that took the best MacBooks and the best Windows laptops to new heights of performance and power efficiency which Intel's best silicon couldn't match. Intel's chips were already behind the curve even before the current AI craze that's sweeping the tech industry had taken hold of laptop makers. Now that everyone from Apple to Microsoft to Samsung is pushing "AI" apps and features as the next big thing that will revolutionize the way you use technology, Intel has a lot of ground to make up. Some good news: Intel appears to be working hard to move fast on that front. There was a big live event late last year where Intel Meteor Lake arrived to show off how the company's first laptop chips with onboard NPUs (Neural Processing Units) enabling new features such as image and text generation or improved webcam performance for the first wave of "AI laptops." . But when we put Intel's Meteor Lake chips through our suite of performance tests, the results lagged behind the best laptop chips from Apple and Qualcomm. Now we've had a chance to test their successors in these first Lunar Lake chips, and the results are better than what we saw before. Our initial testing suggests you should expect significantly improved performance and battery life from laptops packing Intel's Lunar Lake CPUs compared to older Meteor Lake laptops. However, the Lunar Lake chips we've tested still can't catch up to the best that Apple and Qualcomm have on the market. These test results might be a major factor the next time you're shopping for a new laptop, because battery life is a key consideration and performance is also important for a lot of folks. With that in mind, let's dig into the numbers and see how Intel's latest really stack up! We've had a chance to test a handful of Asus and Dell laptops powered by Intel's first Lunar Lake chips, which are technically branded as Intel Core Ultra 200V. So far, every Lunar Lake laptop we've had a chance to test has an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V chip inside, so keep in mind that these test results are just from laptops using that singular slice of silicon. I'm eager to get more laptops in over the next month and change so we can get a better picture of how well the full Lunar Lake family performs. We've also had the opportunity to test a few laptops packing the latest Ryzen 9 AI laptop CPUs from AMD. That silicon's also equipped with NPUs that meet Microsoft's requirements for Copilot+ PCs. The Asus Zenbook S 16 Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 we tested both have the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 onboard, while the HP Omnibook Ultra 14 has the slightly beefier AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375. So in the charts of data below you'll find results from the work our crack lab team has done testing laptops with the latest chips from AMD, Apple and now Intel. I'll bold the results from Lunar Lake machines, but you can see what chip is inside each by looking at the prefix. The first big test to look at is Geekbench 6, a cross-platform benchmark which helps us gauge how capable a CPU is by running it through a single-core and multi-core test, then spitting out a score for each that we can compare against other PCs. As you can see from the chart of results above, the Lunar Lake laptops we've tested so far all perform a bit worse than the latest laptops powered by AMD and Apple chips in terms of single-core and multi-core performance. The Snapdragon laptops we've tested are more skewed, with the Lunar Lake chips beating the Snapdragon X Plus on single-core performance but not multi-core. Qualcomm's more capable Snapdragon X Elite chips perform better in both regards, revealing that while the Lunar Lake chip we've tested so far is an improvement over its Meteor Lake predecessors, it can't match the performance of the best laptop chips on the market. Next, let's talk AI performance. We're still updating our testing regimen to account for the new wave of AI-focused laptops on the market, and we've recently begun using the new Geekbench AI 1.0 test. This test basically lets us see how good a chip is at chewing through the kinds of processing work that most "AI" apps and features demand. We can run this test multiple ways on multiple different parts of a laptop CPU, and different chips have different architectures that sometimes block us from running certain versions of this test. The simple version is, we don't have as many comparable results from this test, and the results we do have are going to be focused on the performance of the NPU in these chips. The chart below lists two scores, Precision and Quantized: the difference is complex, but in simple terms, the Quantized test uses integers rather than floating point numbers, so it's easier and thus the results will be higher. Notably, the NPU in these new Lunar Lake chips delivers significantly higher scores in the Geekbench AI 1.0 NPU test than any of the Snapdragon X or Apple M3 laptops we've tested to date. This is new territory for both us and the rest of the laptop business, so I'm loathe to say too much about what this means for the performance you should expect from a Lunar Lake laptop. But it seems safe to say that if you prize snappy performance when using apps and features with AI components, Intel's latest CPUs should be more than speedy enough for your needs. Next, let me quickly show you how the Lunar Lake laptops we've tested stack up against the competition in terms of content creation. We run just about every laptop we test through PugetBench tests aimed at benchmarking how effectively a machine handles Adobe apps like Photoshop and Premiere Pro. PugetBench works its magic and assigns a score after each test -- the higher, the better. One caveat: Pugetbench's Premiere Pro test isn't well-optimized for Qualcomm's Snapdragon CPUs yet, so we have not yet run those tests on some of the laptops you'll see below. You can see that the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V chip in the Lunar Lake laptops we've tested is pretty capable when it comes to Adobe apps, delivering Photoshop scores that beat the Snapdragon X laptops we've tested so far. But the laptops we've tested that pack the latest AMD and Apple silicon still trounce these Lunar Lake machines when it comes to Pugetbench scores for both Photoshop and Premiere Pro. So while Lunar Lake laptops are no slouch in this department, they're not blowing us away out of the gate either. While Intel isn't leaning into promoting the first Lunar Lake laptop chips as great for gaming, I wanted to give you a general overview of how they fare in the gaming tests we've run so far. We run every laptop we review through the graphical benchmark for Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm because it runs on everything from low-powered Windows ultraportables to Apple's beefiest MacBooks. For gaming laptops and some others we also run benchmarks for some more demanding PC games, and we ran what we could on our first Lunar Lake laptops. Here again we see the first Lunar Lake laptops outperforming the Snapdragon X Windows laptops we've tested, which makes sense since most PC games are optimized for x86 systems and don't handle the different architecture of Qualcomm's laptop chips well. There's a similar quandary with Apple's Arm-based MacBooks, but the company has had more time and put more work into providing support to game developers to ensure that many modern games run smoothly on modern MacBooks. Finally, let's look at battery life and how well Lunar Lake laptops perform in our test. In our lab, we task each laptop we review with endlessly surfing the web via Wi-Fi with its screen set to 150 nits of brightness. That's on the dim side, but it gives us a good benchmark against which to judge laptops from different vendors packing different components. The results are clear: Lunar Lake is more energy-efficient than its Meteor Lake predecessors, but it still can't outlast the best laptops for battery life powered by Apple and Qualcomm silicon. It's awfully close though, with the Lunar Lake laptops we've tested so far nipping at the heels of Apple's long-lasting 16-inch MacBook Pro. And as you can see, the AMD-powered laptops we've tested are now the least power-efficient of those being compared. Of course, even those recent AMD-powered laptops we've tested with their comparatively meager 11-12 hours of tested battery life are still leagues better than most Windows laptops were just a few years ago. And that's something worth keeping in mind as we close out 2024: Even the least power-efficient of this new wave of Windows laptops are leagues better than the best you could get in 2021 or 2022. So while it's clear that the first Lunar Lake ultraportables hitting the market aren't going to revolutionize the way you look at laptops, on balance they're shaping up to be great performers. While our initial testing of laptops sporting the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V Lunar Lake chipset show it can't catch up to the best Apple and Qualcomm laptop chips in terms of raw CPU performance, it delivers outstanding performance in Geekbench AI tests run on the onboard NPU. That's a good sign for the future of Copilot+ PCs, but we're still so early in the lifecycle that I'm hard-pressed to tell you exactly how much of a difference those high scores will make in day-to-day usage. What's easier to say for sure is that Lunar Lake laptops are good for gaming (though components like GPU and RAM tend to make a bigger difference) and great for battery life, with runtimes that rival the longest-lived laptops on the market. Their performance in the NPU-focused version of the Geekbench AI tests also outstrips the competition, though in this case it's harder to say that's a clear win because AI features often tap your CPU and GPU as well, and thus a direct 1:1 comparison of scores generated by the onboard NPU doesn't give you a complete picture of how well the laptop will handle AI tasks. Personally, I'm eager to get more late 2024 laptops in with a wider variety of Lunar Lake chips onboard so we can really see what Intel's latest round of silicon can do. Stay tuned!

Lunar Lake First Tests: Intel's AI-Ready Core Ultra 2 Chip Posts Nearly 24-Hour Battery Life

We've endured a long leadup to Intel launching its Lunar Lake processor platform, but laptops with these second-generation Core Ultra chips are finally in our hands. And now, we have first-hand performance testing results. The Core Ultra brand -- denoting processors with onboard neural processing units (NPUs) for local AI tasks -- launched at the end of 2023 with the first-generation Meteor Lake chips. Lunar Lake processors follow up with superior power and capacity for even more trillions of operations per second (TOPS), which should translate to faster and more efficient AI results. Having recently revamped our entire benchmark suite to adapt to modern PCs -- including AI workload testing -- we're in an ideal place to judge Lunar Lake's efficiency versus other modern platforms. For testing, we used an Asus Zenbook S 14 equipped with a Core Ultra 7 258V processor, which revealed standard-setting battery life and a potentially huge leap in NPU performance. Lunar Lake Has Landed I won't spend too much time here explaining the current CPU landscape or the Lunar Lake architecture, as we've extensively covered these topics in the leadup to the launch. If you want to get up to speed, check out our coverage of Lunar Lake architecture, Intel's speed claims, and the first Core Ultra 2 laptop chips. The table below shows off the whole Core Ultra 2 stack. As you can see, the Core Ultra 7 258V sits in the upper middle of this batch of chips, with eight cores (four Performance cores, four low-power Efficient cores) and eight threads. As detailed previously, the core types occupy the same chip alongside the NPU, with the low-power E-cores designated for lower-priority tasks. AI tasks on Windows are largely inherently background workloads that run behind your main task; think of video call enhancements, audio improvements, and other low-demand asks. The NPU can handle these workloads, freeing the processor's CPU to run the main applications (your browser, conferencing software, and other active work apps) without slowdown. Some creative applications, say for editing, will lean more on the NPU to create or clean up images, but the former is the primary reason for the multi-unit architecture. Now Testing: Intel Core Ultra 2 vs. the Field Let's see what Lunar Lake can do in retail systems. I put the Zenbook S14 through our recently revamped benchmark suite, which covers a range of productivity, multimedia, and AI workloads; I'll explain each batch of tests before the results so you have context for the numbers. Productivity, Content Creation, and AI Tests Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Cinebench 2024 uses Maxon's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Geekbench 6.3 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video editing tool HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. Next, PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with various automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25. Finally, Geekbench AI and UL's Procyon Computer Vision test are two of the first AI processing benchmarks. (Our use of these AI tests is still in development and, regardless, cannot be compared among processing platforms. See our page on how we test laptops for more on that.) Throughout the productivity and content creation tests, the Core Ultra 7 258V performed well compared with the competition. You'll see no visible Lunar Lake superiority on these tests, with the Zenbook falling in line with the others on most of these results. It was rarely the fastest performer, except for the Photoshop test, while HandBrake was an outlier in the other direction -- the slowest time posted. As for the AI tests, we still take these results with a heaping grain of salt, though Intel has claimed triple-digit NPU performance gains with Lunar Lake. AI benchmarking is in its nascent stages, and cross-platform comparisons become even trickier; separating outlier results and marked improvement at this stage can be difficult. The Procyon Computer Vision Intel OpenVINO benchmark showed a clear leap in the integer-grade results across the CPU, GPU, and NPU tests; meanwhile, this laptop's Geekbench AI results were actually lower than the competition. This partially demonstrates the opaque nature of benchmarking this developing field, but the leap in NPU performance is arguably delivering just as Lunar Lake should. Our results were individually in line with what Intel itself has produced, and outside of synthetic test scenarios, these Core Ultra 2 chips have much higher TOPS ceilings that should enable efficient NPU background performance. Graphics Tests We challenge laptops' graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. While the new platform has its upsides, superior graphics performance is not expected to be among them. Indeed, these results show what you'd expect from modern integrated graphics, with the discrete GPU systems taking the lead. To Intel's credit, the gap between Nvidia's entry-level RTX 4050 GPU in the Acer Swift X 14 and the Dell XPS 14 isn't as wide as expected, but the Zenbook and other integrated graphics laptops still have their limits. You can squeak by for casual gaming and light 3D workloads, but if you need to run anything more demanding -- especially professionally -- our advice is to find a system with a discrete GPU. Battery Rundown Test We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness set 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. The efficiency of the Lunar Lake platform is meant to extend its battery life, and Intel seems to have succeeded on that front. The Zenbook lasted longer on our rundown test than any in this group, reaching nearly 24 hours. Super-long battery life supports the appeal of an incredibly portable laptop like this, so look forward to more long-lasting Lunar Lake systems. The Windows AI Wars Are Upon Us We'll gauge plenty more Core Ultra 2-based laptops to come shortly now that Lunar Lake has hit the market, but this first look has given us an idea of what's to come. The overall productivity performance didn't see much of an uptick in our testing -- so don't expect notably faster overall performance from these chips -- while AI workloads potentially have a much higher ceiling. AMD's own Strix Point processors will fight for market share in this field, and unlike in the past, Qualcomm Snapdragon CPUs are also a relevant competitor, already in some big-name systems. Be sure to read our upcoming Lunar Lake laptop reviews as the performance averages settle and our AI testing develops alongside these machines.

Tested: Intel's Lunar Lake wants you to forget Qualcomm laptops exist

Intel's Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) was specifically designed to emphasize low power, but with competitive performance. In this it somewhat succeeds, though the Core Ultra 7 258V chip I tested can still run a distant second, or third, behind AMD's mobile Ryzen processors. But Lunar Lake also provides incredibly good, Snapdragon-like battery life with a powerful, embedded GPU capable of playing yesterday's top-tier games. Intel supplied us with a Lunar Lake-powered Asus ZenBook S14 laptop for review, and we've spent the last week or so testing it to answer the question: Of the AMD Ryzen AI 300, Intel's Lunar Lake, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, which is the best laptop processor so far in 2024? And how does Lunar Lake compare to its predecessor, Meteor Lake? We've run all three chips through a number of benchmarks -- with separate tests run while plugged in and on battery power. We think it's important that you know the maximum performance potential of these laptop processors as well as how much performance is lost to keep your laptop up and running when unplugged. Intel launched Lunar Lake at the Computex 2024 show in Taiwan, where executives promised a "no-compromise experience." The Asus ZenBook S14 and other Lunar Lake and Ryzen AI 300 laptops now qualify as Copilot+ PCs, even though a Windows update to enable their AI features won't occur until October. This review uses benchmarks compiled by myself, my colleague Gordon Mah Ung, and other PCWorld laptop reviewers over current and previous testing. I'll focus on the three key chips of this generation: Intel's Core Ultra Series 2/Lunar Lake, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, and the AMD Ryzen AI 300, occasionally adding some older processors for additional context, such as a Core Ultra Series 1/Meteor Lake processor. I'll try to explain what each test covers, why it matters, and how test performance will reflect on the next laptop you buy. If you want even more depth, Gordon will have his own Lunar Lake video that pits Snapdragon against Lunar Lake in a head-to-head battle. The laptop that Intel and Asus supplied includes a Core Ultra 7 258V. That's about midway down the stack of the Core Ultra Series 2 chips Intel launched, and it's a little unusual in that Intel isn't handing us its top-of-the-line chip for comparison testing. Instead, the Ultra 7 258V includes four performance cores, four low-power efficiency cores, and a 4.8GHz turbo clock available when needed. All told, just eight threads are available for processing. The nice thing is that Intel and Asus have consistently used similar laptop models for comparison between chip generations, specifically the Asus ZenBook 14 OLED, which is home to both the Lunar Lake and previous-gen Meteor Lake Core Ultra processors below. AMD used the Asus Zenbook S 16 as a debut platform for the Ryzen AI 300. On the Qualcomm side, though I reviewed the Microsoft Surface Pro 11th Edition, I commandeered the Surface Laptop 7th Edition Gordon tested and ran some additional benchmarks. It's a fairer comparison for Qualcomm. In certain benchmarks, because of logistics, I used an MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo with an identical Meteor Lake chip inside. I tested all of our test devices with two synthetic benchmarks: Cinebench R23 and Cinebench 2024. Both push the laptop's CPU to its limits, first using every processing thread available and alternatively with just a single thread. The difference between R23 and and Cinebench 2024 is that the latter has a specialized Arm version, while the R23 version is run via the Snapdragon's emulator software that translates X86 instructions into Arm code. Two things stand out here: When you code for Arm, Snapdragon's performance improves significantly, propelling it to the top of the heap. That pushes Lunar Lake (the Ultra 7 258V) down the rankings. But you'll also note that Intel's older Meteor Lake (the 155H) outperforms its latest chip. What this tells me is that Intel is prioritizing battery life, not performance. According to our sister site, Macworld, the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air 15, both using Apple's M3 chip, reported multithreaded scores of 693 and 658, respectively. In single-core performance, they reported a score of 141 for both platforms. So yes, Intel's Lunar Lake is faster, but not in single-core performance. One note: I test using the default performance settings that laptop makers provide, as that feels realistic. That means that the Snapdragon tests were performed at Microsoft's "Recommended" settings (the lowest) while Lunar Lake's tests were performed at the "Balanced," or middle settings. However, I also test chips in performance mode; in this case, using the Windows settings for maximum performance and adjusting the Asus laptop settings to its performance settings, too. Occasionally you'll see battery performance scores that outperform wall power; that can be due to statistical anomalies, but it can also just happen. We've seen this in our Snapdragon and Meteor Lake testing, too. If you'd like Snapdragon's performance settings for comparison, my Surface Pro (11th Edition) review includes those. (I don't test "Max" settings on battery.) I'm not a huge fan of the Geekbench suite, only because it runs in the background without demonstrating what it does as a real workload. But it's a popular test, as it's quick to run. It too has a dedicated Arm version, which propels the Surface Laptop 7th Edition to the top. I've organized the results hierarchically by the "everything goes" multithreaded CPU test, placing the powered test directly over the test running on battery for comparison's sake. One of Snapdragon's strengths is how uniformly it runs, whether on battery or on wall power. Geekbench again shows how sharply Lunar Lake's performance drops on battery...but also hints at something we'll get to later: the excellent performance that its integrated GPU delivers. The other story is simply how well AMD's Ryzen continues to deliver top-tier performance. Another choice I made was to use Procyon's Office Productivity benchmark for this round of testing. I prefer PCMark 10's broad suite of apps (from office to CAD to simulated video calls) but Arm processors won't consistently run all of the tests. These office benchmark tests are still legitimate, demonstrating how well the laptop chips work within Microsoft Office, including Outlook, using the real-world apps themselves. Fortunately, or not, there's not much difference between the various platforms. But again, look at that drop-off on the Core Ultra/Lunar Lake 258V when you run it on battery! This becomes a real issue in certain situations. One of the realities of working on the road is that you rarely "work" constantly: You browse to a web page, pause while you read it, author an email, take a sip of coffee, check your phone... your laptop is often sitting idle. But when you actually ask it to execute an application, the latest generation of mobile processors can have a hard time keeping up. In our recent tests of the AMD Ryzen AI 300, we adjusted our Handbrake test to make it more intensive. Handbrake transcodes a video -- in this case, the open-source film Tears of Steel -- and it's a computationally intensive process. How well the laptop cools itself plays a role here, but so does the battery: This test can take close to an hour to perform, and even a robust battery can give out. I couldn't loop three of these tests together before the battery expired, which is about three hours of constant work. Again, though, Intel's latest and greatest...finishes last. This is a real-world application that you can download yourself, so it's a meaningful test. It took Lunar Lake nearly 17 minutes more than the Ryzen to complete the task. So far, Intel's Lunar Lake hasn't been that impressive compared to the competition. But we now turn to the integrated GPU, and the new Xe2 graphics engine that Intel says will debut in a second discrete GPU, code-named Battlemage, later. Given AMD's historical strength in GPUs, Intel's resurgence is a bit surprising. But in two tests -- Time Spy, an older benchmark geared toward desktop and mobile gaming, and its replacement, Steel Nomad Light -- Intel's Lunar Lake shines. Can you edit photos on the go? Puget Systems, a workstation developer, authors its own benchmarks to try to answer that question. The test uses a scripted benchmark to apply various filters and adjustments to images opened within Adobe Photoshop, and then generates a score. Here, all three mobile platforms are bunched closely together, which probably indicates that all three are okay for this task...but not on battery. Here's some additional context: According to the PugetBench site, an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D desktop system with a GeForce RTX 3080 generates a score of 9,959. A massive MSI Raider notebook with an Intel Core i9-14900HX and GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU generates a score of 9,959. And an Intel Core i7-9750H desktop paired with a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti produces a score of 4,549. We normally don't run gaming benchmarks on top of what are usually considered to be productivity machines. But in this case Intel has been telling us that, yes, these machines are good enough for light gaming, especially on Low graphics settings. That's good enough for us. Typically, 60 frames per second is considered the minimum for gameplay -- any less, and the game can stutter. In this case, we tried out Shadow of the Tomb Raider, run at 1080p and Low settings. Any you know what? It looks and runs pretty dang well. All of our gaming tests were performed on wall power. After its disastrous (?) launch, Cyberpunk: 2077 has surged back to become one of the more playable games on PCs. And in this case, it runs pretty well on Lunar Lake. However, AMD's Ryzen still outpaces it. Again, these tests were run at 1080p, at Low settings. Frame generation was turned on for the Ryzen processor; that's not offered for the other two chips. Instead, Cyberpunk offers XeSS resolution scaling, which, combined with dialing up the Windows and laptop settings to performance mode, allows for a playable frame rate of about 65fps, though I saw 69fps on a cold run at the beginning of the day. Finally, we move to AI. AI has become one of the hottest topics in computing, although developers still haven't flooded the market with AI applications that run locally on the PC. (Windows 11's upcoming 24H2 update should have more, including generative art for Paint and Photos, and eventually Windows Recall.) For now, there aren't too many benchmarks that tap the TOPS that these new platforms integrate. Remember, Intel's Lunar Lake, AMD's Ryzen AI 300 (up to 50 TOPS), and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips (45 TOPS) are all Copilot+ PC-qualified, even if they won't receive their new feature set without a Microsoft update. Intel's Lunar Lake chips provide a varying amount of TOPS; in this case, the Core Ultra 258V provides 47 TOPS. UL's Procyon app measures the AI output by testing each chip for how well it executes various AI frameworks. Like the Cinebench or 3DMark tests, the idea is that you're getting a generic picture of how well the chips will perform AI functions. While I don't have a Procyon result for the AMD Ryzen chip, the test shows that both Lunar Lake and the Snapdragon X Elite are pretty evenly matched; Intel's chip does better with AI on wall power, but Qualcomm is the superior AI chip on the go. Procyon also offers a more practical test: generative AI image generation, which uses AI to generate a series of eight images. (This test doesn't yet run on an Arm processor.) I ran two tests, just to indicate the practical power of the NPU. First I used the test to create a series of eight images using just the NPU, and then I ran the same test with a toggle that allowed me to use the integrated GPU as an assist. It's this "total TOPS" that companies like Intel are espousing as the future of AI, though one that really isn't here yet, either. The test uses an 8-bit integer model, which generates less complex images than a floating-point model. But they're quick: about 8 seconds per image when the NPU and iGPU are combined. Here, I compare the Procyon scores. It's easy to measure the battery life of a laptop. For a chip? Well, that's a lot messier. How long your laptop will last depends a lot on the size of the battery and how big and how efficient your laptop's screen is. The type of screen (IPS, OLED) also makes a difference. I think the best way to answer this particular question is to refer you to my colleague Gordon Mah Ung's forthcoming video, in which he takes two virtually identical Dell laptops -- one with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip inside, the other with an Intel Core Ultra Series 2 / Lunar Lake chip -- and does a direct comparison. That's about as good as you're going to get in answering which chip is most efficient. We do have previous test results of the Asus ZenBook S 16 (with a Ryzen AI 300 chip inside and a 78Wh battery), the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 7th Edition (with a Snapdragon X Elite chip and a 54Wh battery), the Asus ZenBook 14 OLED (with a first-gen Core Ultra Core 155H and a 75Wh battery) versus the current Asus ZenBook OLED (with its Lunar Lake chip and a 73Wh battery). Running these laptops on our standard video rundown test, where we loop a 4K video over and over at a fixed screen brightness until the laptop's battery expires, is kind of ludicrous these days. The Lunar Lake laptop lasted 21 hours!! That's basically like taking a laptop on a weekend "camping" trip or a prolonged sales conference. It makes more sense to ask it to do a little work to simulate a work environment. UL's Procyon battery-life test moves from Office app to Office app, performing "tasks" in each to simulate you working on your laptop for hours on end. In this case, here's how it worked out. Remember, Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, and the Ryzen AI tests were run in "balanced" mode, while the Snapdragon X Elite was left in its "recommended" low-power mode. As they say, your mileage will vary...but at least 10 hours of computing power from all three competitors? That's fantastic. Old chip nerds will recall Transmeta, a laptop processor startup that could translate its instruction set from X86, much like Arm. Transmeta's legacy isn't so much what it accomplished, but what it drove Intel to do: finally zero in on the laptop market and develop a competitive laptop processor during the first years of the new century. Now, it's happened again. Intel's first Core Ultra, Meteor Lake, downplayed performance for long battery life; Lunar Lake takes that to the next level. So is Intel's Lunar Lake a Snapdragon killer? Not exactly. In terms of efficiency, there's a strong case to be made that Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is still the most efficient processor out there. AMD's Ryzen chips win at many performance tasks, but battery life suffers. But in some sense, that doesn't matter. Dumping in a few extra grams of battery essentially "eliminates" Qualcomm's advantage, as our test Asus laptop demonstrates. But the Snapdragon still outperforms it under several scenarios, save for gaming. There, lingering compatibility issues associated with the Arm instruction set and the impressive 3D engine give the Core Ultra Series 2 a solid advantage. All apps just work on Intel and AMD machines, but can be hit or miss on Snapdragon laptops, though Qualcomm has managed to get many of the most popular apps running on Arm. The bottom line is that for any task that depends on the CPU, Intel's Lunar Lake is middling at best. When the GPU or NPU enters the equation, it surges higher. Ditto for battery life, where it competes well against the Snapdragon. (At a certain point, do people stop worrying about battery life, or does long battery life equal a longer-life notebook?) A few years back it was easier to identify the "best" laptop chip. Now, the question is what's best for you. And it's not completely answerable, either: With Arrow Lake lurking in the background, Intel could have a separate performance processor up its sleeve. For Intel, this is a simple sell: Lunar Lake is a safe bet, a Snapdragon without the compatibility concerns.

Asus Zenbook S 14 (2024) review: Intel Lunar Lake caught slipping?

Intel Core Ultra 200 series (codename Lunar Lake) is here, and Asus has joined the party with the Zenbook S 14. The chip wars are beginning to heat up, so does team blue show up to the party? Sort of. Asus has given this a helluva college try -- a thin and light notebook with a drop dead gorgeous design and impressive ergonomics, which sit just below an eye-meltingly good OLED panel. The port array may be a little restricted, but you get just enough to get stuff done. This is where the Intel part of the equation comes into play. Core Ultra 200 series has made some impressive gains in a couple of areas where it matters. The battery life is much better than last year, and out of all the new chipsets, the graphical performance here takes the lead in the Windows laptop space. But in general performance, Intel falls behind the likes of AMD and Qualcomm, and while stamina gains are to be applauded, we've still seen longer in Arm-based computers over the traditional x86 path that Intel takes. Sure, you get some benefits here in terms of not worrying about that ARM app compatibility, and the integrated graphics performance does mean you can get away with playing some AAA games at respectable frame rates. But for the $1,499 price you pay for this, you can get more where it matters in overall speed and stamina. Asus has really found its stride in laptop design, and that is all on show here in the Zenbook S 14. On top of that, there are some strengths to Intel's Lunar Lake. By this point, I'm sure you've heard it all before when it comes to Asus leaning in hard on OLED displays across its entire laptop range. That is very much the case here -- a flash flood of color with a crispy resolution, deep contrast, buttery smooth 120Hz refresh rate, and an impressively zippy touch response rate. That average brightness means you'll want to keep away from direct sunlight to see the screen (something we're seeing in a lot of OLED displays that aren't tandem OLED like the M4 iPad Pro). But all-in-all, this is a stunner. For the past 12-18 months, Asus has been making some of the best-looking and best-feeling laptops I've used, and that's the same case with the Zenbook S 14. That ceraluminum finish with the sharp, angular lines across the lid exude a premium, utilitarian nature out of every pore. And gracing your fingers upon this surface reveals an almost paper-like texture that feels satisfyingly durable. Oh, and did we mention this thing is rather small and lightweight? Asus has done something special here with this frame, and on top of that, the ergonomics are supreme too. The keyboard feels great to type on with plenty of depth, and the touchpad has a nice slick texture to it with a satisfyingly tactile click -- alongside the side gestures you see in the Zenbook S 16. With Lunar Lake, Intel has had a major rethink of its laptop CPUs -- removing hyperthreading (a speedy way of doing tasks but not the most power efficient) and putting the system's RAM directly on the chip are probably the biggest standout features of them all. These work together to give you a vastly improved battery life for an Intel laptop. The numbers here show Intel has taken a big step forward. Lasting just over 13 hours in the Tom's Guide Battery test (web surfing and streaming video at 150 nits of screen brightness) Zenbook S 14 may not be up to the likes of the Snapdragon X Elite-armed systems, but it comes closer. The Dell XPS 13 with Snapdragon endured for over 19 hours. Also, a particular shout-out to the battery drain when the lid is closed -- something that has plagued x86 laptops in the past, but Intel has completely eliminated. In the three times I tested it (charging to 100% and closing the lid for 12 hours), the sleep mode must be doing something extra special here to preserve every single percent of that longevity. Elsewhere, Intel has seen just how important a strong GPU is for AI workloads -- that much has been clear given the true strength of the Asus ProArt P16 as one of the best AI laptops you can buy. So with that in mind, Intel Core Ultra 200 series sports up to a claimed 1.5x better graphics performance thanks to the 2nd generation graphical cores and improved ray tracing capabilities. In fact, Intel has gone in so hard on this that the company has made sacrifices elsewhere for it (more on that later). Yes the Ryzen AI 9 has better frame rates, but to get this, the amount of power AMD sucked from the battery was significantly higher. We'll get into the bad about Intel real soon, but there's plenty of good to write home about too. So far so good...so what's the problem here? Well, outside of a couple small gripes, there is only one real problem. And it's a big one if you want to get the best bang for your buck in a small and light notebook. So while Intel has backed up its claims in the graphics and battery life department (the latter one thanks to that improved NPU), general performance hasn't seen the same gains. So in the day-to-day, you won't really notice the differences. If you look at the results, the Lunar Lake-powered Asus Zenbook S 14 falls behind the competition on several tests. This includes Geekbench (single core and mulit-core), as well as our video transoding test. In fact, this system is nearly 4 minutes slower than the Snapdragon XPS 13 and over 3 minutes slower than the AMD-powered Zenbook S 16. At least the Lunar Lake system delivers better Photoshop scores than the Snapdragon laptop. Most interestingly is the fact that while our crack testing lab got the version with Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, I also received the model with the top-of-the-range Core Ultra 9 288V. Now as far as I can see, this version is available only in the UK for £1,749 (sorry about that). For context, that's £150 more than the Core Ultra 7 configuration, so do you get any additional bang for your buck? Well...kind of, but it's debatable. So let's go ahead and put this into context. Not only are the gains by going for the more expensive chipset here still barely negligible, but the base line Snapdragon X Plus in the ProArt PZ13 is still faster than this. At the prices being asked for of laptops packing these flagship chips, that's just not good enough. I won't ignore the obvious here -- Intel is heading in the right direction. That improvement in battery life needs to be applauded, and there's no doubt that in the integrated graphics face-off between the big Windows 3, team blue has a clear lead here. But where it matters -- being a notebook for getting stuff done as quickly as possible -- Intel is seemingly taking baby steps. It's simply impossible to ignore the fact that Snapdragon X chips are faster with better battery life, and AMD just about matches the stamina here while coming with better single and multi-threaded speeds. These aren't necessarily dealbreakers, but just some small annoyances that may impact your purchasing decision, so I'm grouping them into one con. So I'm left feeling conflicted about the Asus Zenbook S 14. It's a good laptop that looks great, has a lovely OLED display and a top tier keyboard/touchpad combo. But you can get better. In a world where Qualcomm didn't just show up with the Snapdragon X Elite and bring unprecedented performance gains that even show Apple up, this score would be higher. That's not to say Intel doesn't outperform the X Elite here in certain areas -- graphics have had a serious tune-up and x86 means you won't face any of the app compatibility issues. But for the all-round performance, while this does keep up, you can get more bang for your buck elsewhere.

Intel Lunar Lake Review Roundup: Chipzilla Is Back With Strong Performance & Efficiency, Xe2 GPU Shines

Intel's Lunar Lake SoCs have finally debuted in the markets, and it looks like the reception from tech outlets has been superb, marking a big comeback for the blue team. Intel's Lunar Lake CPUs Deliver Tremendous Performance Uplifts In Reviews, Great Efficiency & Graphics Performance Are The Highlights Intel's Lunar Lake "Core Ultra 200V" or "Core Ultra Series2" has been highly anticipated as it was going to be a major turnaround for the blue team and it looks like hands-on reviews from various tech outlets agree that this is a return-to-form moment for Intel. In general, it's safe to say that the Intel CPU design team that worked on Lunar Lake + TSMC's process technologies has managed to nail out the platform's capabilities, with Team Blue bringing in efficiency, performance, and durability all in a single package. Intel certainly did hit the bullseye here. Before we go into the reviews, we just want to slide in that our team is preparing an extensive review on Intel's Lunar Lake platform, including hands-on details and in-depth benchmarking, so make sure to keep your eyes open as it can drop by anytime. So, starting, ETA Prime was one of the first tech YouTubers to showcase ASUS's Zenbook S14, featuring Intel's Lunar Lake Core Ultra 7 258V mobile chip. The SoC features eight cores: four P-cores (Lion Cove) and four E-cores (Skymont Cores), which can be categorized as a mid-tier chip in the lineup. For more in-depth details on Lunar Lake, you can head over to one of our previous coverages in the following links: We won't discuss the laptop model itself, given that the focus of the coverage is on the new Lunar Lake SoCs, but synthetic benchmarks shared by ETA Prime on Geekbench, Cinebench R24, and 3DMark show that the Core Ultra 7 258V manage to oust its previous-gen counterparts by decent margins, and even comes head-to-head with ARM-based chips such as Apple's M1 Max. Similarly, gaming on the new platform is a delight as well since the gaming scenarios shared by ETA Prime shows that the Core Ultra 7 258V manages to deliver consistent performance in AAA titles such as Forza Horizon 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, achieving around 60-80 FPS in low-to-mid settings under the new Xe2 iGPU. This is certainly a great result for Intel's newest chip, given that it manages to maintain the temperatures, even if not being switched to "Performance Mode" The next pivotal point to consider is battery life, and with Intel's Lunar Lake, it is safe to say that Apple's Macbooks have been dethroned when it comes to longevity. The test conducted by ETA Prime shows that the Zenbook S14 managed to run 16 hours and 37 minutes, under 50% brightness and 1080p video streaming, which is beyond impressive at this point. This shows how far Intel has come when it comes to SoC efficiency, and this particular result is consistent across all chips, not just a certain high-end SKU. Interestingly, the above viewpoints are consistent across all reviews made over the internet, but a noticeable point we noted was an Intel Lunar Lake driver issue, which was highlighted by a review from The Phawx, where he claims that the new drivers don't support several titles out there, but that is a preview driver issue for now, and given that a few days post-launch pass by, we will see the drivers in a much better state. The company has already rolled out a new patch as of yesterday which addresses most of these concerns. The performance numbers posted by "The Phawx", especially regarding the Arc 140V "Xe2" iGPU are certainly a delight. The Techtuber uses various TDP targets and benchmarks Lunar Lake against the older Meteor Lake and also AMD's Ryzen AI 300 APUs. The Lunar Lake chips deliver substantial performance per watt and Xe2 is looking to be a strong iGPU solution, especially at lower wattages which is great news for those looking forward to gaming handhelds such as the next-gen MSI Claw. PCWorld's Gordon says that Intel has "saved x86" or, in simple terms, has managed to make one of the biggest comebacks in the laptop segment. Team Blue has nailed SoC efficiency here, by all means. And, to top it all off, PCWorld's review discloses that ASUS's Zenbook S14, which we discussed earlier, delivers up to 23 hours of battery life under 720p video streaming. So, it won't be wrong to say here that Intel has managed to close down the efficiency gap created by the ARM-based chips. Intel's Lunar Lake architecture might prove to be the breakthrough moment for the firm when it comes to decorating the SoCs to present a unified package that features the best of everything. Surely, Intel hasn't managed to meet the benchmarks created by AMD's "Strix Point" APUs, but the generational difference is massive this time and the performance per watt in a thin and light package is amazing, mainly due to how Intel designed the architecture, coupled with their foundry choice. Interesting times are ahead for the laptop segment and Intel but overall, it's just glad to see Intel back in action with a solid product.

Asus Zenbook S 14 Review: A Finely Crafted Home for New Intel AI PC Chips

The Asus Zenbook S 14 gives us our first look at an Intel Lunar Lake laptop, the follow-up to the first AI processors the chipmaker introduced last year under the codename Meteor Lake. Intel is sticking with the Core Ultra branding; this new generation of processors is simply labeled Core Ultra Series 2. Last year's Core Ultra chips introduced a radical new chiplet architecture along with a neural processing unit (NPU) to handle AI tasks. With these new Core Ultra 200V chips, Intel is promising greater efficiency for better battery life along with an uptick in CPU performance and a big boost to graphics performance from the integrated Arc GPU. The focus on x86 efficiency is no surprise, given the lengthy runtimes we've seen from laptops that have ARM-based processors from Qualcomm and Apple. With this focus on efficiency, it makes sense that the first Lunar Lake laptop is a thin and light model designed for on-the-go performance. The Zenbook S 14 is a 14-inch ultraportable that's only half an inch thick and weighs just a smidgen more than 2.5 pounds. It also boasts a gorgeous 2.8K-resolution OLED display, but its superior picture quality comes at the expense of battery life. While the Zenbook S 14 offers a longer runtime than previous-gen Core Ultra laptops, it is still hours away from the battery life you get with a laptop based on Qualcomm's ARM-based Snapdragon X processors or a MacBook based on Apple's own ARM-based M-series chips. There is a lot to like about the Zenbook S 14 as an ultraportable, but it fails to reverse the trend of ARM offering a more optimal mix of performance and battery life compared to x86. Asus has two versions of the Zenbook S 14 at launch. Our test model (UX5406SA-PH79T) costs $1,500 from Asus and has a Core Ultra 7 258V CPU, 32GB of RAM, integrated Intel Arc 140V graphics and a 1TB SSD. There's also a model (UX5406SA-S14.U71TB) available at Best Buy for $1,400 that has a Core Ultra 7 256V CPU and 16GB of RAM. Both models feature the same 14-inch OLED display with a 2,880x1,800-pixel resolution and touch support. System RAM has been moved to the chip, so you'll need to choose the amount of RAM you want up front because you won't be able to add RAM after purchase. The lack of an upgrade path is similar to the trend of soldered RAM, which has become more common in recent years. However, with Core Ultra Series 2 laptops, you're now limited to choosing between 16GB or 32GB of RAM. The Asus Zenbook S 14 starts at £1,500 in the UK and AU$3,399 in Australia. It was a mixed bag for the Zenbook S 14 in lab testing. The laptop's Intel Core Ultra 7 258V has eight processing cores -- four performance cores and four efficient cores. And with Core Ultra Series 2, Intel has done away with hyperthreading to maximize power efficiency. Just compare the Core Ultra 7 258V's eight processing cores/threads to the previous Core Ultra 7 155H's 16 cores (four performance, eight efficient and two low-power efficient cores) and 22 threads. The lack of hyperthreading combined with offering only eight total cores is likely the reason for the Zenbook S 14's poor showing on Geekbench 6 and PCMark 10, two benchmarks that tax every physical core and processing thread to measure overall performance across mixed workloads. It finished last on both tests. It trailed a trio of laptops based on the Core Ultra 7 155H on both tests. PCMark 10 isn't compatible with Macs or Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processors, but Geekbench 6 is. And on that test, the Zenbook S 14 also finished behind the M3 MacBook Air and a trio of Copilot Plus PCs based on a Snapdragon X chip. The Zenbook S 14 performed better with single-core performance, placing just behind the M3 Air on the single-core Cinebench 2024 test. However, it plummeted to last place on the multicore version, again showing the limits of the unthreaded, eight-core CPU. Its single- and multicore scores track closely to those of the MacBook Air, which also has an unthreaded, eight-core M3 chip. The integrated GPU is the second-generation version of Intel Arc graphics, and the Zenbook S 14 showed modest gains on 3DMark Time Spy over previous-gen Core Ultra laptops. Snapdragon X-based laptops have to run this test through emulation since an ARM version hasn't been released yet, leading to significantly lower scores for those systems. This is likely the Intel chip's biggest advantage over Snapdragon processors: no emulation is required, ensuring full Windows software compatibility without issues. With each new generation of Intel's integrated GPU, I can't help but wonder how much closer it gets to delivering playable 3D framerates, at least for older games. If the Zenbook S 14 is any indication, we aren't much closer with this next version of Intel Arc graphics that are based on new Xe2 architecture. On Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it averaged 26 fps at 1080p using Highest settings. That's a few frames more per second than the Surface Laptop 7 and its integrated Qualcomm Adreno GPU, which managed only 20 fps on the same test. Even when I dropped the quality settings to Lowest, the Zenbook S 14 averaged only 47 fps. The NPU also gets a bump with the second-core Core Ultra series. It's capable of 48 TOPS, and the GPU adds 67 TOPS for a total of 115 TOPS. (See our TOPS explainer for more on this AI metric.) On Procyon's AI Computer Vision benchmark that measures integer math proficiency for AI workloads, the Zenbook S 14's score was in line with the NPU performance from Snapdragon X-based Copilot Plus PCs and a whopping 3.6 times better than a laptop with a previous-gen Core Ultra 9 processor. (We've just started using this test and have limited comparison numbers for it, which is why you won't find previous Core Ultra laptops on its chart below.) Battery from this Lunar Lake laptop is good but not great. It lasted for 15 hours 20 minutes on our online streaming battery drain test, which will get you through a work or school day on a single charge. Its a longer runtime than we've seen from Core Ultra laptops but still far short of the exceptional battery life we've seen from Snapdragon X laptops as well as Apple's M3 MacBook Air. The M3 Air ran for roughly three more hours on the same battery test, and the longest-running Snapdragon X model offers nearly 10 more hours of runtime. Lunar Lake has arrived, but ARM still has the clear advantage over x86 with laptop battery life. Now that we've covered the Intel inside the laptop, let's turn our attention to its exterior. The Zenbook S 14 is a finely crafted ultraportable. It is less than half an inch thick but doesn't feel flimsy thanks to its Ceraluminum chassis, which is what Asus calls this aluminum and ceramic material. Oftentimes with laptops this thin, the shell flexes to worrisome degrees, but that's not the case here. The tiniest amount of flex can be felt in the lid behind the display, but the keyboard deck is rock-solid. That makes the typing experience more enjoyable because the keys aren't flexing beneath your fingertips. The keys themselves offer shallow travel but snappy feedback; I felt immediately comfortable and could type fast on the Zenbook S 14. The touchpad is just average. While it's decent for a mechanical touchpad, offering a firm click response, a haptic touchpad isn't unheard of at this price. I much prefer a haptic touchpad for its consistent click response across the entire surface and the option to customize the feedback. The Zenbook S 14 includes smart gestures along the side and top edges for adjusting brightness, volume and controlling video playback. However, I doubt I'd use these gestures over the function keys or the touchscreen. Impressively, the 14-inch Zenbook S 14 is lighter than the 13.6-inch MacBook Air. It weighs just 2.6 pounds, and the Air is 2.7 pounds. Meanwhile, the 13.8-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and 14-inch HP OmniBook X 14 are two of the lightest Copilot Plus PCs we've tested but still weigh close to 3 pounds and are appreciably heavier than the Zenbook S 14. Another advantage the ZenBook S 14 has over the Copilot Plus PCs is its display, which has an HDR OLED panel instead of a standard IPS LCD. Not only does the OLED display deliver more vivid colors with better contrast and truer black levels, but it also has a higher resolution at 2,880x1,800-pixels than any Copilot Plus PCs we've reviewed. Text and images look crisp, and colors pop. It's a fantastic display, even if its peak brightness failed to match its 500-nit rating. I measured a peak brightness of 375 nits with a Spyder X Elite colorimeter, which is significantly lower than its rating. With its excellent contrast, however, an OLED doesn't need to be as bright to stay visible in direct light as an LCD. Its color performance was strong with 100% coverage of the sRGB and P3 spaces and 94% of AdobeRGB Despite the incredibly compact enclosure, Asus found room for four speakers -- a pair of 1-watt woofers and a pair of 1-watt tweeters. That's not a lot of wattage, but this quad array offers fuller sound than the typical 2-watt stereo speakers, even if the total wattage isn't any greater. There was a hint of separation between mid and high tones, and I could also detect a bit of bass in the mix. For such a thin and compact ultraportable, the Zenbook S 14 offers impressive sound. The 1080p IR webcam offers the only biometric login option because the laptop lacks a fingerprint reader. It also offers a sharp, well-balanced image with accurate skin tones, but 1080p is no longer top among webcams. The HP Omnibook X 14, for instance, has a webcam capable of capturing 1440p video. Still, 1080p will probably suffice for most, especially those upgrading from a 720p webcam. With the Zenbook S 14, you get greater processing efficiency and longer battery life, along with a huge leap in AI performance from the NPU, compared with laptops based on Intel's previous Core Ultra chips. Intel still has a ways to go, however, to catch up to the performance and efficiency of the competing ARM-based CPUs from Apple and Qualcomm. The most impressive thing about the Zenbook S 14 isn't the Intel tech inside but the Asus design on the outside. It's a well put together ultraportable.

Asus Zenbook S 14 review: A stellar start for Lunar Lake

Quick Links Asus Zenbook S 14: Pricing and availability Design Keyboard and touchpad Display Performance Should you buy the Asus Zenbook S 14? There's a lot riding on Intel's Core Ultra Series 2 processors, also known as Lunar Lake. After the launch of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X series earlier this year, it became painfully obvious that Intel (alongside AMD) just couldn't live up to what the Arm architecture could offer. That, paired with the other troubles Intel has been facing, has left the company in a fairly vulnerable position. Thankfully, the debut laptops for Intel's latest processors seem to hit most of the notes needed to make this a great offering. Intel appears to finally have figured out performance and power efficiency, and it still has the advantage of actually supporting gaming, which is the big pain point of Qualcomm-powered laptops. Aside from that, Asus has also built a terrific laptop with the Zenbook S 14. This is a super sleek, thin, and premium feeling laptop that leaves very little to be desired across the board. This is the start of a new generation of Intel laptops, and it's a great one at that. About this review: Intel sent us the Asus Zenbook S 14 for the purposes of this review. Neither Intel nor Asus had any input in its content. Sleek and powerful Asus Zenbook S 14 (2024) A great start for Intel Lunar Lake 9/ 10 The Asus Zenbook S 14 is an excellent showcase for Intel's latest processors. It offers plenty of performance and still manages to be power efficient enough to easily last through a whole day. paired with an excellent display and a premium design. It's a great sign for Intel, and a great laptop overall. ProsIntel has finally made some big efficiency gains without sacrificing performanceSuper sleek design that's both thin and light without sacrificing portsBeautiful OLED display ConsStandby power consumption is still not amazingWebcam isn't on par with the best laptops out there $1400 at Best Buy$1500 at Asus Asus Zenbook S 14: Pricing and availability The Asus Zenbook S 14 is available to order from Best Buy and Asus' official website alike. It's launching alongside other laptops that are debuting the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors, so it's shipping today. Pricing starts at $1,399.99 for the model with 16GB of RAM, with a higher-end model featuring 32GB of RAM costing $1,499.99. Otherwise, the models available currently are identical, though more options may appear later on. Specifications. CPU Up to Intel Core Ultra 7 268V GPU Intel Arch Graphics 140V (integrated) Display type OLED, 16:10 aspect ratio, 120Hz refresh rate, 100% DCI-P3, PANTONE Validated, touch support Display (Size, Resolution) 14-inch, 2880x1800 RAM Up to 32GB (onboard) Storage Up to 1TB M.2 2280 Battery 72Wh Charge speed 60W charger included Ports 2x Thunderbolt 4, 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, 1x HDMI, 3.5mm headphone jack Operating System Windows 11 Webcam 1080p with Windows Hello Cellular connectivity No Wi-Fi connectivity Wi-Fi 7 Bluetooth Bluetooth 5.4 Form factor Clamshell Dimensions 12.22x8.45x0.47-0.51 inches (310.39x214.63x11.93-12.95mm) Weight 2.65 pounds (1.2kg) Speakers Quad stereo speakers by Harman/Kardon, Smart Amp, Dolby Atmos Colors Zumaia Grey, Scandinavian White Price Starting at $1,400 Expand Design Asus has perfected the aluminum laptop Close I've been a fan of Asus laptop designs for a while now, but this is the first time I get to see the company's most premium laptop firsthand for a longer period of time, and I love it. The Asus Zenbook S 14 leverages what Asus calls "Ceraluminum" for the lid. Asus uses a special treatment that turns the aluminum into "high-tech ceramic", which gives the material better scratch resistance while keeping the relative lightness of aluminum. I didn't try breaking the laptop to test these claims, but what I will say is that this material looks and feels great, and it helps this laptop stand out from the myriad of aluminum laptops on the market. There's a very unique texture to the material when touching, and it feels a bit more welcoming than bare metal. At 2.65 pounds, it's very light for a 14-inch laptop made of aluminum The base of the laptop uses more regular aluminum, but it still looks and feels very premium, with some very intentional design choices. I really like how the speaker grill consists of larger etchings that look like a rounded square, with two small holes in each of the squares. It's a kind of machining that probably doesn't have much practical use, but it helps give this laptop that much more personality. Despite coming in a plain gray color, I never felt like this laptop was boring. For a 14-inch laptop, this is a very portable machine, too. It comes in at just over 11mm thick at its thinnest point, and under 13mm at its thickest. And at 2.65 pounds, it's very light for a 14-inch laptop made of aluminum. To get significantly lower than that, you'd need magnesium, and that usually sacrifices the premium feel. Asus really nailed it here. We're still not sacrificing ports Close In a world where classic ports have become an afterthought for the majority of premium laptops, Asus has been adamant in keeping these ports around no matter how premium the laptop is. In fact, I don't think this laptop could get any thinner with its current port selection. On the left side on the laptop, you get two Thunderbolt 4 ports, along with HDMI and a headphone jack. On the right, a USB Type-A port with 10Gbps bandwidth. For a premium laptop, that's a lot of ports, and it covers a lot of bases. Both the HDMI and USB Type-A ports are almost as thick as the laptop's frame itself, so Asus couldn't have trimmed more fat if it wanted to. Related Dell XPS 13 9345 review: A winner no matter the chipset The Dell XPS 13 now comes with a Qualcomm chipset and is just as winsome as its Intel brethren. Keyboard and touchpad The good news keeps coming Asus really surprised me with the keyboard on the Zenbook 14 OLED I reviewed back in January, so this time, I knew what to expect. The Zenbook S 14 comes with a very good keyboard that's very comfortable to type on and doesn't do anything weird to make it awkward. All the keys are where you'd expect, and they're well spaced out so it all feels very comfortable. There's also a good amount of travel and a soft bottom out, so everything is in place for a good experience. The backlight helps if you often work in the dark, though this is something I don't really need since I never work in low light. The Zenbook S 14 comes with a very good keyboard that's very comfortable to type on As for the touchpad, Asus also did a good job. The surface is smooth and it's very easy to use this touchpad, and that's about all there is to say in terms of general use. However, Asus also included some interesting features using the edges of the touchpad. If you swipe up or down on the right side, you can change the display brightness, while using the left side changes the volume. You can also scrub videos by swiping along the top, and launch the Asus ScreenXpert app by swiping in from the top right corner. 2:44 Related Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (2024) review: A terrific laptop for travel with few compromises The Asus Zenbook 14 comes with a sharp OLED display and Intel Core Ultra processors elevating every aspect of the experience. I did occasionally change the brightness by accident while using the laptop, so palm rejection could be a bit better, but it was far from a major issue. Display It's OLED, and it's great Close The Asus Zenbook S 14 comes with a 14-inch 3K panel (2880x1800), and just like every OLED laptop, it looks fantastic. OLED displays on laptops are no longer this crazy unheard-of experience, so you probably know the drill by now. Colors are vibrant and punchy, it gets plenty bright for most use cases, and it just looks great overall. It also supports a 120Hz refresh rate, but I inadvertently left it set to 60Hz during my review period, and it still looked just fine. It thankfully supports a dynamic refresh rate too, so you don't have to waste a ton of battery when the higher refresh rate isn't needed. Colors are vibrant and punchy, it gets plenty bright for most use cases, and it just looks great overall. Asus touts up to 500 nits of brightness in HDR, which is also par for the course in OLED laptops. Generally, this means max brightness in SDR is about 400 nits, and according to my tests, the Zenbook S 14 falls just short of that here. I don't think that's a big problem when you have OLED levels of contrast, but it's worth noting all the same. Image credit: XDA As for color reproduction, Asus claims this display covers 100% of DCI-P3, and indeed, that's what my measurements show. In fact, I also got 95% of Adobe RGB and 93% of NTCS, so this is a simply fantastic screen. All in all, this is a great display. And unlike the Zenbook 14 OLED I reviewed before, there were no weird issues with this one when using certain apps. It just looked good all the time. The laptop also delivers excellent audio out of its quad speaker setup. Just like the Zenbook 14 OLED I reviewed before, the Zenbook S 14 delivers surprisingly powerful audio out of its thin chassis, and it does so without significant distortion at high volumes. It's punchy and crisp, making for one of the best speaker setups I've personally heard. Because it has some top-firing speakers, I'd say this is ever so slightly sharper than the Zenbook 14 OLED, so it's currently my favorite audio setup. The webcam is solid Above the display is 1080p webcam, which comes complete with an IR camera for Windows Hello, and even support for presence detection. The camera quality itself is good, though this webcam isn't on par with the 5MP we've seen on some laptops, and less so the 9MP webcams HP is now using on its premium laptops. Still, it's clearly a good enough webcam for video calls, as are the microphones. This laptop doesn't support the Windows Studio Effects features that are promoted with Copilot+ PCs, maybe because Copilot+ just isn't enabled for Intel PCs yet. Things like creative filters or the Teleprompter style for the Eye contact feature aren't available here. Performance Intel Lunar Lake is the real deal Intel had some big hurdles to overcome with its Lunar Lake processors. It had to deliver good AI performance to enable Copilot+ PCs, but more importantly, it had to prove Intel can match or at least compete with Qualcomm when it comes to power efficiency. The Asus Zenbook S 14 is one of the first laptops to debut these processors, with my model specifically featuring an Intel Core Ultra 7 268V with 32GB of RAM and Intel Arc graphics 140V. And from my experience using this laptop for about a week, Intel has finally nailed it, though this requires some explanation. See, the big threat to Intel at this moment is Qualcomm with the Snapdragon X series of chipsets. Snapdragon-powered laptops proved that it is possible to deliver excellent performance on battery power while still having great battery life. When I reviewed the Asus Vivobook S 15, I saw nearly identical results in Geekbench 6 when plugged in or on battery, in both Best performance and Balanced power modes. Related Asus Vivobook S 15 review: It's almost everything I wanted in a laptop I love the Vivobook S 15, but I think I care about it more than Asus does. The Asus Zenbook S 14 had a lot to live up to as a result, and looking at benchmarks alone, you can see how it faltered. Asus Zenbook S 14 (Core Ultra 7 268V, Best performance) Asus Zenbook S 14 (Core Ultra 7 268V, Balanced) Asus Vivobook S 15 (Snapdragon X Elite, Best performance) Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (2024) (Core Ultra 7 155H) Geekbench 6 (AC) (single/multi) 2,732 / 11.215 2,741 / 11,186 2,430 / 14,447 2,355 / 12,202 Geekbench 6 (Battery) (single/multi) 2,765 / 11,153 1,856 / 7,015 2,393 / 14,382 --- Cinebench 2024 (single/multi) 109 / 591 (AC) 118 / 590 (Battery) 76 / 469 (Battery) 108 / 961 101 / 547 PCMark 10 (AC/Battery) 6,536 / 6,559 --- (untested) / 4,542 6,555 / 5,750 3DMark Steel Nomad (Light/Normal) 3,243 / 874 --- 2,019 / 498 --- 3DMark Wild Life (Normal/Extreme) 27,992 / 7,329 --- 16,772 / 6,417 21,855 / 6,306 While it managed to maintain similar scores when I set it to Balanced mode while plugged in, and in High performance mode when on battery, combining the Balanced setting with battery power took a big hit to performance in Geekbench 6 and PCMark 10. That in itself is still a problem, but it's not as big as it used to be. Despite everything, maintaining such a similar score while on battery power, even if it's in high performance mode, is something I've never seen an Intel laptop do. There's still the matter of battery life, but I'll come back to that in a bit. Intel has done some serious work on these cores, and it really shows. Something else that probably gets your attention here is that the multi-core score for this processor is lower than the Meteor Lake processors that launched in January. That may seem like a downgrade, but in reality, the difference here is very small, and by contrast, single-core performance has improved massively. The lower multi-core performance is simply because we've gone from 16 cores and 22 threads to just 8 cores and 8 threads, so there's only so much you can expect. Intel has done some serious work on these cores, and it really shows. Still, it's also behind what the Snapdragon X Elite offers, and that's more of a problem. Still, using this laptop felt very snappy the entire time. Even when battery saver kicked in after reaching 20% battery, it didn't feel like the laptop slowed down signficantly for my general workload of using a browser to write, research, upload images, and so on. It was always a good time. It's also worth noting that GPU performance is significantly better than before, which is one of the big highlights of Lunar Lake. In fact, that's one of the big points where Intel is still basically untouched by Qualcomm. You can actually play games on Intel PCs, and now it's better than ever. With Qualcomm, it's a total gamble whether a game will work or not. I didn't get too deep into gaming, but I did play Rocket League at 1920x1200 resolution and all the settings maxed out, and I was getting just above 100FPS most of the time. In Apex Legends (the DirectX 12 version), I played at high settings across the board and 2880x1800 resolution (though the game uses adaptive resolution) and got 50-60FPS on the ground. When flying over the stage before a match, the framerate is noticeably lower, but the point is, you can't play Apex Legends at all on Snapdragon, and that will likely remain the case for a while. Battery life is finally good (usually) So now we come back to battery life. I just mentioned how performance takes a big hit when we go from the High performance power mode to Balanced while the laptop is unplugged. Obviously, I wanted to see how these modes impacted battery life, because at the end of the day, what matters is whether you can ge tgood battery life and good perofrmance at the same time. As such, I first tested the battery in High performance mode. And the thing is, I never went back. That's right. Despite the Geekbench 6 scores appearing to be disappointing at first, I discovered that Intel's Lunar Lake processors actually can deliver great performance and battery life at the same time. During my review period I got to test battery life for three full days. The results were 5 hours and 54 minutes, 7 hours and 40 minutes, and 8 hours and 52 minutes. That's some of the best battery life I've ever seen from an Intel laptop, and I usually test them all in Balanced mode. That first result was a bit unusual, but I also had some atypical usage that day due to testing some programs for other reasons. Still, it shows that there may still be some inconsistent results, but overall, battery life is much better than before without sacrificing performance. It's not all perfect. The laptop still gets warmer during use than a Snapdragon laptop would, and when I left the computer idle for a couple of days with over 50% of battery, it was still dead after the weekend. Standby battery life could still be a bit better. But this is big for Intel, and it makes this an excellent laptop. Should you buy the Asus Zenbook S 14? Going into this, I had a lot of doubts that Intel could live up to the promises it made for Lunar Lake, or to what Qualcomm is offering with its laptops. But to my surprise, Intel has made a huge leap with these new processors, and it's come surprisingly close to the target. Clearly, it doesn't beat Qualcomm when it comes to raw performance, but the experience is close enough that, considering Intel's advantages in app and game compatibility, getting a Lunar Lake laptop is still more than warranted. And if you're getting such a laptop, the Asus Zenbook S 14 is definitely a great one to go for. Pairing the top-tier processor with a super sleek design that looks and feels great, a fantastic OLED screen, and a simply great experience in just about every way. I can't complain much about anything here. You should buy the Asus Zenbook S 14 if: You want a powerful laptop with great battery life You like having some classic ports but still want an ultrathin laptop You watch a lot of movies on that OLED display You should NOT buy the Asus Zenbook S 14 if: You want battery life and performance that truly beat Snapdragon PCs Asus Zenbook S 14 (2024) 9/ 10 The Asus Zenbook S 14 is an excellent debut hardware for the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors. It delivers excellent performance and battery life paired with a super sleek design and fantastic OLED display. $1400 at Best Buy$1500 at Asus

I tested Intel's new Series 2 chip, and it gave my Copilot+ PC a run for its money

The new Intel Core Ultra 7 200V (Series 2) processor promises next-gen AI experiences in some of the market's thinnest, lightest form factors. I tested it on the Asus Zenbook S 14. It's been a big year for advancements in processor technology, and it's only continuing to ramp up. Intel just announced its next generation of high-efficiency, AI-powered chips with the Core Ultra Series 2, and one of the first laptops it's loaded on is the Asus Zenbook S 14. Last month, ZDNET's Cesar Cadenas went hands-on with the Zenbook S 14 running the Intel Core Ultra 5 processor, praising the laptop's performance, battery efficiency, and brilliant OLED display. The accessible hardware configuration of 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage kept the price down to an agreeable $800, while the processor's NPU did the heavy lifting. The biggest drawback we noted was its tendency to run hot. More on that in a bit. Also: The best OLED laptops of 2024: Expert tested and reviewed Now, a month later, we have yet another configuration of the Zenbook S 14 with the just-announced Intel Core Ultra 7 200V (Series 2) processor on a 32GB, 1TB loadout. Intel's new chip comes with an enhanced NPU 4.0 AI Engine for 47 TOPs, aiming to bridge the gap with other AI-powered processors with upgraded x86 efficiency and redesigned architecture for powering thinner, lighter devices (that endeavor to run cooler). Asus' Zenbook S 14 was already a thin, battery-efficient machine. This processor aims to improve and expand its performance in ways that consumers care about (and in ways that are under the microscope in the current market). In that context, Intel is taking aim at other AI processors that are powering Windows' line-up of Copilot+ PCs, such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series and AMD's Ryzen AI chips. I went hands-on with the Zenbook S 14 over the course of a week and found this Core Ultra 7 Series 2-powered laptop runs a lot like the aforementioned Snapdragon X- and Ryzen-based machines. It's snappy, with rapid-fire load times and smooth transitions between apps while multi-tasking. Even better is the fact that the laptop's gorgeous OLED display with a variable 120Hz refresh rate feels smooth and premium. While running the industry-standard gamut of benchmarking software on this machine, I got numbers that correlated with Intel's expected metrics: In terms of battery life, the Zenbook S 14 is nothing short of impressive. During our livestream test, this laptop lasted well over 17 hours streaming a full-screen video over Wi-Fi. However, during sustained, normal use, I got between 8-10, depending on what you're doing. This is where the AI comes into play: The power-saving technology with Intel's "Intelligent Display" and dynamic tuning uses machine learning algorithms to automatically adjust brightness, refresh rate, and contrast based on user activity and on-screen content. This is what allows this device to effortlessly play media for several hours on end with only a trickle of battery life. Also: Lenovo's newest laptops have a clever solution for iPhone file transferring that you have to see for yourself Regarding the body, the laptop's ceraluminum construction is matte and slightly rough with a speckled, organic texture. Overall, the Zenbook's design is bold and refreshing, defined by thin bezels and straight, crisp lines. The keyboard has a soft but satisfyingly tactile feel, and the trackpad is functional and well-positioned, going right up to the absolute edge of the device. Intel promised thin-and-light form factors with its new processors, and this baby is indeed thin and light. When closed, it's 0.47 inches thick, and weighs only 2.65 pounds. The unique surface is easy to grip and resists fingerprints, and the port selection is refreshingly expansive: You've got two USB-Cs, an HDMI, USB-A, and a headphone jack. The Intel Arc GPU on board also provides a surprisingly high-performing gaming experience, as well. I streamed a few games I have in the cloud, and Intel's Core Ultra 7 and slick OLED screen make for a solid gaming device, exonerated from the emulation issues that making gaming on a Copilot+ PC a headache. Also: One of the best lightweight laptops I've tested made me forget about the MacBook Air There is one thing I should mention: the heat dispersion. This isn't the hottest laptop out there, but it's certainly not a cool and unbothered one, either. In my experience, I would say it generates about the same amount of heat as the previous config of the Zenbook S 14 we tested with the Intel Core Ultra 5 (which we noted was on the high side). Just to put this into perspective, a year ago this would be considered average; it's with the deployment of ARM architecture that the expectation and perceptions surrounding Windows PCs have shifted. Now that we've seen Windows machines run seemingly fanless, there's no going back. This laptop runs hotter than any of the Copilot+ PCs I've tested, yes, but it's also incredibly thin. Besides this, the thinness also comes with a few other trade-offs, namely the fact that when the speakers are firing (which, get loud, by the way), the whole device vibrates. This may or may not be a dealbreaker for some, but it does have an effect on the user experience, and is an inevitable physical result of working with such a thin form factor. Also: The best Windows laptops you can buy: Expert tested and reviewed To sum it all up, there is more than one pathway toward the AI-powered future, and laptop manufacturers like Asus and Lenovo are proving that with devices that come in myriad configurations as technology continues to develop at warp speed. For the consumer, this means options, but also trade-offs. The Zenbook S 14, for example, is available as: Intel wants to provide all the benefits of Windows-on-ARM chips but without any of the compatibility or emulation issues, and it succeeds in some respects (battery life, performance, a thin and light form factor), but doesn't quite match up in others (heat dispersion). Also: My new favorite travel accessory gives me an extra screen to work and play on Issues aside, the Zenbook S 14 is a boldly designed device, and one of my favorite laptops of 2024 for its commitment to the experience. This is a laptop I enthusiastically recommend for anyone who wants a gorgeous display, high-performing processor, and above all, a bold and ultraportable form factor at a competitive price point.

We benchmarked Intel's Lunar Lake GPU with Core Ultra 9 -- drivers still holding back Arc Graphics 140V performance

Intel officially released its Lunar Lake mobile processors today, and we have a review of the Asus Zenbook S14 with the Core Ultra 7 258V. This is supposed to be the new king of laptop processors, with improved battery life being a key element. But it's also the showcase for Intel's latest GPU architecture, and while no integrated graphics solution will rank among the best graphics cards and these aren't positioned as gaming laptops, we want to see how Intel's latest stacks up against the competition. The Core Ultra 9 288V comes with Intel Arc Graphics 140V, with the V indicating the power level of the chip. It's a nominal 30W part with a maximum turbo power of 37W. We're using the Core Ultra 9 in order to potentially remove power restrictions that might impact the Core Ultra 7 258V, with the hope of seeing higher, more consistent performance. This is also the debut of Intel's Battlemage GPU architecture, sort of -- power limits and shared memory will be major limiting factors for any GPU workload. To see what Lunar Lake and Battlemage bring to the table, we'll compare the new processor with the previous generation Meteor Lake chip along with AMD's Ryzen AI chip. Here's the quick rundown of core specs for the various chips we're looking at. What should be clear from the above table is that the three laptops we have for testing are not equivalent in a variety of ways. There are slightly different power targets, different core counts, different tiers (Core Ultra 7/9 and Ryzen 9), different memory, and other places where they don't match up. There are also wildly different NPUs in play for AI workloads and even wildly different AI capabilities for the GPUs. But I'm mostly interested in the graphics performance, so that will be the focus. And even here, we have some interesting changes relative to the previous generation Meteor Lake GPU. Both have eight Xe-cores (roughly similar to an AMD Compute Unit, aka CU), but where Meteor Lake's Arc Xe GPU omitted the XMX functionality, Lunar Lake's Arc Xe2 includes that. It should allow for better XeSS upscaling quality and performance; otherwise, we don't expect that to make much of a difference in graphics performance. The Lunar Lake GPU also has a peak clock speed of just 2.05 GHz, down 200 MHz from Meteor Lake's 2.25 GHz and way, way below AMD's potential 2.9 GHz. AMD also has twice as many graphics clusters (CUs) as Intel, giving peak theoretical compute of 5.94 TFLOPS. That's basically triple the 2.1 TFLOPS on Lunar Lake and more than double Meteor Lake's 2.3 TFLOPS. But theoretical TFLOPS are rarely the whole story. All three laptops support DDR5 (or LPDDR5) memory, but the actual memory used is often up to the laptop vendors -- though not on Lunar Lake. We're using Asus Zenbook models in all three cases, and both the Meteor Lake and Strix Point models have DDR5 running at 7500 MT/s (the MTL says 7467 MT/s, but close enough). With dual-channel memory that works out to 120 GB/s of raw memory bandwidth -- a far cry from what you get with even a modest dedicated GPU, but it should be reasonably sufficient for a laptop with integrated graphics. The new Lunar Lake laptop has 8533 MT/s LPDDR5X memory integrated onto the package, yielding a moderately higher 136.5 GB/s of bandwidth. As I said, we're looking at apples and oranges in some respects, as there are many differences in the core specifications. Still, it's what we have available, so let's go ahead and run some gaming and graphics benchmarks to see where things land. First up is 3DMark Time Spy. I don't like using synthetic benchmarks for normal GPU testing, but in this case it's a reasonable way to try and remove driver issues from the equation. Every GPU manufacturer should be intimately familiar with 3DMark, and ensuring the drivers work optimally is standard procedure. If the drivers are fully tuned for any games that we test, we'd expect the results to at least echo what Time Spy shows. And what it shows is that, despite having theoretically less GPU compute available, Lunar Lake's Battlemage GPU comes out on top. It's not massively faster than the other chips, but it shows 13% higher performance than the Radeon 980M when both are using the MyAsus Performance mode fan profile (which we think also increases the TDP limits). Compared to the previous generation MTL GPU, it's also 14% faster. Putting all three laptops into the Standard mode fan profile does change things a bit. All three laptops run slower, but the Lunar Lake GPU is now only 5% faster than the 980M, but still 12% ahead of the Meteor Lake GPU. One critical item to point out is that memory bandwidth on Lunar Lake is 13-14 percent higher than on the other two laptops, so instead of showing true gaming potential, 3DMark Time Spy might actually end up scaling more with bandwidth. Some games do behave that way, but plenty of others depend more on the GPU computational abilities rather than bandwidth. Black Myth Wukong is a recent release, which makes it a good showcase for how much drivers can matter. We're using Intel's latest preview drivers for the Lunar Lake system, AMD's 24.8.1 drivers on the Ryzen AI / Strix Point laptop, and the latest publicly available Intel 6077 drivers for Meteor Lake. (6078/5736 drivers just came out today for the retail Lunar Lake launch, but we used 6077 from late last week.) These results stand in stark contrast to 3DMark, obviously. Lunar Lake now sits at the very bottom of the charts, followed by Meteor Lake in the middle, with AMD's Strix Point Radeon 980M absolutely destroying them. We are testing at 1080p medium with quality mode upscaling and frame generation enabled, so potentially AMD gets more benefit from FSR3 than the Intel GPUs, but the game is otherwise not really playable at 1080p. The Radeon 980M offers twice the performance of the Arc Graphics in MTL in performance mode and is still 71% faster in standard mode. It's also 2.4 times faster than Arc Graphics 140V in LNL for performance mode, and over twice as fast in standard mode. Note that it's a 16-inch laptop as well, so the higher fan speeds really can amount to a lot more headroom becoming available. Cyberpunk 2077 has been around for a while, but it just (finally) received the promised FSR3 support, which we've opted again to enable on all three chips. Framegen boosts performance around 70~80 percent in most cases, taking some of the laptops from the sub-30 range to a perceived 50+ fps. It's not perfect by any means, but for integrated GPUs, it can be the difference between a playable experience and a stuttering mess. The Radeon 980M once again demolishes the competition. It's 47% faster than MTL in performance mode and 27% faster in standard mode -- so in this case, engaging the performance mode fan profile in the MyAsus app boosts performance by over 40%. Again, chassis size looks to be a factor, with the MTL laptop showing a 24% boost in performance while the newer LNL laptop gets a 14% boost. Here, the Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake GPUs end up being roughly equivalent. While LNL comes out slightly faster in standard mode, it's still slightly slower in performance mode. Overall, there's not much benefit from the Xe2 / Battlemage on display, but that doesn't tell us too much about what might happen with desktop variants. Last, we have Shadow of the Tomb Raider, an older game that should be good and fully optimized for any reasonable drivers. And, interestingly, we get a chart that looks more like 3DMark. There's no upscaling in use this time, so that might also help explain why AMD's chip doesn't zoom past the competition. Overall, the Core Ultra 9 288V takes top honors with 51 fps in performance mode and 41 fps in standard mode. That's also the biggest improvement from engaging the higher speed fan mode, a 24% increase. The Core Ultra 7 155H only increased by 14%, while the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 saw a 15% increase. The net result is that Lunar Lake comes out 13% ahead of Strix Point with both performance modes but only 5% ahead in standard mode. It's also 21% faster than Meteor Lake in performance mode and 11% faster in standard mode. Do your best Obi-wan impression and wave your hand in the air while saying, "These aren't the results you're looking for." That's basically how I'm feeling right now with Lunar Lake. Graphics performance should be clearly higher than Meteor Lake, or at least that was our expectation going into these tests. For now, the results are a very mixed bag, with echoes of the early Arc GPU teething pains of 2022. The one new/recent game that we tested (for now) showed very odd performance results. With the standard fan profile set in the MyAsus app, it ran horribly slow in Black Myth Wukong -- it's only a bit more than half as fast as its predecessor. Turning on the performance fan profile made a world of difference, though it still ended up trailing MTL slightly. The Cyberpunk 2077 results look about right. Lunar Lake has faster memory with more bandwidth and a reworked architecture but lower clocks. That sounds like performance should be roughly the same, perhaps faster if the architectural updates boost graphics throughput enough, and that's what CP77 showed. The other two tests result in more favorable standings for Intel's new integrated GPU. 3DMark has Lunar Lake ahead of even AMD's top Radeon 980M iGPU, as does Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Neither test used any form of upscaling, which might partially account for the discrepancies in other tests. It's certainly something we want to investigate more in the coming days. Not shown in the charts, we also ran the same graphics tests on the 'lesser' Core Ultra 7 258V. The main differences between that chip and the Core Ultra 9 288V are the base power (17W vs 30W) and maximum clocks (100 MHz higher for the GPU clock on 288V). In our testing, at least in the standard fan mode, the two chips are within spitting distance of each other on our graphics tests. So, you can safely opt for the slower and less expensive Lunar Lake chip and only give up a very small amount of performance. Overall, the graphics performance from Lunar Lake and the Arc Graphics 140V, aka Arc Xe2 Battlemage, doesn't look particularly amazing. But then, we didn't expect to see much since we're dealing with integrated graphics. Power and memory bandwidth constraints often eclipse other factors. We've seen claims of double the performance (or at least performance per watt) on various integrated GPU solutions in the past, and those rarely pan out in the real world. With its current focus on ultraportable, low voltage, long battery life laptops, this is hardly the best showcase for Intel's next-generation GPU architecture. We can only hope that the results will be far more competitive when dedicated Battlemage GPUs begin shipping. We also hope that driver issues, which remain an ongoing concern, continue to get resolved. Intel has improved in that area since the initial Arc launch, but AMD and Nvidia remain far more consistent in both game support and performance. There are times when Lunar Lake might come out ahead of AMD's Radeon 980M, but we suspect that over a larger test suite, Intel will encounter far more frequent anomalies in terms of game support and optimizations.

Asus Zenbook S14 review: Intel Core Ultra 7 258V makes its debut

Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test. After years of the component industry taking on Moore's Law with extra cores and threads, higher clocks, and often increased power consumption, Intel is going for efficiency with its Intel Core Ultra 200 "Lunar Lake" chips. That's following in the footsteps of some of the best ultrabooks, which have seen increased battery life as several laptop manufacturers have started adding Arm chips to their lineups. Among the first devices to get Intel's new chips, the Asus Zenbook S14 is a lovely PC with slightly more battery life than we saw last year. That makes Asus' ultraportable good for people who want an x86 notebook -- and all of the Windows application compatibility that it brings -- and want it to last most of the day on a charge. But we also found in testing that this laptop was weaker in multi-core performance and in some more intense tasks. Asus could also do more to make the Zenbook S14 feel more premium, like removing account and subscription requirements on its software and improving the webcam. But between the beautiful design and Intel's improved efficiency, there's plenty to like if you don't mind giving up some performance. Asus sticks with a tried and true design here, and I can't blame the company. The Zenbook S14, like the AMD-based Zenbook S16 we reviewed recently, is a stunner, with a "Ceraluminim" lid that is clunky to say but pretty to look at. The lid really does feel a bit like pottery, just not as fragile. The gray coloring does, however, attract fingerprints. A series of slick lines make Asus' Zenbook logo in silver. (Our configuration will come with a white chassis if you buy it. The gray chassis will sell in a Best Buy configuration with a lower-end version of the processor. With the lid open, the Zenbook looks more like a standard laptop, with thin bezels around the display and a dark gray aluminum chassis with little flex. A series of vents above the keyboard is almost artistic, with two layers of holes drilled in an intricate pattern. Along the laptop's thin sides, Asus managed to cram in some impressive ports. The left side has two Thunderbolt 4 ports over USB Type-C, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and a full-size HDMI 2.1 port -- just barely fitting on the thickest edge. On the left side, there's a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) Type-A port. Measuring in at 12.22 x 8.45 x 0.51 inches and weighing 2.65 pounds, the Zenbook is compact and light, and I rarely noticed it in my work bag. The Dell XPS 13 (9345) is thicker at 0.60 inches and has a smaller screen. The 15-inch MacBook Air is 2.7 pounds and thinner at 0.44 inches. The Asus Zenbook S16 is 3.31 pounds (but hey, it's bigger) and 0.47 inches thick. The Zenbook S14 is the first laptop we're testing with Intel's new "Lunar Lake" architecture. It's using the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, featuring cores (as all of the current Lunar Lake chips do). It's a mix of four performance cores and four low-power efficient cores, with a max turbo frequency of 4.8 GHz (3.7 GHz on the LPE cores). Intel has suggested that Lunar Lake's architectural changes make it the fastest single-core performers on the market, while also pushing power efficiency. Asus runs Lunar Lake with a "standard" PL1 Max of 22W. Here, we're comparing the Lunar Lake chip to a number of contemporaries: the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (X1E-80-100) in the Dell XPS 13 (9345); the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in the Asus Zenbook S16; Apple's M3 in the 15-inch MacBook Air; as well as a gen-on-gen comparison with last year's Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, which used an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H "Meteor Lake" CPU. In our testing, the Zenbook S14 was largely in line with its competitors in single-core performance, and fell behind in multi-core. On Geekbench 6, the Zenbook S14 with Lunar Lake achieved a single-core score of 2,751 and a multi-core score of 11,157. That single-core is largely in line with the XPS 13, Zenbook S16, and a bit behind the M3 (3,093). The multi-core score was the lowest of the bunch at 11,157 (the next lowest, the M3, is also an 8-core CPU). On our file transfer test, the Zenbook copied 25GB of files at a rate of 1,007.29 MBps. That's faster than the Zenbook S15 (908.45 MBps), but the XPS, MacBook Air, and last year's Zenbook were faster. Where Intel's efficient chips really showed their greatest weaknesses was on Handbrake, which we use to transcode a video from 4K to 1080p. It took the Zenbook S14 with the 258V 8 minutes and 28 seconds to complete the test. That's almost two minutes longer than the MacBook Air (6:30), while Meteor Lake was faster at 6:17. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite in the Dell XPS 13 (9345) led the pack at 4:47. We also ran our typical stress test on the Zenbook S14, running Cinebench 2024 in a loop ten times. It was largely consistent, with scores in the high 460's and low 470's, with the exception of a dip to 428.19 at run 5. Intel's P cores ran at an average of 2.2 GHz, while the E cores ran higher, at 2.6 GHz during this test. The NPU on the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V is specced at 47 TOPS, just surpassing the 45 TOPS on the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus, but lower than the 50 TOPS on the AMD Ryzen 9 AI HX 370. All of these laptops have hit the target for Microsoft's Copilot+ features -- Intel and AMD's machines are waiting on updates to add those features. Here's the rub: While you get more and more TOPS, it's unclear when people will see tangible benefits. Sure, it's great that Windows Studio effects don't hog your CPU. But there aren't a ton of applications using the NPU that are particularly useful. We're still looking into the best way to report AI performance in laptop reviews, but for most people, a few TOPS one way or the other isn't going to affect the way you use your machine. Asus packed a 14-inch, 2880 x 1800 display into the Zenbook S14. While some will wonder about the point of packing so many pixels in such a dense display, it's hard to argue that this is a good-looking screen. It goes up to 120 Hz, with support for dynamic refresh rates. When I used the laptop to watch the trailer for Venom: The Last Dance, the Zenbook showed off vivid colors particularly well, including the orange lighting on the Las Vegas Strip, stereotypical blue sci-fi lighting in a lab, and green grassy patches in a desert. The Zenbook covers 82% of the DCI-P3 gamut and 115.7% of the DCI-P3 color space, which is pretty close to what the Zenbook 14 OLED offered last year. Those two screens offered the best gamut coverage in our test group, but they were behind in brightness. The new Zenbook measured 342 nits (down from 354 nits on last year's 14-inch Zenbook and 357 nits on the S16). The Snapdragon-based XPS 13, with a 1080p screen, reached 456 nits, while the MacBook Air reached 476.4 nits. Asus' keyboard has just 1.1 mm of key travel. It's not the snappiest around, but it has a little bit of bounce and I was generally able to get used to it. On the monkeytype typing test, I hit 116 words per minute with a 2% error rate, which is pretty standard for me. While I wish Asus went with a full suite of media keys (it could ditch, say, the dedicated emoji key), there's little else to argue with on the layout. The touchpad takes up as much vertical space as Asus could possibly give it: it goes all the way from the edge of the palmrest to just under the space bar. I wish Asus would switch to haptics, but this click mechanism feels just fine here. All of the typical Windows gestures work well enough, and Asus threw in some of its own. You can swipe up and down alongside the right side of the touchpad to adjust screen brightness or to the same on the left side to tweak volume. If you swipe along the top while a video plays, you can scrub the timeline in 5-second increments forward or backward. I initially worried that these gestures would get in the way of using the device, but I mostly just forgot they existed at all. The speakers on the Zenbook S14 pack some surprising power considering the laptop's diminutive size, but there are still some sacrifices. As I sat in our lab space, James Bay's "Up All Night (with The Lumineers and Noah Kahan) started off with some impressive bass for such a slim notebook (the impressive bit being that I noticed the bass at all), along with loud, powerful guitars and clear singing vocals. That being said, some other instruments, including tambourines and drums, got a bit lost in the mix, and the down-firing speakers means you'll get much better audio when on a desk or other hard surface than, say, computing in bed or on the couch. I was able to make adjustments using the Dolby Access app (or through duplicate functionality in the MyAsus software) and switch between music, movie and game modes. IN most instances though, I felt the music default was the best. It's not too hard to get into the Asus Zenbook S14, but there's not much to repair or upgrade in there. There are 10 Torx screws on the bottom lid, in two sizes, so be sure to keep them organized. Once those are removed, you can easily get the bottom case off with a pry tool. The tiny motherboard only has room for a single m.2 2280 SSD, which you can replace if need be. The battery is also accessible. But the wireless card is soldered to the board, and the RAM is now on-chip as part of Intel's Lunar Lake architecture, so there's no way to upgrade it down the line. We expected long battery life on the Asus Zenbook S14. After all, Intel is making some striking claims about Lunar Lake's efficiency. On our battery test, the Zenbook S14 for an average of 14 hours and 7 minutes. That's slightly longer than the Meteor Lake-based Asus Zenbook 14 OLED from last year which ran for 12 hours and 21 minutes. It's also longer than the Asus Zenbook S16 running the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. But this latest x86-based laptop didn't always beat its Arm-based competitors. In our chart, the Dell XPS 13 (9345) and a Microsoft Surface Pro each sport a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (X1E-80-100). That XPS 13 -- which had the longest-lasting battery of the group running for 19:31 -- has a smaller 55 WHr battery, but the ace in its sleeve may be the fact that it also has a 1080p, LCD screen that sips power in comparison. The Surface Pro has an OLED display like the Zenbook, with a slightly higher resolution of 2880 x 1920. That lasted for 12 hours and 17 minutes, possibly because of its diminutive 53 WHr battery. The MacBook Air with M3 also beat the Zenbook, running just over 15 hours. That laptop also doesn't have an OLED screen, but has a high resolution of 2880 x 1864. During our Cinebench 2024 stress test, the Zenbook got a bit warm, but not too toasty to use. The center of the keyboard reached 106.8 degrees Fahrenheit, while the touchpad was 92 F. (The latter is toastier than many laptops, but not obscenely so). The bottom of the notebook hit 119.6 F at its hottest point, at the exhaust vent. The camera on the Zenbook S14 disappointed me. The 1080p lens was extremely color accurate in great conditions, with lots of natural light coming in through nearby windows. My eyes appeared the right shade of blue, and every book on a bookshelf behind me had the right color cover. But images had grainy backgrounds and overly highlighted imperfections in my skin while leaving details in my hair unfocused and blurry. It's OK in a pinch, but if you're using the Zenbook S14 with an external keyboard and monitor, you may want to consider one of the best webcams. Asus has four main pieces of software on the Zenbook S16. Some are more useful than others, but they have a troubling trend: asking for accounts. The four big ones are MyAsus (for system settings and warranty); ScreenXpert (to manage windows across displays, including external monitors); GlideX (to use a phone or tablet as an additional screen, or to mirror your phone's screen on the laptop); and Story Cube (a media hub to collect photos and videos by category, location, and people). MyAsus pushes for an account (though you can skip past it), and GlideX is a subscription service with a trial that has ads. Once these preinstalled apps start asking for money, they feel more like bloat. Otherwise, there's a few Intel utilities and Microsoft's usual Windows Store apps pinned to the Start Menu. Asus also has some pre-set bookmarks in the Edge browser, including two bookmarks to Asus's software webpages and one to McAfee LiveSafe (which wasn't, thankfully, installed on our review unit). Asus sells the Zenbook S14 with a one-year warranty. We reviewed the Asus Zenbook S14 with an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD. This configuration costs $1,499.99 direct from Asus. While our unit was gray, Asus will sell this configuration in white. At Best Buy, there's a $1,399.99 configuration with Core Ultra 7 256V and 16GB of RAM, but is otherwise the same, except it comes with the gray chassis. The Asus Zenbook S14 is about as beautiful as Windows PCs get these days. It's thin with a premium build, and I'm pretty into the aluminum-ceramic combo, even though it gets smudgy. Asus also managed to pack a surprising amount of ports into this thin design. To go with that portability, Asus opted for the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V. While almost 14 hours on our battery test is nothing to shake a stick at, it's not the level of longevity we were hoping for. We saw both Apple and Qualcomm beat it in our comparison systems. That being said, one laptop doesn't define an entire chip or platform, so we're curious to see how other Lunar Lake systems stack up.. Single-core performance seems good enough for most tasks, and on par with the competition. But if you're considering anything that heavily uses all available cores, you may want to consider something a bit more powerful. With a notebook this small and thin, the Zenbook S14 is best for simple, straightforward tasks. It's portable and lasts a long time on a charge, but you'll have to keep expectations in check if you do intense work.

Asus Zenbook S 14 Review

The Asus Zenbook S 14 has a unique finish that helps you ignore the term "ceraluminum." The issue is at $1,400 you're getting less stellar performance than the one with a better Lunar Lake chip. “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. 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. 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, whichâ€"if you had to guessâ€" 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. 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. 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. 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.

Dell XPS 13 (2024, Lunar Lake) review: Intel is so back

Quick Links Dell XPS 13 (2024, Lunar Lake) pricing and availability Design and keyboard Display Performance and battery life Should you buy the Dell XPS 13 (2024, Lunar Lake)? It feels crazy that the Dell XPS 13 Plus was released only two years ago, because things have moved really fast since then. That design has taken over the XPS family, and I'm writing my review of the third Dell XPS 13 of the year. This one is special though, because it has Intel's new Core Ultra Series 2 processors, codenamed Lunar Lake. Intel hasn't been shy about how this line of chips was built in response to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, promising to bust the myth that Arm has to be more efficient than x86. And it seems to have delivered. Delivered in the same chassis we've been using since that original XPS 13 Plus, the Dell XPS 13 (2024) with Lunar Lake has some of the best battery life I've seen in a laptop; more importantly, with some of the fewest compromises. On top of that, it's some of the most powerful integrated graphics I've seen in an ultrabook. Indeed, the Dell XPS 13 is one of the best laptops around. You should be excited about it. Dell sent us the XPS 13 for review. It had no input on the content of this article. MacBook killer Dell XPS 13 (2024, Intel Lunar Lake) 9.5/ 10 ProsUnprecedented battery lifeIntegrated graphics power makes it a MacBook killerDell XPS design is still the best ConsTiny webcam sensorMultithreaded performance isn't on par with competitionNo headphone jack $1400 at Dell Dell XPS 13 (2024, Lunar Lake) pricing and availability Right now, it seems like Intel is only selling the Core Ultra 7 256V and 258V, which means that the SKUs of the XPS 13 available now are pretty limited. On Dell.com, you can pick one up with a Core Ultra 7 256V (16GB RAM), a 512GB SSD, and an FHD+ display for $1,399. More configurations are coming, and while Dell wasn't able to provide a timetable, I've been hearing around November for more Intel SKUs to hit the market. The XPS 13 will eventually start at a Core Ultra 5 (16GB RAM) and top out at a Core Ultra 9 (32GB RAM). With Lunar Lake, RAM is on the chip now, meaning it won't be upgradeable, and it's tied to the CPU selection that you mean. SSD sizes start at 512GB, going all the way up to 4TB. Dell actually sent me two models. One of them has a Core Ultra 7 258V with the FHD+ screen, while the other has a Core Ultra 7 256V and the 2.8K Tandem OLED display. As you'd expect, the FHD+ is to show how good the battery life is, while the OLED is to show off that sweet, sweet display. Specifications CPU Up to Intel Core Ultra 9 288V GPU Up to Intel Arc graphics 140V (16GB) (integrated) Display type IPS or OLED, up to 120Hz refresh rate, up to 100% DCI-P3, optional touch Display (Size, Resolution) 13.4-inch, up to 2880x1800 RAM Up to 32GB LPDDR5x-8533 Storage Up to 4TB PCIe 4.0 SSD Battery 55Wh Charge speed 60W charger (ExpressCharge 1.0) Ports 2x Thunderbolt 4 Operating System Windows 11 Webcam Full HD 1080p with IR Cellular connectivity No Wi-Fi connectivity Wi-Fi 7 (Intel Killer Wi-Fi 7 1750i) Bluetooth Bluetooth 5.4 Form factor Clamshell Dimensions 11.62x7.84x0.58 inches (295.3x199.1x14.8mm) (OLED) Weight 2.6 pounds (1.18kg) (OLED) Speakers Quad speakers with Waves MaxxAudio Pro Colors Platinum, Graphite Expand Design and keyboard Nothing has changed, and that's great Close The Dell XPS 13 is still the laptop of the future, and I love it. Made of all aluminum, it weighs 2.6 pounds, which is less than a MacBook Air (2.7 pounds). In fact, there's a direct comparison to be drawn to the MacBook Air now, and the XPS 13 is probably the most qualified Windows PC to do it. The tandem OLED display is the best in its classic, and we'll talk more about how Lunar Lake is ready to take on Apple Silicon. But I digress. It comes in Platinum and Graphite colorways, and they're both beautiful. I always say that a flagship laptop shouldn't even be offered in gray or silver. If you want basic but high-end, go look at a Dell Inspiron, an HP Envy, or a Lenovo 7 series. Personally, Graphite has won me over after generations of XPS reviews, although I think Platinum was the fan-favorite in the beginning. It doesn't matter. They're both stunners. Once again, there are only two ports, both of which are Thunderbolt 4. Dell gets bonus points for including one non each side, because the ability to charge from either side does matter. But while I don't care about USB Type-A anymore (seriously, we've been moving to USB Type-C for over a decade now), the lack of a headphone jack does matter. If you're going to use this machine for any serious audio work, you're going to need wired headphones. Of course, you can use an adapter, but I still think a proper headphone jack matters on a PC. Close Dell is still using its edge-to-edge keyboard with square keys, and it's a keyboard that I've quite fallen in love with over the past year. Because yes, I have reviewed many, many XPS systems in 2024. I still think it takes a little getting used to, since it's an unconventional design, but it's all very futuristic. You have a borderless haptic touchpad underneath, which yes, should have some kind of border. And you also get the capacitive function keys at the top, which I love. Those function keys actually show you what they're going to do, rather than offering dual functions where you have to guess which will be the default. When you press the Fn key, the selection changes. It's great. I understand that some people like buttons there, and those are usually the people that use those buttons frequently. If you're one of those people, there are other laptops for you. Display LCD vs OLED Close Dell sent me two models of the XPS 13 for review, one of which has the standard FHD+ panel, and one of which has its now-famous tandem OLED panel. Tandem OLED, of course, became famous because Apple put it in an iPad Pro, and Dell basically got to say, "Hey, we have this in the XPS 13 already!" Dell's XPS displays have been the best for years. Tandem OLED basically means you're stacking OLED screens on top of each other for a brighter display, and those screens work...in tandem. As usual, it's excellent. Dell always has various configurations of its displays, and I've been writing the same thing about them for years and years. The top-end screens are best-in-class; that was even the case before they were OLED. Those 4K LCD screens were so good that Dell didn't even have to make the switch, in my opinion. The lower-tier screens still leave something to be desired, which I'll show you in a bit. They just don't produce the same level of colors. The reason Dell sent both was to demonstrate the best-in-class screen on the OLED config, and the unprecedented battery life you can get with FHD+. FHD+ LCD 2.8K OLED The FHD+ LCD supports 96% sRGB, 71% NTSC, 75% Adobe RGB, and 75% P3, while the OLED panel supports 100% sRGB, 93% NTSC, 95% Adobe RGB, and 100% P3. It's a significant difference. The OLED panel is brighter too, coming in at 464.8 nits. And of course, you get the near-infinite contrast ratio of an OLED display. Dell upgraded the webcam this year to 1080p, although it's still a small sensor that lives in the top bezel. It's fine, and it's better than it was. It's always going to be limited by its size, as Dell continues to prioritize narrow bezels around the screen. Performance and battery life Intel delivered on its big promises And now, it's the moment you've been waiting for. Intel promised to bust the myth that Arm has to be more efficient than x86, and it promised that Lunar Lake would beat Snapdragon X Elite in both performance and efficiency. So, did it live up to those promises? You bet it did...mostly. The short answer is that the Dell XPS 13 with Core Ultra Series 2 crushes on battery life and graphics power. Unfortunately, the Core Ultra 7 250V series falls short of Snapdragon X Elite and AMD Ryzen AI 300 in CPU power. However, Core Ultra 9 288V isn't shipping yet, so I can't say for certain if Lunar Lake will beat those products. This is a MacBook Air killer, for real this time. This is a MacBook Air killer, for real this time. It's not just something some OEM promised; it's happening. I'll tell you why. For years, guidance for laptop reviews has been to do performance testing on the 'best performance' power profile, while doing battery testing on whichever setting is most efficient (the label varies by laptop, for some reason). I was hoping that the Snapdragon X Elite would fix that, but it didn't. I got the same guidance for those, and in 'best performance' mode, battery life wasn't that impressive. That's not a problem on a MacBook. With a MacBook, you just use it for whatever you would, whether it's photo editing, video editing, or anything else. You're not thinking about a power profile, and you just get the performance and battery life you're expecting. 2:15 Related MacBook Air (M3, 15-inch, 2024) review: The Goldilocks laptop size The 15-inch MacBook Air offers an immersive large screen experience while keeping a slim and light(er) body than the MacBook Pro I'm here to say that this is the first Windows laptop I've used where that's the case. When I first started testing, I was disappointed because on 'balanced' power settings, performance really isn't good enough to justify the better battery life. What I later realized is that when set to 'best performance', the battery life is still incredible, so you don't have to make compromises. A Windows laptop for creators without the need for dedicated graphics is here. It's not just the battery life though. It's the graphics performance. AI Denoise on a 12MP photo in Adobe Lightroom Classic took just about a minute on the XPS 13, where it took about three minutes on Meteor Lake and around 10 minutes on Snapdragon X Elite. Forza Horizon 5 defaulted to 'high' graphics, instead of 'medium' on Meteor Lake (it doesn't run on Snapdragon). A Windows laptop for creators without the need for dedicated graphics is here. Alright, it's benchmark time. Note that scores from the Core Ultra 7 256V and 258V were pretty much the same, so I only included one. Dell XPS 13 Core Ultra 7 258V HP OmniBook Ultra Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 Surface Laptop 7 Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 PCMark 10 (AC / battery / battery on balanced) 6,868 / 6,817 / 5,101 7,723 / 6,697 / 5,962 N/A Geekbench 6 (single / multi) 2,637 / 10,823 2,842 / 15,030 2,803 / 14,497 Cinebench 2024 (single / multi) 116 / 583 114 / 965 124 / 972 3DMark (Time Spy / Wild Life / Wild Life Extreme / Night Raid) 4,366 / 28,967 / 7,362 / 34,425 3,863 / 22,134 / 6,618 / 32,476 1,892 / 16,878 / 6,540 / 25,257 CrossMark (Overall) 1,788 1,825 1,558 As you can see, the CPU scores come up short, although not shown is that single core scores from the Core Ultra 7 258V are actually ahead of the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 that was in products like the HP OmniBook X and Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, which was more on par with Meteor Lake. A lot of Intel's performance claims included the Core Ultra 9 288V, so we'll have to wait on that one. Related Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x review: Absolutely wonderful It's almost everything I want in a laptop Also, take a quick look at that PCMark 10 score with the power profile set to 'balanced'. It's a huge performance dropoff. There's virtually no performance delta between when it's plugged in and when it's not, something you can't and never have been able to say about AMD. All of the 3DMark scores beat the competition though, which is a really big deal. We're talking about powerful graphics on a Windows laptop with great battery life. We've never had that before. That battery life, at its best, is 1,164 minutes. As always, I test battery life by using the product like a normally would, rather than using some synthetic benchmark that gives you an inflated number. That means using things like Chrome, OneNote, Photoshop, and Slack, and I keep the screen at a comfortable 50%. The power profile was 'best performance', and honestly, I couldn't even top that in the beginning when I was using 'balanced', not that you should use that setting anyway. This is game-changing. While that was the best I could get, more average scores were 670, 753, and 843 minutes, so you're looking at a good 13 or 14 hours of battery life, at best performance while doing real-world productivity tasks. This is game-changing. As usual, Google Meet sucks down power, so on constant meetings, I got it down to 325 minutes, which is still way better than average. As for the OLED model, I didn't test is extensively, but it seems like that's good for nine or 10 hours of battery life. That's still great, but when I took a work trip to Palo Alto, I brought the FHD+ one because that's the one where I feel comfortable not charging it. There's something about device usage that changes when you instinctively don't have to worry about carrying a charger anymore. I've never felt it with an Intel laptop in the past because even when they were good, they were inconsistent. This is legit. Should you buy the Dell XPS 13 (2024, Lunar Lake)? You should buy the Dell XPS 13 (2024, Lunar Lake) if: You're creative tasks like photo and video editing, but want something compact You're on-the-go a lot, and you travel light You want to look cool You should NOT buy the Dell XPS 13 (2024, Lunar Lake) if: You want a big screen You don't want a product that stands out from the crowd You spend a lot of time on meetings Obviously, the XPS 13 has the smallest screen of the XPS lineup, but it was also the only one that was refreshed. I have to assume that the XPS 14 and XPS 16 are going to be refreshed with Arrow Lake processors when the time comes for that, if the XPS 14 gets refreshed at all. Related Dell XPS 14 (2024) review: It's just so much fun A MacBook Pro killer Assuming you're good with the screen size, the Dell XPS 13 is great for pretty much everyone. It hits those key experiences like keyboard and battery life, and it has a unique design. It's such an easy product to recommend. Dell XPS 13 (2024, Intel Lunar Lake) 9.5/ 10 $1400 at Dell

Asus Zenbook S 14 review: Core Ultra Series 2 makes it debut | Digital Trends

Asus Zenbook S 14 MSRP $1,499.00 Score Details "The Asus Zenbook S 14 is gorgeously made, long-lasting laptop -- an ideal showcase for Intel's Core Ultra Series 2 chips." Pros Very impressive battery life Beautiful design Portable yet sturdy Good port selection Improved integrated graphics Cons CPU performance is disappointing Palm rests are almost too small No haptic trackpad A lot rides on this laptop. Contents Specs and configurationDesignKeyboard and trackpadPortsDisplayPerformanceWebcam and speakersBattery lifeHanging in the balanceShow 4 more items It's the flagship device to showcase Intel's new Core Ultra Series 2 processors (aka Lunar Lake), which are attempting to stand against attacks from all sides. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite has upped the ante for battery life on Windows laptops and Apple's M4 Macs are right around the corner. On the other hand, the Zenbook S 14 itself is also gunning for a top spot among the best laptops you can buy, featuring a really premium, thin and light build. Despite some misgivings about the performance of the Core Ultra Series 2 chips, I'm happy to report that this is a stellar laptop on its own, largely thanks to the great design, improved integrated graphics, and heaps of battery life. Specs and configuration Asus Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA) Dimensions 12.22 x 8.45 x 0.47-0.51 inches Weight 2.65 pounds Display 14-inch 2.8K OLED 120Hz CPU Intel Core Ultra 7 258V GPU Intel Arc 140V Memory 16GB LPDDR5X RAM 32GB LPDDR5X RAM Storage 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD Ports 1x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 2x Thunderbolt 4 1x HDMI 2.1 1x 3.5mm headphone jack Camera 1080p Wi-Fi Wi-Fi 7 Bluetooth Bluetooth 5.4 Battery 72 watt-hour Operating system Windows 11 Price $1399+ My review unit of the Asus Zenbook S 14 comes with the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, the Arc 140V integrated graphics, 32GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and a 2880 x 1800 OLED display. I'm told that this exact configuration isn't going to be sold in North America, and therefore I don't have an exact price for it. That's understandable, as it's an odd pairing of RAM and memory capacity. The closest model that is being sold starts at $1,500, which is identical to my configuration except comes with 1TB of storage. There's also a similar that has 16GB of RAM, selling for $100 less. While memory is soldered down, storage can be upgraded using the M.2 PCIe 4 slot. The lack of a cheaper configuration, however, means that the Zenbook S 14 is meant to represent a higher echelon of product. Zenbooks used to represent a more budget-friendly premium laptop, but not the Zenbook S 14. This is a laptop that's designed to compete with the likes of the best thin-and-light 14-inch laptops on the market. Namely, you can put this in the same camp as laptops like the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition, MacBook Pro 14-inch (M3), and Dell XPS 14. In comparison, the Zenbook S 14 is still $150 cheaper than the XPS 14, even when it's on sale at Dell.com. The Best Buy model matches the price of a similarly configured Surface Laptop 7th Edition too, though the 32GB model is quite a bit cheaper than Microsoft. Suffice to say that it's also far cheaper than the 14-inch MacBook Pro when trying to stuff it with 32GB of RAM. In that sense, you can think of it as one of the cheaper options in the most premium laptops category. Still, I wish Asus was offering a 16GB model with 512GB of storage as a starting configuration to really showcase the value of the offering. Design Ceraluminum. It's a made-up word, yes. Asus says it took four years to create, which is an aluminum that's been transformed into "high-tech ceramic." But the idea is real. The Zenbook S 14 is remarkably light laptop at 2.65 pounds but still has excellent build quality. More than that, the lid has an interesting textured finish that feels great under your fingers. Unlike some other very light laptops, the lid of the Zenbook S 14 feels rigid against bending. With a maximum height of 0.51 inches, it's not quite as thin as the MacBook Air, but it sure does feel thin. It opens with one finger effortlessly, of course, It also features the newer Asus logo (which yes, looks a lot like a Star Trek insignia) both on the lid and on the keyboard deck. It's always been a nice bit of branding, manaing to be both subtle and classy. Meanwhile, the Zenbook S 14 comes in either gray or white, and I'm a little disappointed I didn't get the white version. It has a really clean look, whereas the gray is a bit drab. I would have liked to see a darker gray color option rather than the very businesslike shade that's offered. All this shares a lot in common with the larger Zenbook S 16, which launched earlier and was powered by the new AMD Ryzen AI 300 series. Just as laptops like the MacBook Air and Surface Laptop are adopting rounded corners and softer edges, the Zenbook S 14 remains sharp and angular. That's in everything from the keycaps to the chassis itself. I have to say I prefer displays with rounded corners as many laptops are using this year, though I can appreciate just how slim these bezels are. One of the concerns with this type of design is comfort -- the last thing you want is your palms pressed up against sharp edges. The Zenbook S 14 gets close, specifically because of the placement of the vents at the top of the keyboard deck. These vents do a nice job of keeping heat away from the keyboard, but it shrinks the available space for your palms. I have fairly big hands, though, and it wasn't a problem. If you have particularly large hands though, it could get uncomfortable. My palms are dangerously close. Unlike some other Zenbooks, this model doesn't use an ErgoLift hinge to prop up the laptop off the table when open. I like this choice, and Asus gets around the design change by adding some tall rubber feet on the bottom of the device for improved thermals. Keyboard and trackpad I like both the keyboard and trackpad on the Zenbook S 14, even if it's not my favorite example of either. Asus has been using this keyboard for a while now, and it's plenty snappy, though it always takes me a day or so to really feel comfortable on it. The 1.1mm of key travel is fairly shallow, but Asus attempts to balance it with a sharp bottoming out action. The keycaps have a subtle texture to them, as does the palm rests and rest of the keyboard deck. It's not my favorite texture -- but again, I found myself getting used to it in a day or two. The trackpad is quite large, taking a cue from the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. Moving across the trackpad is smooth, and I never felt like it was imprecise. However, the click is a bit too chunky for my taste. It takes too much effort to depress the click, which can get tiresome. It's especially noticeable coming from so many laptops that use a haptic feedback trackpad. At this price, I'd prefer Asus to switch to one, like the Surface Laptop 7th Edition. The trackpad does have a few unique features though. By default, swiping up or down on the right side of the trackpad automatically adjust display brightness, while swiping across the left side controls volume. When I remembered them, I found both of these to be pretty handy. I never accidentally triggered the actions, and I found them to be faster than hunting around the keyboard for the right function key. There's no fingerprint reader, so you'll need to rely solely on facial recognition for Windows Hello. Ports The Zenbook S 14 has a great selection of ports. It has HDMI 2.1, two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, one USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, and a headphone jack. One of those USB-C ports will need to be used for power, of course. Unlike the MacBook Air, the Zenbook S 14 can support connecting up to two 4K 60Hz monitors. The addition of USB-A is useful too. If only Asus had also included an SD card slot, I'd be completely happy with these ports for my day-to-day. I am happy about the wireless connectivity, though. The Zenbook S 14 has the latest speeds with both Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. Display This is a 14-inch laptop display with a resolution of 2880 x 1800 pixels. More importantly, it's an OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate. It's a very pretty screen, as most of these OLED panels are. In the MyAsus app, you'll find a variety of different color modes available. Interestingly, the default mode is Vivid, which offers a nearly perfect color gamut, hitting 100% sRGB, 100% P3, and 96% AdobeRGB. I should mention that this isn't the brightest display in the world. Asus markets its 500-nit "peak brightness," which of course means it's not what you'll be seeing when commonly using the laptop. In SDR, it maxes out at just 313 nits, which is bright enough in most cases, but just can't compete with something like the Surface Pro 11 or M4 iPad Pro with its tandem OLED panel. Of course, OLED displays aren't known for being bright, even when the pure blacks help make up for that. One oddity in my review sample's display was around color accuracy. Asus claims the device is factory-calibrated and has a Delta-E of under 1.0. But all my tests, regardless of the different color modes I used, all put out Delta-E scores of over 4.0, which I assume is some kind of bug. I'm in contact with Asus about what the problem might be, but it's safe to assume that something about the test or panel is showing up incorrectly. Overall, though, I was very pleased with the panel. I'm excited for these OLED displays to get brighter in the future, but in terms of clarity of motion, contrast, viewing angles, and color gamut, OLED makes a huge difference. Performance The Core Ultra 7 258V is Intel's new processor for thin-and-light laptops, meaning the emphasis here is on efficiency rather than brute force. In other words, it's all about putting out as much performance as possible while consuming as little power as possible. Here's some things to note right out of the gate: this chip is not a big step up from the previous generation. In fact, in some cases it sits at performance parity or even steps back. Intel will say the lack of performance gain is worth the tradeoff for the huge jump up in performance -- and maybe it's right. As laptop buyers, we all want a device that is ultra-powerful and long lasting, but there will always be compromises to me made. The sacrifice here is definitely around multi-core performance. Scores in both Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R24 tell the same story: a decent step forward in single-core performance and a step back in multi-core performance. The comparison against the HP Spectre x360 14 with last-gen Core Ultra 7 155H is a good example. This is a similar-sized device that is by no means a performance leader in the category. And still, the older Core Ultra 7 155H is 8% faster than the Core Ultra 7 258V in multi-core tests. You might say this is an unfair comparison, as Intel's H-series chips are still coming and these are just 17-watt chips, representing a new class of processor that sits in between U-series and H-series. Intel's confusing and inconsistent naming has obscured comparisons, but for now, these V-series chips seem to sit right in between the performance of previous-gen U and H-series chips. Regardless of how you slice it, Series 2 doesn't represent a significant jump in multi-core CPU performance over its predecessor, especially since laptop manufacturers were putting H-series chips in laptops as small as the Dell XPS 13 just earlier this year. The Handbrake scores are perhaps the most telling of the situation. There are laptops like the Acer Swift Go 14, a midrange laptop with a Core Ultra 7 155H in it, and yet the Zenbook S 14 encodes video 46% slower in Handbrake. That's not a good look. Single-core is where things are more on Intel's side. Intel's chips have been fairly stagnant there, but the Core Ultra 7 258V makes a decided step forward, shown most notably in its Cinebench R24 score, where it shows a lead over the Snapdragon X Elite. Cinebench R24 (single/multi) Geekbench (single/multi) Handbrake 3DMark Steel Nomad Light Asus Zenbook S 14 (Core Ultra 7 258V) 112 / 452 2738 / 10734 113 3240 Surface Laptop 7th Edition (Snapdragon X Elite) 105 / 826 2388 / 13215 N/A 1904 MacBook Air (M3) 141 / 601 3102 / 12078 109 3378 Asus ProArt PX13 (Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 / RTX 4050) 116 / 897 2710 / 14696 54 7648 Intel has stiff competition though. The Apple M3 is still the more powerful chips, remaining as the single-core champion, and while the Snapdragon X Elite's performance varies depending on the device, it's all-in-all the more powerful chip. And meanwhile, the Ryzen AI 300 series makes an impressive single-core showing with its HX 370 chip. That might not sound like a fair comparison to make -- but remember, AMD stuffed that into a 13-inch laptop, the ProArt PX13. The other important aspect of this chip is the performance of its integrated graphics. That's not usually the case with a laptop of this kind -- it's not like people are buying this for hardcore gaming. But Intel has made some big claims about the Arc graphics, which could potentially speed up tasks like video editing -- and yes, even gaming. The Core Ultra 7 258V does provide some decent gen-over-gen GPU performance gains, especially compared to its Snapdragon X Elite counterpart. In some specific comparisons, Intel's part gets nearly double the scores in 3DMark Time Spy. And it fares better in some more challenging games too. I nearly averaged 60 fps (frames per second) in Cyberpunk 2077, so long as graphics were set to Low, resolution lowered to 1200p, and FSR 3 with Frame Generation was turned on. Still, it feels kind of magical to play on a laptop like this. Just don't expect to smoothly play the latest graphically intense titles, such as Black Myth: Wukong. I ran the benchmark through a few times at different settings, and couldn't average over 35 fps. And yes, laptops with a discrete GPU are still represent a massive leap in GPU performance, so if you can benefit from it, it's worth considering a more powerful laptop like Asus ProArt PX13 or even the Dell XPS 14. But if you're looking to play some Fortnite, this thin Zenbook performs admirably for a laptop this thin thanks to the Intel Arc 140V graphics. Webcam and speakers The webcam is 1080p and is adequate in capturing video for work calls. It can get awfully grainy in lower lighting, but does a good job of prioritizing skin tone to brighten up images. It's not great, but it's certainly serviceable if your daily work requires the occasional video call. The speakers fare a bit better. The laptop uses a four-speaker setup; two along the sides and two under the keyboard. Again, the audio produced is not great per se, but they are serviceable for a broader range of activities. Videos and even music sound decent enough for casual listening. The lack of bass is noticeable, of course, but that's true of nearly all laptops of this size outside MacBooks. Battery life There's no more important a test for this laptop than battery life. The laptop has a large 72 watt-hour battery, which results in some very impressive battery life. Of course, it's the extreme efficiency of the the Core Ultra Series 2 chip that adds this much battery life, as the previous-gen model had the same size of battery. Just how good is it? Well, I ran three separate battery tests on the laptop. The most impressive was actually the Cinebench multi-core rundown to test how long the laptop lasts on the heaviest load. A multi-core Cinebench test is an extreme task, and the Zenbook S 14 managed to last over three and a half hours. That makes it the longest-lasting laptop I've tested on Cinebench, beating even our previous champ, the M3 MacBook Air. The Zenbook S 14 also did very well in our web browsing test, which cycles through a series of heavy websites until the battery dies. It lasted for 16 hours and 47 minutes, beat only by the MacBook Air, which remains untouchable on this test -- by a few hours. There was a huge variety of battery results from Intel's previous-gen Meteor Lake laptops, but this one lasted a couple hours more than even the longest-lasting Meteor Lake machines. Most importantly, it's beating Snapdragon X Elite laptops by 2-3 hours depending on the model. That's a huge win for the Zenbook S 14 and for Core Ultra Series 2. Hanging in the balance As a review of a new Intel processor, I have to admit I'm slightly let down. The battery life is there, and that's no small feat. But the CPU performance represents more of a lateral move, which is never what you want to see in a new generation. On the other hand, battery life is likely the metric that you'll care more about in this type of laptop. A slightly faster CPU won't make your web browsing, YouTube watching, and Slack chats go any faster. You may, however, notice a few extra hours of battery life. From the Windows side of things, it's the official battery life champion, and considering how much pressure the Snapdragon X Elite devices put on Intel, I'm thoroughly impressed. But we have to remember -- a device like the Zenbook S 14 is the ideal case for Intel's new chips. The battery life gains are a positive first sign for this generation of Intel-powered laptops, but I have concerns about these chips will play out in laptops which require more performance. Still, none of that takes away from what the Zenbook S 14 achieves on its own. The larger question remains: does this device stand up against Snapdragon X Elite laptop like the Surface Laptop 7th Edition? I'd say yes. Despite the fact that cheaper configurations aren't being offered at the moment, and I have a few gripes with the design such as the size of the palm rests or the overly loud mechanical trackpad. The Surface Laptop 7th Edition has a better balance of premium feature to make it a better MacBook alternative, but the OLED screen and fantastic battery life of the Zenbook S 14 more than make up for the difference.

ASUS Zenbook S14 Laptop Review - Lunar Lake and Intel Xe2 "Battlemage"

At IDF, Intel unveiled one of its most ambitious CPU offerings in years, moving to the second generation of the Core Ultra series with Lunar Lake. More than a new generation, Lunar Lake represents an entirely new architecture, enabling increased performance efficiency and generating immense performance gains over generation and considerable gains in battery life. The Zenbook S14 is one of the initial offerings to get the upgrade from ASUS, and luckily enough, we were able to get one to see just how good it is. Our model is spec'd out above and includes the "Lunar Lake" Core Ultra 7 258V. This CPU gives us eight cores with boost clocks up to 4.8GHz. It features a 12MB Cache; of course, memory is directly on the die; we have 32GB of LPDDR5X @8500MHz. Further, we have the AI Boost NPU offering an additional 47 TOPS of AI performance, while graphics too have been upgraded with second-generation Arc, our model getting the Arc 140V built on the "Battlemage" Architecture; this iGPU offers 64CUs @ 2.05GHz and 8GB VRAM. This leads us to the display on the Zenbook S, a 14" 2880x1800p OLED Touch Screen with a 120Hz refresh rate that's both DCI-P3 and Pantone rated and offers 500 nits peak brightness. Connectivity on the Zenbook S is top-notch, though limited. We have two Thunderbolt 4 ports supporting Display and Power Delivery with a data throughput of 40GBps. USB 3.2 Gen 2 is also available with a single port. HDMI 2.1 is also available and offers an additional display output for the Zenbook S. We also have a 3.5mm audio output. Internally, things are slim, with just a single PCIe Gen4 NVMe slot for storage. This model has the Intel BE200 chipset, which includes Wi-Fi 7 support and Bluetooth 5.4 support. The ASUS Zenbook S14 costs $1499 and is available starting today. The Zenbook S was delivered in retail packaging, which includes a box modeled after the laptop's design. As seen above, the power adapter is a 65W model. We also have notes on the design of the ASUS Ceraluminum Chassis, which makes this unit a work of art. As mentioned, the Zenbook S features a Ceraluminum chassis with a high-end finish and design. The left side of the Zenbook offers most of the I/O connectivity, including the HDMI port, both Thunderbolt 4 ports, and the 3.5mm audio jack. The right side includes the USB 3.2 Gen 2 port for Type-A devices. The bottom of the unit is mainly closed off; we have full-length rubber feet to secure the unit off the desk, venting across the entire back to allow airflow. The keyboard is a traditional white backlit offering with a three-brightness level available. According to ASUS, it is a chicklet style with 1.1mm of travel, which I found tremendously easy to type while writing my last six articles. Further, we found the quick travel of the keys to help immensely when gaming; yes, gaming is something we are getting too soon. The Trackpad on the Zenbook S is immensely smooth and centered, certainly driving right through my lane regarding personal preferences; it offers a solid tactile click, though I could use a little more confirmation at times. There is no way around an OLED display; they offer some of the most gorgeous visuals you can get, and the display on the Zenbook S is no different. At 2880x1800p, this display provides tons of resolution while offering a variable refresh rate of up to 120Hz, allowing for smooth touchscreen functionality without sacrificing battery life. The colors on this display are crisp and clear; thanks to the dark blacks, the display reproduces. As a note, we have no backlight bleed from this display. Cooling on the Zenbook S isn't the most robust solution we have seen, though it is designed for efficiency through a multiple heat pipe design. The Zenbook runs a bit warm even during idle operation. We were seeing temperatures around 45c idle and upwards of 80c when running through testing. The fan speeds are all controllable through My ASUS, which we will touch on shortly, giving users control over overall system noise. Upgradability is quite slim. As noted, just a single Gen4 NVMe slot is tucked off to the left in the image above. Our unit did have a PM9A1 NVMe from Samsung from the factory at 512GB; after testing, we moved to a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro to further increase capacity and performance to some degree for ourselves. The ASUS BIOS mirrors the design of the My ASUS application, offering hardware information on the main page, as seen above. Should you need them, there are further side panel options for permissions, diagnostics, and cloud recovery, while experienced users can tap F7 and head to the advanced menu. The Advanced menu offers further options for configuring your Zenbook. These include options for turning on and off technologies like VT-d, Virtualization, and AES-NI. You can also disable the trackpad from here. Performance can be tuned through the My ASUS software. The top menu offers hardware monitoring to the right. Further options include a battery care mode to preserve the battery's life. In addition, we have several fan mode presets, as seen above. Those wanting to do some gaming can manually adjust the iGPU memory here as well, as it is dedicated to up to 8GB. Arc Control gives users finer control over the iGPU, Arc 140V. This allows for keeping the driver up to date and offers options for tuning the GPU in the left sidebar. One of these features is live performance monitoring, including the ability to run an in-game overlay. Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that Intel and AMD have relied on to highlight their newest platforms during unveilings. The benchmark has two tests: a single-core workload that utilizes one thread or 1T and a multi-threaded test that uses all threads or nT of a tested CPU. Comparisons for the Zenbook S give us the Zephyrus G16 with the newly minted Ryzen 9 HX 370 and XPS14 from Dell using the first-generation Core Ultra 7 155H. Kicking off our testing, the 258V does pull solid single core at 117 points, with multi-core landing at 579. CrossMark is an easy-to-run native cross-platform benchmark that uses real-world application models to measure overall system performance and responsiveness. CrossMark supports devices running Windows, iOS, and macOS platforms. CrossMark was our first overall system bench, scoring 1841; the 258V is becoming quite impressive. Memory performance was 86K read, 115K write, and 108K copy. The latency was 97 ns. Geekbench scored 2533 in single-core workloads and 10820 in multi-core. Adding in a quick AI run with ONNX CPU, the 258V offers a solid 3543 Quantized score. GeekBench GPU with Arc 140V gives us 36727 for OpenCL and 32057 for Vulkan. DirectML gives the Arc 140V a quantized score of 4533. Moving to Intel's OpenVINO workloads, we see a solid uptick in performance between Core U7 155H and Core Ultra 7 158V in CPU AI, the Lunar Lake offering scoring about 500 points higher in the workload above. This gets even better when using an OpenVINO GPU. The Arc 140V pulls nearly 6,000 points higher than the Arc-8 in the 155H. Looking at Office Productivity, all systems seem to be evenly matched, the 258V landing in the middle of the pack about 50 points shy of the HX 370. The CPU Profile shows solid gains in performance for the 258V through eight cores, with the 155H and HX 370 taking advantage of sixteen cores with their higher core count offerings. Storage Performance for the Zenbook S was quite good with the installed PM9A1. We picked up 391 MB/s throughput from the drive, nearly the same as the Micron 2400H in the XPS14. Steel Nomad Light was our tease into gaming. The Arc 140V scored 2748, nearly 200 points higher than the Arc-8 on the Core Ultra 7 155H. We have several games lined up to test the power of Arc 140V. The results are all at 1800p full resolution, and we tested with both XeSS Performance mode and straight up without XeSS. Cyberpunk 2077 is our first scenario. At the top, we picked up 25, 19, and 16 FPS, testing the low, medium, and high profiles; all solid numbers are likely the only playable scenario. Adding XeSS performance, we jump up to 47, 37, and 32 FPS, respectively, making medium a viable option at 37 FPS. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, an instant classic for benchmarking, gives us 36, 29, and 28 FPS without XeSS, likely low being the only playable option at our tested 1800p resolution. That said, adding XeSS Performance ticks performance up to 52, 44, and 41, making even the high preset viable for gamers. F1 23 was our next workload. This game played well natively, with 59, 53, and 40 FPS for the three main presets. Adding XeSS, we see some legit performance at 78, 72, and 58, making high, medium, and low all viable for gaming. Again, Gears Tactics was relatively easy natively. We picked up 85, 55, and 31 with the high, medium, and low presets. Adding XeSS ramped this up to 95 FPS at low, which was a very smooth experience. Medium gave us 63 FPS, which was quite good; high, on the other hand, did start to notice a few jumps in performance due to the 34 FPS rate. Black Myth Wukong at 1800p goes from unplayable without XeSS to viable at low settings with XeSS Performance mode. The results came in at 33 FPS using the low preset down to 21 FPS at high. Battery Life is the eighth wonder of the world on the ZenBook S, and perhaps Lunar Lake itself. We tested battery life three times with this unit to confirm. Using the Office Productivity workload in UL Procyon, we came away with sixteen hours and thirty minutes of battery life. There is no denying that the Zenbook S is a work of art. From the exceptional materials used in the build, including the Ceraluminum, to the aesthetic design of the chassis, ASUS has nailed it. There isn't another laptop I have used that has gone to this level of making something you use daily so exquisite that it almost makes it a display piece; I'm sure other Zenbook owners can attest to this. What makes the 2024 model so unique isn't all the glitz and glamour; it's the hardware. Lunar Lake takes this S14" machine to another level with not only its supreme efficiency but also its performance. It is pretty apparent that core counts will keep multi-threaded performance down with synthetic benchmarks like Cinebench. We noted that in our review, with the 258V pulling 579 points to the 874 of the 155H and even 1217, we picked up with the HX 370 from AMDs new Ryzen 9 AI APU, but it is also worth noting the single-core performance of Lunar Lake, which topped the 155H by 20 points while matching the HX 370. Looking at complete "system" workloads, like CrossMark and UL Procyon, Lunar Lake looks even better; we pulled a score of 1841 overall in Crossmark, again, is better than the 155H by a good 100-point margin and even pushing past the HX 370. Speaking on Procyon, again, more gains over the Meteor Lake H CU7 155H, ~150 points to be blunt, and what is remarkable is the Core Ultra 7 258V is technically a "U" series processor, replacing the entry-level Meteor Lake U 100 series offerings, yet we are showing performance of it matching and in cases outperforming the 28 watt 'H" series. Gaming is even better; we tossed the notion of lowering the resolution to 1080p for our review of the Zenbook S14, which was part of Intel's guidelines on what to expect; no hard feelings, of course; we just wanted to see how gorgeous games could look on the 14" OLED with its massive 2880x1800 resolution and 120Hz refresh rate. To that point, I came away supremely surprised. While I didn't go for direct comparisons to the Radeon 890M in the HX 370 APU or 1st Gen Arc-8 in the 155H, I did want to see baseline performance and how good Intel's XeSS technology could really be, and boy, was I blown away. For starters, we ran through all the numbers a page above, but Cyberpunk 2077 gave us something like 16 FPS using the high preset straight up, barely playable by any metric; that performance was doubled with Arc 140V by enabling XeSS Performance. Other games too, like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, saw modest jumps, the high preset getting a gain of 13 FPS for an average of 41 FPS, and even new titles like Black Myth Wukong got benefits, where the game was unplayable at high or medium settings without XeSS, enabling Performance mode, we ramp up to 33 FPS and have a game that is playable on an ultrathin laptop with an iGPU and its called "Battlemage." The pricing of the ASUS Zenbook S14 is quite good. As configured, our model will retail for $1499 at the time of release.

Asus Zenbook S 14 UX5406 review: a near-perfect ultraportable

Why you can trust Laptop Mag Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test. The Asus Zenbook S 14 is one of the launch systems for Intel's new Core Ultra 200V series processors launched at IFA Berlin 2024 earlier this month. These new processors promise better performance, power efficiency, and graphics. So naturally, we had some rather high hopes when testing out the first few laptops that came into the Laptop Mag office. While our testing results supported Intel and Asus's claims for the Zenbook S 14, I was still surprised at just how well this incredibly light and thin laptop handled multiple Chrome tabs, Adobe Photoshop, and Steam running in the background. Combined with a vivid display, powerful high-fidelity audio, and almost 14 hours of battery life, there's little to complain about besides a lackluster keyboard and webcam. The Asus Zenbook S 14 is good enough to be considered for our best laptop and best 14-inch laptop pages, but should it be your next laptop? Let's find out. The Asus Zenbook S 14 (UX5406) costs $1,499 for an Intel Core Ultra 258V processor with Intel Arc integrated graphics and an Intel AI Boost NPU, 32GB of memory, a 1TB SSD, and a 14-inch 120Hz 3K (2,880 x 1,800) OLED touchscreen with a 0.2ms response time. This is currently the only model of Zenbook S 14 with an Intel Core Ultra 200 series processor, but there may be more configurations available in the future. The previous Intel Zenbook S 14 model is still available. The Zenbook S 14 (UX3405) costs just $1,299 and features an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, Intel Arc integrated graphics, 32GB of memory, 1TB of SSD storage, and a 14-inch 3K OLED display. That model can also be configured with an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor for $1,399. While the Asus Zenbook S 14 doesn't entirely escape the monochrome laptop trap, the oversized geometric Zenbook logo on the Ceraluminum chassis helps elevate the Zenbook above its more bland peers. The Scandinavian White and Zumaia Gray colorways are just different enough from most silver laptops that the design feels fresh. Our review unit came in the Zumaia Gray color, which has a subtle but compelling marbling to the Ceraluminum surface. Measuring 12.22 x 8.45 x 0.47~0.51 inches and weighing just 2.6 pounds, you'll have no trouble transporting the Zenbook S 14 in a backpack or laptop bag if you need to bring it on the road or transport it on your daily commute. The Zenbook S 14 is particularly light and thin when compared to similar laptops like the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (Q425), Dell XPS 13 (9345), Asus Zenbook S 16 (UM5606), and Apple MacBook Pro 14 M3 (2023). The Zenbook S 16 is similarly thin, measuring just 13.92 x 9.57 x 0.47~0.51 inches thick, which makes sense as both laptops share the same Ceraluminum chassis design. The Zenbook S 16 is a bit heavier, however, weighing 3.3 pounds. The Dell XPS 13 is thicker than the Zenbook S 14, measuring 11.62 x 7.84 x 0.6 inches, but is similarly light, weighing in at 2.6 pounds. The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (Q425) has a thicker chassis, measuring 12.3 x 8.67 x 0.59 inches and weighs a bit more than the Zenbook S 14, weighing in at 3 pounds. The Apple MacBook Pro 14 M3 was the thickest and heaviest of the group, measuring 12.3 x 8.7 x 0.6 inches and weighing 3.4 pounds. The Zenbook S 14 features two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports with support for display and power delivery (with data speeds up to 40Gbps), one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, one HDMI 2.1 port, and a 3.5mm combo audio jack. While that should be enough ports for most people, if you want to use the Zenbook S 14 in a multi-display workstation, we recommend investing in one of the best USB Type-C hubs or best laptop docking stations. The Asus Zenbook S 14 features a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and Microsoft Pluton security, so you can be sure your files are safe. The Zenbook also houses an IR webcam suitable for secure Windows Hello sign-in. In case you're worried about the safety of your hardware, the Zenbook S 14 meets the US MIL-STD 810H for exposure to dust, high and low temperatures, high altitudes, and moisture. So even if you take the Zenbook with you on your next mountain hike, it'll make the trip and back. The Zenbook S 14 has a glossy 3K OLED display panel, and as you may expect from an OLED display, it looks stunning with vibrant colors and minimal glare. Watching the trailer for Lionsgate's upcoming adaptation of the novel Small Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy and Emily Watson, I was impressed by just how clear and colorful the display appeared, even with the muted colors of the trailer. From deep blacks with high contrast to the warmly lit kitchen scene of the Furlong family home, the Zenbook's display portrayed the combination of tense introspection and religious trauma the trailer deserves. Our testing lab's Klein K-10A colorimeter helped support my personal experience, measuring the Zenbook S 14's display as covering 82% of the DCI-P3 color gamut with a Delta-E accuracy of 0.21, indicating a rather vibrant and color-accurate display. The Apple MacBook Pro 14 M3's liquid retina display gave the Zenbook S 14 a run for its money, measuring at 81.3% of the DCI-P3 color gamut with a Delta-E accuracy of 0.12, making the MacBook a little more accurate but a bit less vibrant. The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (79.8%) and Asus Zenbook S 16 (79.7%) were just a bit less colorful, while the Dell XPS 13 (66.9%) was the least vibrant of the bunch. In terms of brightness, the Zenbook S 14 won't be winning any awards for the brightest screen, but it was enough to avoid most screen glare even in the bright Laptop Mag office. With an average peak brightness of just 342 nits, the Zenbook S 14 was significantly less bright than the Apple MacBook Pro 14 which measured at 558 nits. The Dell XPS 13 (455 nits) and Zenbook S 16 (357 nits) were also brighter than the Zenbook S 14, though the Zenbook 14 OLED Q425 (339 nits) was a bit dimmer. The Zenbook S 14 features a backlit chiclet-style keyboard rated for 1.1mm of key travel. Much like the Zenbook S 16 we reviewed earlier this year, the chiclet keyboard feels soft and mushy under my hands. The lack of tactile feedback on the key activation and minimal key travel makes for an unsatisfying experience. On the 10FastFingers advanced typing test, I managed an average of 86 words per minute (WPM), which is just under the 88 WPM average I maintain on my MacBook Pro 14 keyboard. So at least the chiclet keyboard didn't greatly reduce my typing speed, even if it wasn't the best typing experience I've ever had. The 5.1 x 3.2 inch touchpad on the Zenbook S 14 is smooth with a shallow click activation, which is perfectly serviceable though it may not have the most satisfying clicker feedback. The Zenbook S 14 has Smart Amp Technology and a built-in side-firing speaker array tuned by Harman/Kardon. I don't often expect much from laptop audio, especially on ultra-thin laptops as the speakers are crammed into a tiny chassis. So I was pleasantly surprised by the sound volume and quality of the audio on the Zenbook S 14. The opening bass riff of Anti-Flag's 1999 anti-government punk anthem "Stars and Stripes" has lived rent-free in my brain for over two decades now, and it made for a great test of the Zenbook S 14's finely-tuned speaker array. The Zenbook's woofers captured the depth of Chris #2's memorable bass track and the rich quality of singer Justin Sane's raw Punk vocals and screaming guitar melodies. On the lighter side of the spectrum, the Zenbook's sound system had no trouble presenting Debbie Harry's crisp, smooth vocals on Blondie's "Heart of Glass." Intel's new Core Ultra 7 258V processor features architecture designed for efficiency over pure power, but that doesn't mean you won't get a satisfying computing experience. I couldn't overwhelm the Zenbook S 14 with any number of Chrome tabs, even with Photoshop, Steam, and Intel's AI Playground running in the background. On the Geekbench 6 cross-platform CPU benchmark, the Zenbook S 14 averaged a single-core score of 2,751 and a multicore score of 11,157. This was stronger single-core performance than the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Q425's Intel Core Ultra 7 155H (2,453) but worse multicore performance (12,707) reflecting the change in architecture between the Intel Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake chipsets. The Zenbook S 14 was competitive on single-core performance against both the AMD Ryzen 9 AI-powered Zenbook S 16 (2,765) and Snapdragon X Elite XIE-80-100 powered Dell XPS 13 9345 (2,797). As far as multicore performance, both the Zenbook S 16 (13,282) and XPS 13 (14,635) performed better than the Zenbook S 14. The Apple MacBook Pro 14 M3 outperformed the Zenbook S 14 on both single-core (3,163) and multi-core (11,968) performance. On the Handbrake video encoding test, which compresses the 4K version of "Tears of Steel" into a 1080p 30fps format, the Zenbook completed the encoding in 8 minutes and 30 seconds. This was far slower than the other four laptops, with the Dell XPS 13 (4:41) being the quickest, followed by the Zenbook S 16 (5:08), MacBook Pro 14 (5:38), and Zenbook 14 OLED (6:43). The Zenbook S 14 made up for its slow video encoding speeds with a quick SSD, taking just 17.8 seconds to complete the Laptop Mag 25GB File Copy test, for a transfer rate of 1,513 MBps. This was far quicker than even the XPS 13 which completed the transfer in 20 seconds for a rate of 1,342 MBps. The Zenbook 14 OLED took 21.7 seconds to transfer the 25GB file for a rate of 1,236 MBps. The Zenbook S 16 was the slowest, taking 29.55 seconds to copy the folder, with a transfer rate of 908 MBps. While the Asus Zenbook S 14 isn't yet part of the Copilot+ PC program, it will be added to Microsoft's elite AI PC platform in the near future. That said, you can already access a lot of the Copilot+ AI functionality using Intel's proprietary AI Playground and existing Large Language Model systems like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. I spent some time messing around with the AI features of the Zenbook using the Intel Core Ultra 100 version of Intel AI Playground. I was pleasantly surprised by the Zenbook S 14's quick response times with AI prompts even without the benefit of fully-tuned drivers. To gauge AI performance, we ran the Zenbook through the Geekbench AI CPU and NPU tests to test the capabilities of the laptop's various AI accelerators. We were unable to test the Zenbook on Geekbench ML without breaking the review embargo. So we don't have quite enough data to make a proper comparison on AI performance. On the Geekbench AI CPU test, the Asus Zenbook S 14 averaged a Full Precision score of 2,194, and on the Geekbench AI NPU test, the Zenbook averaged a Full Precision score of 18,619. The Asus Zenbook S 14 is a premium ultra-thin laptop, not typically a recipe for great graphics, but Intel has made some promises about the new Core Ultra 200V chipset's graphics capabilities. To prove this point, the company showed multiple gaming benchmarks and side-by-side racing comparisons. As a self-admitted MMO and gacha game addict, I obviously had to put at least one game on the Zenbook. Genshin Impact and Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail were playable on the Zenbook S 14, particularly on Medium or Laptop (Standard) graphics presets and at 1080p resolution. The Zenbook struggled with Genshin on even Low graphics at the display's 3K (2,880 x 1,800) native resolution. But at Medium, 1080p, the games were smooth and stutter-free, which aligns with what we'd seen from Intel's gaming demo showcase. On the 3DMark Fire Strike Direct X 11 benchmark, the Zenbook S 14 scored 7,806 which was just a bit worse performance than the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H-powered Zenbook 14 OLED Q425 (8,064). The Zenbook S 14 scored better than both the AMD Ryzen 9 AI-powered Zenbook S 16 (7,468) and Snapdragon X Elite-powered XPS 13 (7,468). Considering the Zenbook 14 OLED Q425 features an H-suffix processor, it is more of a high-performance CPU than the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor on the Zenbook S 14. On the 3DMark Time Spy Direct X 12 benchmark, the Zenbook S 14 scored 3,747 which was the best performance of all four Windows laptops. The Zenbook S 16 came in just behind its Intel-powered sibling with a score of 3,728, while the Zenbook 14 OLED (3,566) and Dell XPS 13 (1,925) rounded out the rest of the category. To test the Zenbook S 14 against the MacBook Pro 14, we also ran the laptop through the cross-platform 3DMark Wild Life Extreme gaming benchmark. The Zenbook S 14 scored an average of 7,037 with a frame rate of 42.14fps while the MacBook Pro performed a bit better with an average of 7,861 with a frame rate of 47.1fps. Finally, for some more real-world gaming experience we tested all of the laptops on the Sid Mieier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm graphics benchmark at Medium graphics settings and 1080p resolution. The Zenbook S 14 averaged 48fps, which is solidly in the middle of the pack for gaming performance compared to the other premium laptops. The Zenbook S 16 had the best gaming performance, averaging 63fps while the MacBook Pro 14 (51fps) came in second. Both the Zenbook 14 OLED Q425 (31fps) and XPS 13 (22fps) performed worse than the Zenbook S 14. Battery life is often the main deciding factor with thin and light laptops, especially if you don't have the most demanding performance or display needs. Despite downloading multiple applications, running Photoshop and Steam in the background, and keeping multiple Chrome tabs open, the Zenbook S 14's battery life barely dipped even after a couple of hours sitting with the display on at maximum brightness. I completed a full day of work without having to hunt down the laptop's charging cord, which is about all I really need out of a laptop. That said, the Zenbook S 14 lasted for 13 hours and 51 minutes on the Laptop Mag web surfing battery test, which sets a laptop to 150 nits of brightness and scrolls through a series of 20 static and video web pages. The MacBook Pro 14 (17:16), XPS 13 (19:01), and Zenbook 14 OLED Q425 (15:52) all lasted longer than the Zenbook S 14. Only the Zenbook S 16 (11:35) performed worse on our battery test, so there is a bit of a battery life gap between the x86 processors and the ARM processors. The Zenbook 14 OLED Q425 does have a 75Whr battery compared to the Zenbook S 14's 72Whr battery, which could at least partially account for the difference in battery life between the two 14-inch Asus laptops. Intel claimed that the Asus Zenbook S 14 would last for 16 hours on the UL Procyon Office Productivity Battery Life test, and while we don't usually run that battery life benchmark, we were able to confirm Intel's claim as our Zenbook S 14 unit lasted for 16 hours and 21 minutes. So while Qualcomm and Apple's ARM processors still have a lead on battery life, the gap is shrinking. The Zenbook S 14 has an FHD camera with IR functionality, so while its great for security, it isn't exactly the best webcam out there. The FHD feed is incredibly grainy with some serious color distortion when pulled up full-screen on the 3K OLED display on the Zenbook. So if you need to take a lot of video calls or make virtual presentations, we recommend using one of our best webcams instead. Laptop heat management is always something to consider, particularly with ultra thin systems. The Zenbook S 14 hit a high temperature of 97.7 degrees Fahrenheit while streaming a 4K video for 15 minutes, which is above the Laptop Mag comfort threshold of 95 degrees. The hottest point on the laptop was the rear center underside, right in front of the vent, so you'll want to be careful about streaming video with the Zenbook in your lap. After the streaming session, the keyboard (87.3 degrees) and touchpad (78.1 degrees) stayed relatively cool in comparison, so if you put the Zenbook on a desk or table, you shouldn't have to worry much about singeing your fingertips. The Asus Zenbook S 14 comes with Windows 11 Home and has the standard Windows apps pre-loaded like Microsoft Paint and Office 365. The Zenbook S 14 also has some of Asus' own software installed like the My Asus app. The Zenbook has a 1 year limited manufacturer's warranty. If you want to see how Asus customer service compares in our annual report, check out our Tech Support Showdown. From its stunning design to its vivid OLED display panel, there's plenty to appreciate about the Asus Zenbook S 14. The laptop's battery life may not be breaking records, but nearly 14 hours is more than enough to last you a full workday, even with more grueling task loads. The laptop's performance is also quick and responsive on both the CPU and NPU levels. While the gaming experience wasn't the most groundbreaking of any integrated GPU, it easily outperformed the previous generation, so we can't say Intel didn't meet expectations with this new hardware. Really, as long as you don't need a high-quality webcam and you aren't a big keyboard snob, the Zenbook S 14 is a perfect laptop. I would prefer just about any other keyboard over the backlit chiclet keyboard on the new Zenbooks, but that's my only major complaint. This is an impressive launch laptop for Intel Lunar Lake and a win for Asus.

Dell XPS 13 (9350) review: Lunar Lake lands with stellar battery life and solid performance

Why you can trust Laptop Mag Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test. The Dell XPS 13 is an old favorite here at Laptop Mag. We've been fond of many different XPS configurations, sizes, and form factors, but the XPS 13 is a classic. While the new, minimalist design created more of a divide regarding the aesthetics and keyboard, our high expectations for the Dell XPS 13 line remain. So, the new Intel Core Ultra 200V-powered XPS 13 has big shoes to fill in its admittedly small chassis. The XPS 13 9350 does have its benefits, from solid performance and respectable integrated graphics to impressive battery life and impactful speakers. However, it still has that minimalist, cramped keyboard and only two USB-C ports. With the recent Snapdragon X Elite-powered Dell XPS 13 (9345) breaking our record for the longest-lasting laptop, has Intel already made the Snapdragon configuration obsolete? And will the Dell XPS 13 9350 be good enough to rank among our best laptops? Let's find out. Currently, only one configuration of XPS 13 (9350) is available with the Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" processors. That model costs just $1,399 and features an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor, Intel Arc integrated graphics, 16GB of memory, 512GB of storage space, and a 13.4-inch 120Hz FHD LCD display. If you want to upgrade to 32GB of RAM like our non-OLED review model, that will cost an additional $200. If you want 32GB of RAM and a 13.4-inch 60Hz 3K tandem OLED display, that will set you back a total of $1,899. These two configurations will be available on October 15, 2024. A Dell representative told Laptop Mag that configuration options for increased storage space will be available after the XPS 13's initial launch with Lunar Lake. Dell has kept the InfinityEdge bezels and flat keyboard deck of the previous few XPS models for the new Intel Core Ultra 200V-powered XPS 13. So that's either excellent or bitterly disappointing news, depending on how you've felt about the last couple of generations of XPS 13 models. For me, the minimalist design of the XPS 13 is elevated by just how light and thin the laptop is, making it feel more futuristic than ever. Coming in Platinum (white) and Graphite (black), the recent XPS design feels more iconic with every iteration. I wish we'd get a third colorway option, but I can't say I'm disappointed with the two we have. The XPS 13 (9350) measures 11.62 x 7.84 x 0.6 inches for the LCD model and weighs just 2.6 pounds. It can easily fit in any backpack or laptop bag. The OLED model weighs the same as the non-OLED version but is 0.02 inches thinner. The Dell XPS 13 (9345), powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor, is identical to our non-OLED XPS 13 model in dimensions and weight. The only differences between these two XPS versions are under the hood. Compared to one of the other Intel Core Ultra 200V launch systems, the Asus Zenbook S 14 (12.22 x 8.45 x 0.47~0.51 inches, 2.6 pounds), the XPS 13 is just a bit thicker but just as lightweight. Meanwhile, the Apple MacBook Pro 14 M3 (12.3 x 8.7 x 0.6 inches, 3.4 pounds) is heavier than the XPS 13, weighing 0.8 pounds more. The XPS 13 9350 features just two Thunderbolt 4 USB Type-C ports with DisplayPort 2.1 and power delivery. So, if you rely on any USB-powered accessories, you'll probably want to invest in one of the best USB Type-C hubs or best laptop docking stations. The Dell XPS 13 features an IR webcam suitable for Windows Hello sign-in. The XPS 13 also has a fingerprint reader for added security. While our lab has tested the OLED and non-OLED versions of the XPS 13, I have only gotten my hands on the non-OLED model so far. I can't say I was surprised by the FHD display's poor color, we already experienced it with a similar FHD display panel on the Snapdragon-powered XPS 13 9345 this summer. Instead, I was just disappointed when I booted up the trailer for upcoming scifi adventure Mickey 17 to test the XPS 13's display. The colors were muted and gray, even in the more colorful scenes in the trailer. The red council room didn't pop as much as it would have on a more colorful display. While the XPS 13 9350's LCD display panel is serviceable, it's not a joy to watch. Our lab testing had similar findings, with the XPS 13 9350 non-OLED display covering just 69.9% of the DCI-P3 color gamut with a Delta-E accuracy of 0.23. The OLED panel was much more vibrant, covering an astounding 144.6% of the DCI-P3 color gamut with a Delta-E accuracy of 0.28. The Snapdragon-powered Dell XPS 13 9345 covered a similarly grim 66.9% of the DCI-P3 gamut with an accuracy of 0.21. So the 9350 gets a marginal upgrade, but it's nothing to celebrate. The Asus Zenbook S 14's OLED display covered a solid 82% of the DCI-P3 color gamut with an accuracy of 0.21, and the MacBook Pro 14 covered 81.3% of the color gamut with an accuracy of 0.12. So the XPS 13's tandem OLED panel has much better color than the MacBook Pro 14's Liquid Retina display or the Asus Zenbook S 14's OLED panel. As far as brightness goes, both the XPS 13 9350 OLED and non-OLED models could stand to be brighther. The display panels are bright enough to cut through most glare with the non-OLED display offering an average peak brightness average of 357 nits, while the OLED model was a bit brighter with an average of 377 nits. The Snapdragon X Elite XPS 13 9345 was far brighter, with an average brightness of 455 nits. The Asus Zenbook S 14 (342 nits) had the dimmest display, while the MacBook Pro 14 M3 (558 nits) had the brightest panel. The Dell XPS 13 (9350) keeps the minimalist style of the keyboard, function row, and touchpad from the last few generations of XPS design. While this is a sleek look, it does lose some of the functionality of discrete function row keys and a visible border between the touchpad and the keyboard deck. Like the other XPS laptops with this keyboard design, the lack of space between keys and lack of click activation makes for a difficult typing experience. On the 10FastFingers advanced typing test, I managed an average of 95 words per minute (WPM), which is well above the 88 WPM average I maintain on my MacBook Pro 14 keyboard. Because a poor typing experience doesn't mean a slow one. The XPS 13 has a borderless touchpad that measures roughly 3.9 x 2.9 inches, smaller than most modern laptops. While there is a subtle difference between the touchpad and the keyboard deck, it can be difficult to determine the edges, especially if you're used to scrolling by feel. The touchpad haptics are helpful for this, but unfortunately the function row still has no haptics. The side-firing Realtek quad-speaker array gets decent volume, which is more than enough to fill a room at 100 percent. However, the speakers sound distorted, as if you're listening through a tin can, while listening to a heavily distorted track like All That Remains' classic "Two Weeks" at full volume. Hozier's summer bop single "Too Sweet" was much clearer, but the bass still has that annoying metallic reverb. So if you're using the XPS 13 for a lot of video or audio streaming, you'll want one of the best computer speakers instead of the onboard sound system. The Dell XPS 13 (9350) has a decently powerful Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor, which should handle most computing tasks. The new Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" processors are designed to be highly power-efficient for ultra-portable light and thin laptops. So its multicore performance suffers compared to previous Intel -H suffix laptop processors. But, as my hands-on experience can attest, the Core Ultra 7 258V is still powerful enough for multiple programs, over 20 Chrome browser tabs, games downloading in the background, and some light Photoshopping on top of it. In our lab benchmarks, we found that the XPS 13 9350 non-OLED model averaged a Geekbench 6 single-core score of 2,660 and a multicore score of 10,846, while the XPS 13 OLED model averaged a single-core score of 2,772 and a multicore score of 11,033. The gap between these two laptops isn't outside the usual Geekbench score deviation and is well within Intel and Dell's expectations. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite XIE-80-100-powered XPS 13 9345 had a single-core average competitive with the Intel-powered laptops at 2,797. However, the Qualcomm XPS 13 dramatically outperformed its Intel counterparts in multicore performance with a score of 14,635. The Asus Zenbook S 14 had a slight edge on CPU performance over the XPS 13 9350, with a single-core average of 2,751 and a multicore average of 11,157. The Apple MacBook Pro 14 M3 had the highest single-core performance with a score of 3,163 and came in second for multicore performance with a score of 11,968. On the Handbrake video encoding test, the XPS 13 9350 non-OLED took 8 minutes and 17 seconds to compress the 4K version of "Tears of Steel" to a 1080p 30fps format. The OLED model (8:28) took a bit more time, as did the Zenbook S 14 (8:30). The Apple MacBook Pro 14 M3 (5:38) was the second-fastest, and the Qualcomm-powered XPS 13 9345 (4:41) was the quickest at the encoding task. On the Laptop Mag 25GB file copy test, the XPS 13 9350 non-OLED model took 17.5 seconds to copy over a 25GB multi-media file folder for a transfer rate of 1,534MBps. The OLED model was a bit slower, taking 17.75 seconds to complete the transfer for a rate of 1,513MBps. The Asus Zenbook S 14 took just a bit longer, needing 17.8 seconds to complete the task for a transfer rate of 1,513MBps. The Dell XPS 13 9345 took the longest, requiring 20 seconds to copy the folder, for a transfer rate of 1,342MBps. The Dell XPS 13 (9350) is not yet part of the Copilot+ PC program, but laptops made with Intel's Core Ultra 200V series processors will be rolled into Microsoft's new AI program suite in the next several months. Intel does have its own suite of on-device AI programs, but the Intel AI Playground hasn't yet been optimized for the new Core Ultra 200 series processors; though those optimizations should arrive now that the laptops have officially launched, so users should be able to dive right in once they get their new Intel laptops. With an Intel AI Boost NPU that boasts 48 TOPS (trillions of Operations Per Second), we were pretty eager to put the AI capabilities of the XPS 13 9350 to the test in our lab. To gauge AI performance, we ran the XPS 13 through the Geekbench AI CPU and NPU tests to test the capabilities of the laptop's various AI accelerators. We could not run Geekbench ML on the XPS without breaking the review's NDA, so unfortunately, we do not have any comparison numbers. On the Geekbench AI CPU Full Precision test, the XPS 13 (9350)'s Core Ultra 7 258V processor scored 2,292 points, which outdoes the XPS 13 (9345)'s Snapdragon X Elite XIE-80-100 processor, which scored just 2,069 points. The Asus Zenbook S 14 with the same Intel Core Ultra 7 processor as the XPS 13 (9350) scored about 100 points below with an average of 2,292. On the Geekbench AI NPU Single Precision test, the XPS 13 (9350) with an Intel AI Boost NPU scored 18,387 points. The Asus Zenbook S 14, with the same Intel AI Boost NPU, scored a bit higher with an average of 18,619. The Dell XPS 13 (9345) with a Qualcomm Hegaxon NPU scored well below both Intel laptops, with an average of just 2,173. The Dell XPS 13 isn't a gaming laptop, but Intel has made some claims about gaming performance on the new Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" processors, so naturally, we had to put those to the test. I found the XPS 13 handled gaming at 1080p with Medium settings a bit smoother than the Asus Zenbook S 14. The XPS 13's integrated Intel Arc GPU struggled a bit with motion smoothing in Genshin Impact's newer Fontaine and Natlan zones, but it had no trouble at all maintaining a steady framerate with Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail, even in the busy endgame hub city of Solution Nine. We also ran a few gaming benchmarks on the XPS 13. On the 3DMark Fire Strike Direct X 11 gaming benchmark, the XPS 13 9350 non-OLED maintained an average of 8,053, while the OLED model scored a bit higher with an average of 8,519. The Asus Zenbook S 14 came in just a bit behind the XPS models with a score of 7,806, while the XPS 13 9345's integrated Qualcomm Adreno GPU performed the worst with an average of 5,635. On the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme cross-platform gaming benchmark, the XPS 13 9350 non-OLED averaged a score of 7,186 and a frame rate of 43.03fps. Again, the OLED model performed better, with an average score of 7,409 and a frame rate of 44.37fps. The Apple MacBook Pro 14 M3 performed the best on this gaming test, with a score of 7,861 and a frame rate of 47.1fps. The Asus Zenbook S 14 (7,037, 42.14fps) came in just behind the Intel-based XPS 13s, with the Qualcomm-powered XPS 13 (6,449, 38.6fps) performing the worst. For a more real-world gaming test, we ran the XPS 13 through the Sid Mieier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm and Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmarks. On the Civ VI benchmark at 1080p and Medium graphics settings, the XPS 13 9350 non-OLED scored an average of 51fps, while the OLED model was a bit faster with an average of 53fps. The Apple MacBook Pro 14 M3 tied with the non-OLED XPS 13 with a frame rate average of 51fps, while the Zenbook S 14 trailed just behind with an average of 48fps. The Qualcomm-based XPS 13 performed the worst with a frame rate of just 22fps. On the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark at 1080p and Highest graphics presets, the XPS 13 non-OLED model maintained an average of 21fps while the OLED model was just ahead with a 22fps average. The Apple MacBook Pro 14 M3 performed the best on this benchmark with a frame rate of 32fps, while the Zenbook S 14 performed the worst with a frame rate of 19fps. The Dell XPS 13 9345 was not tested on this benchmark. When it comes to premium ultra-light laptops, battery life is often one of the biggest deciding factors. And when comparing Intel x86 and ARM laptops, battery life was one of the main selling points of the Apple and Snapdragon platforms. But that may no longer be the case thanks to Intel's new chip architecture. The non-OLED XPS 13 (9350) lasted an astonishing 18 hours and 34 minutes on the Laptop Mag web surfing battery test, which sets a laptop to 150 nits of brightness and scrolls through a series of 20 static and video web pages until the laptop powers down. The OLED model XPS 13 (9350) lasted 8 hours and 40 minutes, which is disappointing but not surprising given that the tandem OLED display panel does require quite a bit more power to run than the FHD LCD panel on the non-OLED model. But that does mean the XPS 13 (9350) non-OLED comes within thirty minutes of the battery life record of 19:01 set by the Dell XPS 13 (9345) with Snapdragon X Elite. And it beats the Apple MacBook Pro 14 M3's 17:16 battery life by over an hour. The only other laptop with an OLED display on our comparison list was the Asus Zenbook S 14, which lasted 13:51 on the Laptop Mag battery test. While this is far better than the XPS 13 OLED, there is a difference in the OLED technologies behind both displays. The Zenbook S 14 features a more traditional OLED panel, while the XPS 13 OLED has a tandem OLED panel. So that likely accounts for the large difference in OLED battery life between the two Lunar Lake laptops. Dell claimed 26 hours of video streaming battery life for the XPS 13 (9350), and 27 hours of video streaming battery life for the XPS 13 (9345), so while our battery test seems to be more intensive, we saw a very similar relationship between the Intel Core Ultra 200V and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite systems. The Dell XPS 13 has an FHD camera with IR functionality, so the camera feed isn't the best quality. The webcam feed is naturally on the grainy side at full-screen, and there is some distortion in the color accuracy, but it's far from the worst laptop webcam we've seen. However, if you'll be using the XPS 13 for a lot of video calls and virtual presentations, I recommend using one of our best webcams instead. After streaming a 4K YouTube video for at least fifteen minutes, the XPS 13 (9350) non-OLED model measured 79.3 degrees Fahrenheit on the touchpad, 79.9 degrees between the G and H keys, and 86 degrees on the underside, which was the hottest point on the laptop. The XPS 13 (9350) OLED model ran hotter than its LCD counterpart, measuring 88.3 degrees on the touchpad, 92.7 degrees on the keyboard, and hitting a maximum temperature of 100.4 degrees on the rear center underside of the laptop. The max temperature on the OLED model is well above the Laptop Mag comfort threshold of 95 degrees, while the non-OLED model is well below that threshold. So, if you plan to keep the XPS 13 on your lap for most use cases, you may want to opt for the non-OLED display panel option. The Dell XPS 13 comes with Windows 11 Home and has standard Windows apps preloaded, such as Microsoft Paint and Office 365. It also has some of Dell's custom applications preloaded, like the My Dell and Dell Support Assistant applications. The XPS 13 has a 1-year warranty for hardware and software support with 1-2 business day on-site service after a remote diagnosis. Accidental damage is not covered by the warranty. If you want to see how Dell customer service compares in our annual report, check out our Tech Support Showdown. To the XPS 13 9350's credit, it does have quite a lot going for it. The laptop offers solid performance, an impressive 18 hours of battery life, impactful speakers, and respectable graphics for a laptop with an integrated GPU. The OLED display panel option is vivid, while the LCD option has poor color, and both displays could stand to be brighter. With a cramped keyboard and only two USB-C ports, the XPS 13 isn't perfect. But if you're in the market for a quality Dell laptop, here are the factors to consider with the XPS 13 9350. If you need a small, portable laptop with a fantastic display and you don't care about battery life as much, the tandem OLED display panel is fantastic. If you need a laptop with battery life that can last multiple days, the LCD option gets you almost as much battery life as the Snapdragon X Elite version without that pesky ARM software emulation.