It has easily earned my recommendation and then some.
Disclaimer:This review was made possible by a review unit provided by ASUS.
The company did not see the contents of the review before publishing.
It didn’t take long for me to realize this was going to be one of my favorite laptops of the year.
It strikes an excellent balance, making this a great laptop at a great price.
Pulling it out of the box, I was immediately impressed by every angle of the design.
This laptop is tightly constructed, everything is intelligently positioned, and it looks great.
More than anything, though, the Zenbook 14X OLED just feels good to use.
Opening the laptop with one hand shows off a smoothly actioned, stable hinge.
Honestly, I love the design of this laptop.
This colorway smudges easily, but it’s still really easy on the eyes.
A little icing on the cake is the 180-degree hinge, which gives you a lot of flexibility.
My only real complaint in this department is how this grey color easily shows smudges and fingerprints.
The Zenbook 14X OLED has a positively magnificent 14.5-inch 2.8K OLED panel situated between its “NanoEdge” bezels.
The Zenbook 14X OLED is all about that display, and it is glorious.
If we turn to the hard numbers, ASUS' boasts were no joke.
And HDR content does look phenomenal on the Zenbook 14X OLED.
Also, there’s no variable refresh rate here.
The default Native color profile looks the best in my opinion, and also achieves the most well-rounded color accuracy.(Image credit: Windows Central)
That’s a little disappointing but something that can be improved in future iterations of this gadget.
Outside of strenuous work, the Zenbook 14X OLED is perfectly cool and quiet.
Of course, there’s also the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050.
To the naked eye, the sRGB color profile just looks like a worse version of Native, but ASUS promises up to 133% of the sRGB color gamut (my test tool only goes up to 100%).(Image credit: Windows Central)
Despite that, the Zenbook 14X OLED is actually viable as a casual gaming machine.
Generating aWindows Battery Reportreturns similar results of 6 hours and 58 minutes of expected battery life.
Let’s wrap this up with a quick rundown of what I’m now calling the leftovers!
The DCI-P3 color profile dials down the saturation of the display for a more subtle look, and remains very color accurate.(Image credit: Windows Central)
The keyboard on the ASUS Zenbook 14X OLED is spacious and quite comfortable to bang out on.
An IR sensor nets youWindows Hellobiometric authentication, which was always incredibly fast and reliable for signing me in.
Wireless connectivity is top-notch withWi-Fi 6Eand Bluetooth 5.3, and performance was flawless.
I was surprised by this laptop’s performance and thermal management, considering how tiny it is.
For a pure ultrabook, theLenovo Yoga 9iis wonderful but not as powerful.
For a more versatile convertible, theSurface Laptop Studio 2is just as powerful but significantly more expensive.
You’re losing a lot of power and creator-focused features, though.
This isn’t the fastest SSD around, but it’s still a speedy unit that helps the Zenbook 14X boot up quickly.(Image credit: Windows Central)
It’s a fantastic laptop, and the price for what you get is surprisingly reasonable.
It has enough power for casual gamers, but it’s ultimately designed for creative work.
The Zenbook 14X OLED doesn’t get anything major wrong, and it gets so much right.
The Zenbook 14X OLED is able to keep up with the Surface Studio 2 and Dell XPS 15 in this test, which is impressive.(Image credit: Windows Central)
This is a top-notch 14-inch laptop.
This laptop also performed great in CrossMark, which is a general productivity benchmark.(Image credit: Windows Central)
Once again, the Zenbook 14X OLED is able to keep up with larger, much more expensive laptops like the Dell XPS 17.(Image credit: Windows Central)
PCMark 10 is the one outlier, with the Zenbook 14X OLED underperforming here.(Image credit: Windows Central)
Returning to normal, the Zenbook 14X OLED sits exactly where I expected in the Time Spy benchmark — in the upper ranges of other RTX 3050-powered laptops.(Image credit: Windows Central)
I was just as surprised to see how long this laptop is capable of lasting, and it’s easy to charge it back up using either of these Thunderbolt 4 ports.
PCMark 10 runs its general productivity, mixed usage Modern Office test until a laptop dies, and the Zenbook 14X OLED managed 7 hours and 24 minutes.
The keyboard is one area where the Zenbook 14X OLED isn’t exceptional, but it’s still very good — and I love that the touchpad has a hidden number pad.
There are a lot of reasons to consider this laptop, but I guess the 180-degrees hinge is one of them.
14-inch laptops continue to be the sweet spot for a lot of people, and the Zenbook 14X OLED is a very good example of one.
