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

TweakTown's Rating: 95%

The Bottom Line

Top-notch build quality, efficiency, and performance combine to make the ASUS Zenbook S14 a work of art!

Pros

• + Intel Core Ultra 7 258V and Arc 140V
• + 1800p OLED touchscreen panel
• + Power efficiency
• + Brilliant Ceraluminum chassis
• + Wi-Fi 7 and price

Cons

• - Tile design (memory soldered)
• - No SD card support

Should you buy it?

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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

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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.

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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.

ASUS Zenbook 14X OLED Business Laptop

	Today	Yesterday	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$999.00	$999.00	$999.00	-	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 10/3/2024 at 11:03 am CDT - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission from any sales.

Laptop Features

Overview

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The Zenbook S was delivered in retail packaging, which includes a box modeled after the laptop's design.

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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.

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As mentioned, the Zenbook S features a Ceraluminum chassis with a high-end finish and design.

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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.

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The right side includes the USB 3.2 Gen 2 port for Type-A devices.

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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.

Keyboard & Trackpad

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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.

Display

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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 and Upgradability

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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.

BIOS/UEFI

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.

Software

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Performance can be tuned through the My ASUS software. The top menu offers hardware monitoring to the right.

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Further options include a battery care mode to preserve the battery's life.

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In addition, we have several fan mode presets, as seen above.

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Those wanting to do some gaming can manually adjust the iGPU memory here as well, as it is dedicated to up to 8GB.

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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.

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One of these features is live performance monitoring, including the ability to run an in-game overlay.

System & CPU Performance

Cinebench

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.

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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.

BAPCo CrossMark

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.

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CrossMark was our first overall system bench, scoring 1841; the 258V is becoming quite impressive.

AIDA64 Memory

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Memory performance was 86K read, 115K write, and 108K copy. The latency was 97 ns.

Geekbench 6

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Geekbench scored 2533 in single-core workloads and 10820 in multi-core.

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Adding in a quick AI run with ONNX CPU, the 258V offers a solid 3543 Quantized score.

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GeekBench GPU with Arc 140V gives us 36727 for OpenCL and 32057 for Vulkan.

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DirectML gives the Arc 140V a quantized score of 4533.

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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.

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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.

Graphics & System I/O Performance

UL Procyon Office

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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.

3DMark

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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.

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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.

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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.

Gaming Performance

Gaming on Arc 140V "Xe2 Battlemage"

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

Final Thoughts

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.