ASUS ExpertBook Ultra (Panther Lake) 14" Business Laptop Review

TweakTown Rating: 89%

Our Verdict

A brilliant business laptop that's one of the best ultraportables on the market. It even plays games. But it's incredibly expensive for individual buyers, so hassle your IT department to get one for you.

Pros

• Very well built
• Superb screen and speakers
• Great battery life
• Can play games

Cons

• Mediocre webcam
• Divisive trackpad
• Incredibly expensive

Should you buy it?

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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

I like business laptops because they're manufactured to much higher standards than regular consumer laptops. They're designed to survive being lugged about by grumpy office workers (who don't treat them very well) while some executive models feature extra bells and whistles to keep the C-Suite happy.

ASUS is positioning the ExpertBook Ultra at both groups, and it sees the global RAM crisis as an opportunity to target it. The company has said that it wants bulk-buying organizations to consider the Ultra over models from their regular suppliers (like Dell) because its S-tier build quality will make it last longer and be more reliable. This should lower its Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which includes expensive support costs, and that should make a difference when competitors appear to be cutting corners to maintain shareholder value. Time will tell if this approach succeeds - it's a very difficult club to break into - but the rewards of having individual purchasers buying 10,000 units at a time are self-evident.

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The ExpertBook Ultra gets off to a good start with its new, matte, 'Nano Ceramic' coating looking good and feeling luxurious (like earthenware). It rates 9H on the hardness scale (10 is diamond), meaning that most scratches can just be brushed off. It's also good at fending off fingerprints. It's not flashy, but this is not a laptop you want to draw attention to. Our review model's livery is called 'Jet Fog,' but you can also get a light-grey variant called 'Morning Grey.'

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Like the HP OmniBook 7 that we reviewed earlier this year, the ASUS ExpertBook Ultra wields an Intel Ultra X7 358H CPU, which has four Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, and four Low Power Efficient cores that operate between 1.5 and 4.8GHz. There's no Hyperthreading; its NPU can process 50 TOPS, and its 12-core Intel Arc B390 GPU has 12 Xe cores that can run at 2.5GHz. Our review sample came with 64GB of LPDDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD.

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Different SKUs are available at different stores in different regions across the world. The primary differences involve swapping the touchscreen for a regular screen and choosing a different Panther Lake processor. Our review unit has a massive sticker price of $3,599, which puts it out of reach of many individual buyers. Business-oriented bulk buyers will get discounts and care more about the TCO spread over 3-5 years, which could potentially make it a bargain. Nonetheless, the huge price tag means this laptop has a lot to live up to.

Features, Details and Design

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Opening up the ExpertBook Ultra reveals the 2,880 x 1,800 Tandem OLED touchscreen display (which is coated in Gorilla Glass for toughness). It's one of the very best laptop screens on the market thanks to a 1,400-nit peak brightness and HDR performance that reveals details in both very bright areas and dark shadows simultaneously. It also has a matte finish to banish reflections, and yet the OLED technology keeps colors vibrant and blacks true. The quick OLED pixel response time also marries with a quick 120Hz refresh rate to keep fast-moving objects relatively blur-free, so it's also good for gaming. Ultimately, it's one of the very best laptop screens on the market.

Above the screen is a Full HD webcam. Frankly, I was a little disappointed here as it can exhibit grain, even in good lighting. I've seen better on other ASUS laptops. Still, the microphone array captures clear and crisp audio, making it good for video conferencing. Its partnering IR camera facilitates Windows Hello log-on.

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Below the screen is an excellent Scrabble-tile keyboard that is very well-weighted, comfortable, and accurate to type upon for extended periods. The power button at the top right doubles as a (Windows Hello-compatible) fingerprint reader.

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Below it is a large, haptic trackpad, which was another imperfection. It's incredibly sensitive to the point where it's nearly impossible to type without activating an unwanted feature. We had to disable every ASUS and Windows gesture that used it. ASUS says it has fewer moving parts that can potentially fail, but I feel it's an over-engineered solution to a trackpad problem that didn't exist.

Inside the svelte chassis, there are six speakers: two tweeters and two dual-sided woofers. These reproduce loud and punchy music and crisp and clear audio for web-conferencing. ASUS explained that executives don't like wearing headsets, and this is why microphones and speakers tend to be so much better in business laptops compared to many other expensive gaming laptops.

I/O

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On the left of the ASUS ExpertBook Ultra is a Thunderbolt 4 port, an HDMI 2.1 port, a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, and a 3.5mm audio jack.

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On the right-hand side is another Thunderbolt 4 port and another USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port. You can also see the maximum extent to which the screen reclines in this image.

Inside there's Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. So, it's pretty much got the best of everything.

Portability

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Some review SKUs of the ASUS ExpertBook weigh just under 1KG, but our Tandem OLED model tipped the scales at 1.09KG. I'd have liked to have seen a phone-style charger, but ASUS supplies a bulkier 90-Watt power brick instead.

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Fortunately, you won't need to carry it around much, as it ran our UL Procyon Modern Office benchmark for an impressive 18 hours 35 minutes.

It also ran UL's video playback test for a whopping 23 hours 46 minutes.

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While it's not fully MIL-STD-810H certified, it's passed many of the tests, and ASUS has delighted in demonstrating people standing on it, holding it by its screen, spilling water on it, and torturing its I/O ports. It's a tough cookie and will survive life on the road.

Benchmarks

Panther Lake laptops have impressed us before, so I was keen to see what the ExpertBook Ultra could do.

CrystalDiskMark

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I wasn't expecting an ultraportable business laptop to be using a PCIe 5 SSD owing to heat issues and the power required. Nonetheless, the CrystalDiskMark benchmark shows that that's exactly what's inside the ExpertBook. Read and write speeds of 11,198MB/s and 10,105MB/s (respectively) are crazy fast for any laptop, not just one in this category.

CineBench

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An area where I expect Panther Lake laptops to struggle is CPU-based rendering, owing to the removal of HyperThreading. And indeed, the Cinebench R24 score of 1,114 is relatively low for a modern laptop. The single-core score of 124 isn't fast either (an M4 MacBook Air scores 175), but few people will notice any significant performance difference caused by this.

GeekBench 6 CPU

In the GeekBench 6 CPU tests, the ExpertBook Ultra scored 2,805 in the single-core test and 16,225 in the multi-core test. These scores are impressive in that they're mid-range in a laptop world that includes powerful gaming machines. It's not something we'd have expected from a business laptop just a couple of years ago.

GeekBench 6 GPU

In the GPU version of the GeekBench test, the ASUS scored 57,932. That's a fair way behind Nvidia-based gaming laptops, but it's still good compared to everything else.

3DMark Speed Way + Steel Nomad

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3DMark's Speed Way benchmark runs at 1,440p and uses complex ray-tracing to give powerful gaming laptops a real test. Not so long ago, business laptops would simply have noped out of even trying to run it. In that context, a score of 981 (9.8fps) is actually impressive, even if it shows that the ExpertBook can't play games with similar demands.

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Steel Nomad tests powerful gaming laptops' 4K gaming potential. The Ultra's score of 1,597 (16fps) shows it can't comfortably play demanding 4K games, but it can have a stab at less-powerful ones if you (dramatically) drop the detail settings.

3DMark Solar Bay + Night Raid

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3DMark's Solar Bay benchmark is a less-demanding, 1,440p ray-tracing test. The score of 27,723 represents an average of 105fps, meaning that the Ultra is adept when it comes to moderate gaming.

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Night Raid is 3DMark's ancient benchmark that tests for old-school Full HD gaming performance. Few modern laptops can ace it, but even so, the Ultra's score of 48,322 (average 245fps) here shows it's more than capable of playing casual and competitive games.

Real World Benchmarks

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To back up this point, we ran the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark at a Full HD resolution and with Ultra settings. The ExpertBook Ultra managed a very playable 69fps. When I added ray-tracing, the score dropped to 40fps (which means there'll be stuttering). This is still all very impressive for a business laptop.

Ultimately, it might not be a gaming laptop, but it's a laptop that can play games.

Adobe Premiere

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I'm a big fan of UL's Procyon Video Editing benchmark, which uses Adobe Premiere to encode four 900MB UHD files. The ExpertBook scored 12,313, which means it can't compete with NVIDIA's best. Still, to help visualize its performance, the hardest test (UHD, H.265, 60fps) took 212 seconds. A 5090-equipped laptop can do it in 30 seconds. However, weak ultraportables can take 10 minutes. This really isn't bad if you need to do occasional video editing when out and about.

Cooling

The ASUS ExpertBook Ultra runs cool and silently for the most part. When it's under sustained, heavy load, it can get rather warm at the base, and the fan ramps up to a light whoosh. However, it's not uncomfortably hot, and it might only prove distracting in a tense, library environment. It quickly returns to silent once the workload is done. There's minimal thermal throttling on show either. In the 30-minute Cinebench R24 test, the score only registered a negligible one per cent drop to 1,105 (from 1,114).

Final Thoughts

Many laptop users would happily use an ASUS ExpertBook Ultra as their daily driver. While it's not quite perfect, it's not very far off it at all. The main issue is the price. It's colossally expensive for individual buyers, and even bulk-buying organizations will need to look at the TCO figures to justify buying it - and that's still after the bulk discount. Still, everyone would like to see Dell, HP and Lenovo face a bit more competition in the corporate space and so hopefully ASUS' ExpertBook Ultra will make a dent.