Asus ExpertBook B9: Intel Tiger Lake, Iris Xe, and Thunderbolt 4 in a magnesium alloy body that only weights 880 grams

As part of Project Athena (Intel Evo), the ExpertBook B9 was developed in partnership with Intel to include a rapid resume, battery life, and quick charging (up to 60% in 39 minutes) as three of the primary focus points. The chassis is made of a magnesium-lithium alloy and has the MIL-STD 810H military durability rating.

The ExpertBook B9 is being refreshed with an 11th gen. Intel Tiger Lake i5-1135G7 or i7-1165G7 processor and Iris Xe GPU, which is Intel’s most powerful mobile graphics chipset to date. The ultrabook SoC variant of the Iris Xe architecture is claimed to offer a “discrete GPU level of performance”, this would likely place it as a competitor to the MX350 or MX450 from Nvidia — depending on the benchmark.

Accompanying these are WiFi 6 and Thunderbolt 4, the latter of which isn’t any faster than Thunderbolt 3 but has better display support (2 x 4K or 1 x 8K), charging input, Thunderspy protection, and cable length (full speed at 2m). The display uses a 14-inch 1080p panel that can display 100% of sRGB and has a 400-nit maximum brightness.

Memory can be configured up to 32 GB LPDDR4x 4266 MHz. The dual M.2 SSD slots allow for configuration of RAID0 or RAID1 setups. RAID0 provides higher throughput and greater total storage capacity, but with the speed and size of today’s NVMe drives the RAID1 arrangement or just two individual storage drives are probably more common choices.

The ExpertBook B9 is the lightest 14-inch business laptop available, but to get the 880 gram (1.94 lb) advertised weight, you have to select the 33 Wh battery. Fortunately, the 66 Wh battery configuration is only slightly heavier at just over 1 kg (2.22 lb), meaning that it would still be barely noticeable in the bag of a road warrior. The body is fairly svelte at 320 x 203 x 15 mm (12.6 x 8.0 x 0.6 inches).

The Asus ExpertBook B9 (B9400) will be available in the fourth quarter of 2020, starting at €1799 (US$2140). Note that the German/Euro pricing we have includes a 15% sales tax.

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