Asus ZenBook 14X OLED Review: Games & Strong 3K Colors

The e-shutter webcam produces low-resolution and rather noisy images, even under the best lighting conditions. E-shutter means that the camera is switched off electrically when the corresponding F button is pressed. Unfortunately, you can't see this visually on the camera eye as you can in the case of a mechanical shutter with its red "curtain". The Dell XPS 13 shows that things can be done better.

Accessories consist of a 100-watt power supply, a USB Type-A Ethernet dongle, and a digitizer pen with battery and replaceable tips. The current Intel and AMD versions of the Zenbook are all touchscreen, so the pen should be part of the equipment of every 14X. 

Loosen the screws, open a gap between the hinges with a plastic spatula, and the baseplate can be removed. There is not much to maintain: the RAM is onboard (no socket) as well as the WiFi module.

Asus supplements the input devices with a Screenpad, which is a display in the clickpad. This is an extended desktop onto which any windows can be dragged - such as an audio player or color palettes in Photoshop. Whether this results in useful applications depends on the tools used and, of course, on the question of whether one can intermittently do without the ClickPad.

The matte, non-slip keys have a distinctive pressure point, a moderate drop and a firm stroke. Typing is almost silent. Thanks to the three-level white backlight, you can work in dark environments without issue.

Overall, a broad layout with the large Shift, Ctrl and direction keys allows one to work quickly, or even blindly. The key spacing is quite large by laptop standards (2.5 mm) because the entire width of the base is used here. On the right, there is even enough space for Page Up/Down and Home/End - a successful layout for practical use. Another very positive point is the firm base of the keyboard; nothing gives way at any point.

All in all, the result is a spacious keyboard that only lags a little behind business professionals like the Dell Latitude 7420 in terms of pressure point. The Zenbook is certainly fast to type on. This review was written on the Zenbook keyboard.

The clickpad is sensitive right up to the edges and has a short drop. It works with a dull, quiet noise. The matte surface is smooth, bordering on slippery, and guides the finger comfortably. We find the short drop stroke unsatisfactory.
The pad can be a screen if desired: The pad function can be used quickly with a crossfade or for a longer time by dectivating the display function (Fn+F6). The ScreenPad 2.0 has a FHD+ resolution (2160x1080); it is an IPS panel. In Windows, the secondary display operates as an extended desktop. Asus has prepared groups for the ScreenPad. Each group can be filled with applications that seem useful on the small display: handwriting, a number pad, the app store, a calculator or Spotify.

Before calibration, we determined the DeltaE of the grayscale and colors to be 0.8 and 2.8, respectively - very good values because they are below 3.0. However, calibration made grayscale worse and colors minimally better. In short: calibration is unnecessary, as the factory-calibrated panel seems to be optimally set up.

The glare-type surface (non-touch) suffers from reflections outdoors, and the strong brightness hardly helps here. The screen can be used well in the shade, also because the luminance does not throttle in battery mode (345 cd/m² in the centre of the image).

There's no question that the viewing angles of OLED panels are the best available. Even from flat angles, colors remain stable and the brightness does not appear any weaker.

MyAsus allows you to choose a performance mode independent of the Windows power settings. For the benchmarks and load measurements, we selected "Performance Mode" combined with the Windows setting "Best Performance". The Windows power-saving mode was completely deactivated. For the WiFi runtime test, we activated Asus "Silent Mode" and Windows "Best Energy Saving". We did not change any performance-related settings in the BIOS. The user can only access the Asus performance mode by creating a MyAsus account. This coercive measure - because it is also necessary for all OLED settings - is a point of criticism. 

The Core i7-1165G7 (2.8 GHz) has a PL1 of 50 watts and a PL2 (short term) of 61 watts. In practice, however, the processor does not operate within this range, as total CPU power consumption graph shows below. The 50 watt level is not reached; the value settles at 40 watts after 20 seconds. The power peak at the beginning of load is low, where 4 GHz is only maintained for a few seconds in multi-core. See Logviewer Prime95.

At least the available power that can be accessed remains constant under permanent load, as the Cinebench R15 loop demonstrates. This shows a Core i7 that is no faster than a nominally weaker Core i5, such as the one installed in the HP Envy 14. As has often been shown, the Ryzen 9 5900HS is in a completely different league in this respect.

In all Cinebench tests, the i7-1165G7 follows the Ryzen 9 in multi-core by a clear margin (-50%). In single core, it is only a gap of -9% for our Core i7. The bottom line is that the SoC is slightly above average compared to other models with the same chipset, such as the Zenbook 14 UX435 and the MSI Modern 14.

In our standardized latency test (web surfing, YouTube 4K playback, CPU load), the Zenbook shows problems with increased latencies. This is due to kernel driver and ACPI drivers. The present driver configuration is not suitable for real-time audio applications. During video playback, there were 132 skipped frames. But this reflects the present configuration; things may look different if the driver setting is changed.