Japan-made laptop with 32 GB RAM and 8-core CPU arrives with 30-hour battery life

NEC is a well-known Japanese conglomerate specializing in enterprise and consumer computing hardware. The companie's Lavie brand, which is a joint venture between NEC and Lenovo, sells a bunch of laptops, AIOs, as well as tablets. 

The brand has now announced a bunch of new products, among which happens to be the Lavie X14 14-inch laptop. Powered by a capable Intel "Panther Lake" CPU and plenty of memory, the laptop weighs in at just around 2.25 lbs (~1 kg) and is around 0.74 inches thick.

To be more specific, the Lavie X14 laptop comes equipped with an Intel Core Ultra 7 355 CPU paired with 32 GB of LPDDR5x RAM. SKUs with lesser memory are not available as of this writing.

The octa-core CPU consists of four "Cougar Cove" performance cores and four "Darkmont" LP efficiency cores, and performs decently well in most benchmarks, managing roughly 650 points in Cinebench 2024, which puts it roughly 5% ahead of an Apple M3 SoC.

Simply put, the laptop should be good enough for most moderately intensive workloads, such as casual productivity, office tasks, web browsing, as well as some lightweight photo and video editing.

Speaking of video editing, the Core Ultra 7 "Panther Lake" chip packs a rather mediocre four-core Intel Graphics Xe3 iGPU, which would be about as powerful as an AMD Radeon 760M found in many mid-range portable laptops and mini PCs (GMKtec M6 Ultra, currently $499 on Amazon).

Some lightweight gaming should be possible on the X14 laptop, albeit at only very modest settings. The I/O on offer has been detailed below:

• Dual Thunderbolt 4 Type-C
• Dual USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A
• HDMI
• MicroSD
• Ethernet, Wi-Fi 7
• 3.5 mm audio

Notable features, pricing, and availability

One of the highlight features of the Lavie X14 laptop happens to be its 99.9 Wh battery, which allows the laptop to keep its lights on for roughly 30 hours of video playback, and 51 hours of idle time.

Other details worth mentioning include a 512 GB SSD, 1080p IR camera (Windows Hello compatible), 49-top NPU courtesy of the Core Ultra Series 3 chip, multi-touch trackpad with gesture support, and last but not least: a 14-inch touch-enabled WUXGA (1920 x 1200) IPS display.

The laptop is already available for purchase in Japan, priced at roughly 364,870 yen. (~$2,314). NEC PC sells Lavie-branded products exclusively in Japan, making a launch outside of the country quite unlikely. That said, interested customers can always go the import route, courtesy of shipment forwarding services.