The Asus Zenbook A14 powered by the Snapdragon X2 Elite is the perfect mobile companion

Asus refreshed its extremely lightweight 14-inch laptop Zenbook A14 and now uses the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite, which offers a massive performance improvement over the previous version. The CPU performance is also superior to AMD or Intel and Apple's M5 SoC is only better in terms of single-core performance. You still get plenty of performance in Whisper mode, so you basically get a silent or extremely quiet (up to 28 dB(A)) in practice. This is obviously still not as good as the passively cooled MacBook Air 13, but it is currently the best opportunity to get an extremely quiet, but still powerful subnotebook with Windows. If you want to utilize the full performance, the fans will get very loud, but the amount of performance is pretty unrivaled in such a lightweight package.

The highlight is once again the low weight, which is still under 1 kg despite the much more powerful processor. This is impressive for a 14-inch laptop and it is no problem to put the Zenbook A14 into your hand luggage. This is also an advantage over the Apple MacBook Air 13, which has smaller footprint, but is about 230 grams heavier in return. Asus also uses an OLED screen, which is limited to the Full-HD resolution, but still offers very good image quality. Both rivals are limited to 60 Hz panels, which is not ideal.

In terms of battery runtime, you do not have to make any compromises, because we determine around 16 hours in our Wi-Fi test at a150 nits and still almost 11 hours at maximum brightness. The price of the Zenbook A14 is also very competitive, because the SLU with the faste X2 Elite and 32 GB RAM retails for around €1500, while the comparable MacBook Air 13 M5 with 32 GB RAM has an RRP of €1949. Please see our in-depth review for more information on the new Zenbook A14.