There's a lot riding on Intel's Core Ultra Series 2 processors, also known as Lunar Lake. After the launch of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X series earlier this year, it became painfully obvious that Intel (alongside AMD) just couldn't live up to what the Arm architecture could offer. That, paired with the other troubles Intel has been facing, has left the company in a fairly vulnerable position.

Thankfully, the debut laptops for Intel's latest processors seem to hit most of the notes needed to make this a great offering. Intel appears to finally have figured out performance and power efficiency, and it still has the advantage of actually supporting gaming, which is the big pain point of Qualcomm-powered laptops.

Aside from that, Asus has also built a terrific laptop with the Zenbook S 14. This is a super sleek, thin, and premium feeling laptop that leaves very little to be desired across the board. This is the start of a new generation of Intel laptops, and it's a great one at that.

About this review: Intel sent us the Asus Zenbook S 14 for the purposes of this review. Neither Intel nor Asus had any input in its content.

Asus Zenbook S 14: Pricing and availability

The Asus Zenbook S 14 is available to order from Best Buy and Asus' official website alike. It's launching alongside other laptops that are debuting the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors, so it's shipping today.

Pricing starts at $1,399.99 for the model with 16GB of RAM, with a higher-end model featuring 32GB of RAM costing $1,499.99. Otherwise, the models available currently are identical, though more options may appear later on.

Design

Asus has perfected the aluminum laptop

I've been a fan of Asus laptop designs for a while now, but this is the first time I get to see the company's most premium laptop firsthand for a longer period of time, and I love it. The Asus Zenbook S 14 leverages what Asus calls "Ceraluminum" for the lid. Asus uses a special treatment that turns the aluminum into "high-tech ceramic", which gives the material better scratch resistance while keeping the relative lightness of aluminum.

I didn't try breaking the laptop to test these claims, but what I will say is that this material looks and feels great, and it helps this laptop stand out from the myriad of aluminum laptops on the market. There's a very unique texture to the material when touching, and it feels a bit more welcoming than bare metal.

At 2.65 pounds, it's very light for a 14-inch laptop made of aluminum

The base of the laptop uses more regular aluminum, but it still looks and feels very premium, with some very intentional design choices. I really like how the speaker grill consists of larger etchings that look like a rounded square, with two small holes in each of the squares. It's a kind of machining that probably doesn't have much practical use, but it helps give this laptop that much more personality. Despite coming in a plain gray color, I never felt like this laptop was boring.

For a 14-inch laptop, this is a very portable machine, too. It comes in at just over 11mm thick at its thinnest point, and under 13mm at its thickest. And at 2.65 pounds, it's very light for a 14-inch laptop made of aluminum. To get significantly lower than that, you'd need magnesium, and that usually sacrifices the premium feel. Asus really nailed it here.

We're still not sacrificing ports

In a world where classic ports have become an afterthought for the majority of premium laptops, Asus has been adamant in keeping these ports around no matter how premium the laptop is. In fact, I don't think this laptop could get any thinner with its current port selection.

On the left side on the laptop, you get two Thunderbolt 4 ports, along with HDMI and a headphone jack. On the right, a USB Type-A port with 10Gbps bandwidth. For a premium laptop, that's a lot of ports, and it covers a lot of bases. Both the HDMI and USB Type-A ports are almost as thick as the laptop's frame itself, so Asus couldn't have trimmed more fat if it wanted to.

Keyboard and touchpad

The good news keeps coming

Asus really surprised me with the keyboard on the Zenbook 14 OLED I reviewed back in January, so this time, I knew what to expect. The Zenbook S 14 comes with a very good keyboard that's very comfortable to type on and doesn't do anything weird to make it awkward. All the keys are where you'd expect, and they're well spaced out so it all feels very comfortable. There's also a good amount of travel and a soft bottom out, so everything is in place for a good experience. The backlight helps if you often work in the dark, though this is something I don't really need since I never work in low light.

The Zenbook S 14 comes with a very good keyboard that's very comfortable to type on

As for the touchpad, Asus also did a good job. The surface is smooth and it's very easy to use this touchpad, and that's about all there is to say in terms of general use. However, Asus also included some interesting features using the edges of the touchpad. If you swipe up or down on the right side, you can change the display brightness, while using the left side changes the volume. You can also scrub videos by swiping along the top, and launch the Asus ScreenXpert app by swiping in from the top right corner.

I did occasionally change the brightness by accident while using the laptop, so palm rejection could be a bit better, but it was far from a major issue.

Display

It's OLED, and it's great

The Asus Zenbook S 14 comes with a 14-inch 3K panel (2880x1800), and just like every OLED laptop, it looks fantastic. OLED displays on laptops are no longer this crazy unheard-of experience, so you probably know the drill by now. Colors are vibrant and punchy, it gets plenty bright for most use cases, and it just looks great overall.

It also supports a 120Hz refresh rate, but I inadvertently left it set to 60Hz during my review period, and it still looked just fine. It thankfully supports a dynamic refresh rate too, so you don't have to waste a ton of battery when the higher refresh rate isn't needed.

Colors are vibrant and punchy, it gets plenty bright for most use cases, and it just looks great overall.

Asus touts up to 500 nits of brightness in HDR, which is also par for the course in OLED laptops. Generally, this means max brightness in SDR is about 400 nits, and according to my tests, the Zenbook S 14 falls just short of that here. I don't think that's a big problem when you have OLED levels of contrast, but it's worth noting all the same.

As for color reproduction, Asus claims this display covers 100% of DCI-P3, and indeed, that's what my measurements show. In fact, I also got 95% of Adobe RGB and 93% of NTCS, so this is a simply fantastic screen.

All in all, this is a great display. And unlike the Zenbook 14 OLED I reviewed before, there were no weird issues with this one when using certain apps. It just looked good all the time.

The laptop also delivers excellent audio out of its quad speaker setup. Just like the Zenbook 14 OLED I reviewed before, the Zenbook S 14 delivers surprisingly powerful audio out of its thin chassis, and it does so without significant distortion at high volumes. It's punchy and crisp, making for one of the best speaker setups I've personally heard. Because it has some top-firing speakers, I'd say this is ever so slightly sharper than the Zenbook 14 OLED, so it's currently my favorite audio setup.

The webcam is solid

Above the display is 1080p webcam, which comes complete with an IR camera for Windows Hello, and even support for presence detection. The camera quality itself is good, though this webcam isn't on par with the 5MP we've seen on some laptops, and less so the 9MP webcams HP is now using on its premium laptops. Still, it's clearly a good enough webcam for video calls, as are the microphones.

This laptop doesn't support the Windows Studio Effects features that are promoted with Copilot+ PCs, maybe because Copilot+ just isn't enabled for Intel PCs yet. Things like creative filters or the Teleprompter style for the Eye contact feature aren't available here.

Performance

Intel Lunar Lake is the real deal

Intel had some big hurdles to overcome with its Lunar Lake processors. It had to deliver good AI performance to enable Copilot+ PCs, but more importantly, it had to prove Intel can match or at least compete with Qualcomm when it comes to power efficiency. The Asus Zenbook S 14 is one of the first laptops to debut these processors, with my model specifically featuring an Intel Core Ultra 7 268V with 32GB of RAM and Intel Arc graphics 140V. And from my experience using this laptop for about a week, Intel has finally nailed it, though this requires some explanation.

See, the big threat to Intel at this moment is Qualcomm with the Snapdragon X series of chipsets. Snapdragon-powered laptops proved that it is possible to deliver excellent performance on battery power while still having great battery life. When I reviewed the Asus Vivobook S 15, I saw nearly identical results in Geekbench 6 when plugged in or on battery, in both Best performance and Balanced power modes.

The Asus Zenbook S 14 had a lot to live up to as a result, and looking at benchmarks alone, you can see how it faltered.

While it managed to maintain similar scores when I set it to Balanced mode while plugged in, and in High performance mode when on battery, combining the Balanced setting with battery power took a big hit to performance in Geekbench 6 and PCMark 10. That in itself is still a problem, but it's not as big as it used to be. Despite everything, maintaining such a similar score while on battery power, even if it's in high performance mode, is something I've never seen an Intel laptop do. There's still the matter of battery life, but I'll come back to that in a bit.

Intel has done some serious work on these cores, and it really shows.

Something else that probably gets your attention here is that the multi-core score for this processor is lower than the Meteor Lake processors that launched in January. That may seem like a downgrade, but in reality, the difference here is very small, and by contrast, single-core performance has improved massively. The lower multi-core performance is simply because we've gone from 16 cores and 22 threads to just 8 cores and 8 threads, so there's only so much you can expect. Intel has done some serious work on these cores, and it really shows. Still, it's also behind what the Snapdragon X Elite offers, and that's more of a problem.

Still, using this laptop felt very snappy the entire time. Even when battery saver kicked in after reaching 20% battery, it didn't feel like the laptop slowed down signficantly for my general workload of using a browser to write, research, upload images, and so on. It was always a good time.

It's also worth noting that GPU performance is significantly better than before, which is one of the big highlights of Lunar Lake. In fact, that's one of the big points where Intel is still basically untouched by Qualcomm. You can actually play games on Intel PCs, and now it's better than ever. With Qualcomm, it's a total gamble whether a game will work or not. I didn't get too deep into gaming, but I did play Rocket League at 1920x1200 resolution and all the settings maxed out, and I was getting just above 100FPS most of the time. In Apex Legends (the DirectX 12 version), I played at high settings across the board and 2880x1800 resolution (though the game uses adaptive resolution) and got 50-60FPS on the ground. When flying over the stage before a match, the framerate is noticeably lower, but the point is, you can't play Apex Legends at all on Snapdragon, and that will likely remain the case for a while.

Battery life is finally good (usually)

So now we come back to battery life. I just mentioned how performance takes a big hit when we go from the High performance power mode to Balanced while the laptop is unplugged. Obviously, I wanted to see how these modes impacted battery life, because at the end of the day, what matters is whether you can ge tgood battery life and good perofrmance at the same time. As such, I first tested the battery in High performance mode. And the thing is, I never went back.

That's right. Despite the Geekbench 6 scores appearing to be disappointing at first, I discovered that Intel's Lunar Lake processors actually can deliver great performance and battery life at the same time. During my review period I got to test battery life for three full days. The results were 5 hours and 54 minutes, 7 hours and 40 minutes, and 8 hours and 52 minutes. That's some of the best battery life I've ever seen from an Intel laptop, and I usually test them all in Balanced mode. That first result was a bit unusual, but I also had some atypical usage that day due to testing some programs for other reasons. Still, it shows that there may still be some inconsistent results, but overall, battery life is much better than before without sacrificing performance.

It's not all perfect. The laptop still gets warmer during use than a Snapdragon laptop would, and when I left the computer idle for a couple of days with over 50% of battery, it was still dead after the weekend. Standby battery life could still be a bit better. But this is big for Intel, and it makes this an excellent laptop.

Should you buy the Asus Zenbook S 14?

Going into this, I had a lot of doubts that Intel could live up to the promises it made for Lunar Lake, or to what Qualcomm is offering with its laptops. But to my surprise, Intel has made a huge leap with these new processors, and it's come surprisingly close to the target. Clearly, it doesn't beat Qualcomm when it comes to raw performance, but the experience is close enough that, considering Intel's advantages in app and game compatibility, getting a Lunar Lake laptop is still more than warranted.

And if you're getting such a laptop, the Asus Zenbook S 14 is definitely a great one to go for. Pairing the top-tier processor with a super sleek design that looks and feels great, a fantastic OLED screen, and a simply great experience in just about every way. I can't complain much about anything here.

You should buy the Asus Zenbook S 14 if:

• You want a powerful laptop with great battery life
• You like having some classic ports but still want an ultrathin laptop
• You watch a lot of movies on that OLED display

You should NOT buy the Asus Zenbook S 14 if:

• You want battery life and performance that truly beat Snapdragon PCs