Asus Zenbook S 14 UX5406 laptop review - Excellent everyday laptop with Intel Lunar Lake

[bp]

Bit confused with all the benchmarks and word salads.
It would suffice if you just said that intel was right to claim that its 17W Lunar Lake is just as good at gaming as AMD 890m at more than double the power. Therefore core ultra 9 (30W Lunar Lunar Lake) should be better at gaming (just like Intel claimed).

About performance per watt.
There is obvious discrepancy between real world battery life and calculated performance per watt with all cores at 100%. I don't see the point of a CPU that has better performance per watt and much worse battery life.
Maybe benchmark that measures battery drain on 100%-75%-50% load would be more representative test.
Because all other components contribute to battery drain.

[just better]

Energy Efficiency (from JustJosh on YouTube)

Before Lunar Lake
1.  Apple M3
2.  AMD zen5 laptop hx365, hx370
3.  Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite
4.  Intel 155h or whatever

After Lunar Lake
1.  Apple M3
2.  AMD zen5 laptop
3.  Intel 268 or whatever
4.  Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite

Competition isn't putting much pressure on the leaders in the field ...

apple doesn't lead in all efficiency. it sometimes has higher idle power draw and also during some scenario loads. notebook shows, this when you look at some M-series variants vs the competition.

[ab]

Here is what I like about this machine:
- battery life,
- single core performance,
- noise level.
I do not see any other positives and some "no go" negatives, including multicore performance and price tag. I wonder who should by this laptop? If you edit images or videos- multicore performance is not good enough for price tag. If you are running multiple VMs, you are short of cores. Gaming- cannot see any significant improvement. The biggest advantage of this laptop is that it can run everything, like eveyone windows laptop.
Speaking about review- not sure why there is not direct comparison between previous generation of Zenbook 14 and this machine, it is complete nonsense... I am wondering again, is it review or marketing... How it compers to vivobook s14 with AMD reviewed weeks ago?

[Alexander_]

How it compers to vivobook s14 with AMD

A valid question.
But if you notice, NB usually doesn't compare laptops from different model lines, assigning them to "different categories".

It is also interesting that Asus has really been blurring the lines between different laptop lines in recent years.
So e.g. ZenBook Pro used to be a top quality line. But it has not been so noticeable for a long time. And now the "coolest" universal laptop for comfortable work with graphics and leisure [not including games] remains the ROG Zephyrus M16, although it is already a gaming line [and even it was better than the designer ProArt]. And the VivoBook S comes out well from the cheap segment [although the quality of the materials, of course, is not yet the highest and the equipment often corresponds to the same HP/Dell alternatives].
That is why questions similar to yours may arise.

I will also remind you that you can independently add comparison graphs of the laptop models you need from different lines and brands.

[Aras]

I agree that it should be compared to Vivobook S 14. When I added it to the measurement graphs & tables, I've seen that it is usually much faster in everything, sometimes more than 2 times as fast. The drawback seems to be the power consumption, noise, and temperature under load. However, one can configure Vivobook S 14 to consume less power by selecting the right mode (like standard, eco, or quiet) and then it may still be faster than this, given that more power has diminishing returns and the margin is quite large. Interestingly Vivobook has a longer battery life for Wifi websurfing, but it also has a lower-resolution screen as well. Some Youtubers made power vs performance chart for different power levels of the CPUs, and the new Ryzen processor outperforms this Lunar Lake processor at the same power levels, but the Lunar Lake can consume less when idle. Given that the laptop won't be idle most of the time, the idle power consumption should be less important than the power consumption in light loads.

How it compers to vivobook s14 with AMD

A valid question.
But if you notice, NB usually doesn't compare laptops from different model lines, assigning them to "different categories".

It is also interesting that Asus has really been blurring the lines between different laptop lines in recent years.
So e.g. ZenBook Pro used to be a top quality line. But it has not been so noticeable for a long time. And now the "coolest" universal laptop for comfortable work with graphics and leisure [not including games] remains the ROG Zephyrus M16, although it is already a gaming line [and even it was better than the designer ProArt]. And the VivoBook S comes out well from the cheap segment [although the quality of the materials, of course, is not yet the highest and the equipment often corresponds to the same HP/Dell alternatives].
That is why questions similar to yours may arise.

I will also remind you that you can independently add comparison graphs of the laptop models you need from different lines and brands.

[Matt Schmidt]

Bottom firing speakers should be listed as a con. They may sound OK at the desk, but the sound gets muffled on the lap or anything else.

[Schmatt midt]

Bottom firing speakers should be listed as a con. They may sound OK at the desk, but the sound gets muffled on the lap or anything else.

Upward firing speakers should be listed as a con. They may sound OK at the lap, but the sound gets muffled on the desk when the laptop is closed and connected to external monitor or anything else.

[Anonymous Coward]

Upward firing speakers should be listed as a con. They may sound OK at the lap, but the sound gets muffled on the desk when the laptop is closed and connected to external monitor or anything else.

Absolutely! This is desktop computer and only someone insane would use it on their lap! What a crazy idea?!

[N-B]

Zen4 and especially Zen5 are in fact 1.4-1.5 times faster at 17W, proven by NB reviews on 7840U.
The processor performance in the CineBench R15 test in PL1 mode is at the level of a 5-year-old Zen2 (although it consumes about 2-2.5 times more).
Asus (Intel) has an epic failure in the memory controller - despite the fact that there is 8533, instead of 7500 in Zen5, the difference in average throughput is only 4 GB / s in favor of Intel.
I do not see any reduced noise level - 30 dB is too much by ear even at a ridiculous 17W. The maximum should not be higher than 25-26 dB.

The result is that Lunar Lake laptops are only suitable for housewives for simple tasks with such a low level of performance for 2024. Performance should be at least 2 times higher at 17W - 2100-2200 points in CineBenchR15. This is not a tablet, but also not a laptop by 2024 standards in terms of multi-threaded performance.

[G-W]

@N-B: This chip is aimed at laptops that are competing with M3 MacBook airs, not MacBook pros with M3 max. So for that performance profile, I think this level of CPU is acceptable.

I do hope that intel continue with this type of design and scale it up. Maybe in future build a bigger version of this chip with 12 CPUs cores + 24 Xe2 GPUs cores, on 2nm TSMC perhaps.

[Konstantinos]

Vivobook S 14 AMD Strix HX 370 is better in every respect!

1. Better OLED screen with color coverage (Adobe 98% vs 89%)
2. Better performance (CB 3350 vs 1500)
3. Better battery life (16.5 hours web vs 14 hours)
4. Better price ($1200 vs $2000)
5. Better game FPS in real games (e.g. Cyberpunk, Witcher etc)