Asus Zenbook A14 Review: a lightweight charmer

Introduction

If ever there was a laptop designed to take it to the MacBook Air, it would be the new Asus Zenbook A14.

Even a cursory glance of the spec sheet would suggest that, as it comes with a sub-1kg chassis, Arm-based Snapdragon X chip, 14-inch OLED display and immense efficiency thanks to a 70Whr cell.

With this in mind, the £1099.99/$1099.99 price tag is also competitive against Apple’s own MacBook Air M3, as well as other Snapdragon-powered choices we’ve liked in the past such as the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024).

I’ve been testing the Zenbook A14 for the last few weeks to see if it’s one of the best ultrabooks we’ve tested, and as to whether it’s a true MacBook Air-buster.

Design and Keyboard

• Incredibly lightweight and sturdy
• Excellent port selection
• Satisfying keyboard and huge trackpad

The Zenbook A14 pulls no punches when it comes to the design, coming with its own distinctive look, not least with the beige colourway I have here. It’s pleasantly left-field of the grey and black slabs that modern laptops have become, and looks excellent. I should say that it is also available in black if you want something more conventional.

What’s also unconventional here is the fact it tips the scales at just 980g. That’s ridiculously light for a 14-inch laptop and makes this Asus Zenbook A14 one of the most portable laptops. There is a certain Apple-like quality to the rounded corners and small nub in the centre of the chassis, too.

The reason for this being so lightweight is because of Asus’ use of their own innovative ceraluminium material. This was first seen on the Zenbook S 16 (2024), the premium AMD-powered ultrabook, so it’s rather nice to see it trickle down to another model.

As the odd name suggests, ceraluminium is an alloy that blends ceramic and aluminium for a rugged, yet lightweight finish. The former material is quite uncommon in laptops, and is one I’ve seen more in the world of watches in bezels, cases and bracelets for fantastic durability and lightness.

At just 13.3mm thick, the Asus Zenbook A14 also cuts down on its thickness against the current MacBook Air by 2mm while offering a better overall port selection. Whereas the M3 MacBook Air comes with a pair of USB-C ports, headphone jack and MagSafe charging, this Asus laptop features a full-size HDMI, headphone jack and a pair of USB4-capable Type-C ports on the left side, and a USB-A on the right. That’s more Pro than Air.

Being a more compact laptop, the fact there’s a smaller layout keyboard here isn’t a surprise. It’s a 65 percent option complete with arrow keys, function row and surprisingly deep travel. The 1.3mm of total travel means keypresses have a certain substance to them, as opposed to feeling like hair triggers on a controller.

It’s a satisfying typing experience, and I had no issues with it for daily productivity tasks, typing out thousands of words. The white backlighting is also vibrant and crisp, with a strong white shine that is excellent for after-dark working.

Even with its smaller chassis, the Asus Zenbook A14 still manages to slap in a huge, MacBook-busting trackpad. It’s positively huge for a laptop of this size, giving my fingers a lot of real estate for movement and gestures. The action and movement is super slick too, owing to its glass surface.

The packaging here seems to be entirely plastic-free, with the laptop coming in a cardboard box and paper bag, along with the cable and power brick.

Display and Sound

• Deep blacks and fantastic contrast
• Resolution and refresh rate seem a little low
• Middling speakers

The Asus Zenbook A14 opts for an OLED panel to allow for deep blacks, accurate colours and virtually infinite contrast. To be a bit more specific, this is a 14-inch screen with a 1920×1200 resolution for decent detail and clarity with a standard 60Hz refresh rate.

It is also a 16:10 aspect ratio to give more vertical space for modern workloads. It is a bit of a shame that it isn’t a higher-res panel for more detail and with a higher refresh rate for perceivably smoother motion, as is found on the similarly-priced Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (2024).

Nonetheless, the Asus Zenbook A14’s panel impresses both on immediate use with its inky blacks and excellent colours, while this is also backed up when taking out my colorimeter. Here it measured accuracy results of over 90 percent across the sRGB (100%), DCI-P3 (99%) and Adobe RGB (94%) gamuts, making the screen suitable for productivity and more colour-sensitive workloads.

In addition, it offers virtually perfect blacks and excellent colour temperature with levels of 0.01 and 6600K respectively measured both out of the box, and with brightness cranked all the way up. Peak SDR brightness here beats our 300-nit target, with a measured 392.5 nits. That isn’t the brightest we’ve tested, but is suitable for indoor and outdoor use.

In addition, a measured contrast ratio of 28,700:1 is impressive, and lends the Zenbook A14 to having some excellent dynamic range. There is support for HDR with HDR True Black 600, and here Asus quotes a peak brightness of 600 nits for even more punch.

The speakers here are reasonable, if unremarkable. They’re downwards-firing, so you’ll want to ensure the Asus Zenbook A14 is placed on a harder surface such as a desk to avoid sounding muffled. There’s a decent mid-range, although they lack top-end precision and extension in the low end. You can use them for basic tasks, although I’d suggest utilising the headphone jack for any serious content consumption.

Performance

• New Qualcomm Snapdragon X chip
• Multi-core performance is underwhelming
• Especially snappy and generous SSD

The Zenbook A14 is quite intriguing from a performance standpoint in that it comes with one of Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X chips that were first announced at CES 2025. These are the new base model processors for use in these Arm-based Windows machines and sit alongside the more powerful Snapdragon X Plus and Elite chips.

For reference, the X Plus has 10 cores and the Elite has 12; the key difference with this new X model is that it only comes with 8. Therefore, it makes sense to expect slightly less performance in multi-threaded workloads as the base model chip has less to work with.

In single-core loads in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23, this chip keeps up with its more powerful brothers with scores in the right kind of ballpark, proving the Zenbook A14 to be fast enough. However, the multi-core scores in Geekbench 6 are around 20% slower than the competition. It’s worse in Cinebench, with 35% lower scores than the average X Plus or Elite laptop. In addition, the multicore Cinebench results are also 40% slower than the M3 MacBook Air.

The scores are in fact in line with the Asus ProArt PZ13, the brand’s own 2-in-1 device that performs that way due to its form factor. I can’t think of any reason why the Zenbook A14 would suffer from the same ailment. 

With this all in mind, quoting a load of benchmark tests doesn’t tell the full story. For most workloads, such as web browsing and working with Spotify in the background in my case, the Zenbook A14 performed admirably, remaining quiet and speedy. It’s only in extreme cases, such as with intensive video or photo editing where the multicore performance deficit is likely to be an issue.

The 16GB of RAM gives enough headroom for those tasks, while the 1TB SSD is pretty generous. It’s also easily one of the briskest SSDs we’ve tested in an ultrabook, with measured read and write speeds of 7001.63MB/s and 6073.20MB/s respectively.

Software

• Copilot+ PC offers AI smarts
• Reasonably clean Windows 11 install
• Some compatibility issues, being Arm-based

The Zenbook A14 is a Copilot+ PC, so comes with all of Microsoft’s advertised features and the perceivable benefits of AI. First and foremost is a Copilot key on the bottom row of the keyboard that acts as a ‘wake’ button for Microsoft’s AI assistant so you can ask it questions or whatever else.

In addition, there is also generative AI found in the Photos and Paint app to do things such as add filters to your photos or stylise any of your creations into an oil painting, watercolours or other art styles. I’m sure these are useful for someone, although I don’t necessarily have much utility for them.

Arguably the handiest part of all of this is the inclusion of Windows Studio effects for the Zenbook A14’s webcam. Here you can do everything from blur the background to enable auto framing to ensure you’re always in the frame on a call. It can even ensure you maintain eye contact even if you aren’t looking at the screen. That’s particularly eerie at first, but works in a similar way to Nvidia’s AI tools that I’ve experienced before in webcams including the Elgato Facecam MK.2

Microsoft is still touting its controversial Recall feature with these Copilot+ PCs, and even if it isn’t on the Zenbook A14 at the time of writing, it is labelled as ‘coming soon’. The idea of it is that it takes screenshots of your screen every few seconds so you can look back and remember things you’ve looked at, even if you haven’t manually bookmarked them or used the Snipping Tool to take a screenshot. Due to privacy concerns, it remains for Windows Insiders, and it seems to need some ironing out before it gets released into the wild.

The Windows 11 Home Install here is reasonably clean otherwise, coming with little in the way of unwanted anti-virus or bloatware, barring the customary McAfee popup that comes every now and again. There are a couple of Asus-specific apps though, such as GlideX which is where you can manage tasks such as casting or mirroring the Zenbook A14’s screen to other devices wirelessly, or transfer files across the same network. You can also enable remote access to a mobile device, too.

Being Arm-based, the Zenbook A14 also has the problem of having issues with some compatibility. This is because Windows is traditionally run on x86-based systems, so to work on Arm, apps have had to be translated through Microsoft’s Prism translation software. For the most part, I had little in the way of issues with compatibility in running a range of benchmark software, as well as Photoshop and similar apps.

However, 3D Mark Time Spy refused to run, erroring out with the fact that the chip doesn’t support SSSE3, which is strange as it’s worked on all the other Snapdragon X Elite and Plus-powered laptops we’ve tested.

In addition, the PCMark app doesn’t run fully, but that’s an issue we’ve seen on other Arm-based Windows systems. There have been reports that games such as Dirt 5 and some VPN apps also refuse to load from elsewhere, too.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 20 hours 47 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for two working days

Asus has talked up the Zenbook A14’s battery life a lot, with them officially quoting up to 32 hours of runtime with its 70Whr cell. That would make it one of the longest-running laptops ever made, if true.

In a video loop test with the laptop’s display at the requisite 150 nits, the Zenbook A14 lasted for 20 hours and 47 minutes. That easily makes it one of the best-performing laptops we’ve had in terms of its endurance, beating out key rivals such as the Dell XPS 13 (2024) and the MacBook Air M3. One of the only laptops it sits behind is the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, which lasted for just shy of two hours longer.

Charging speeds are also quite brisk with the 65W USB-C charger included taking 45 minutes to go from 0-50 percent, while going from zero to full took 92 minutes. That’s not bad at all.

Should you buy it?