ASUS Zenbook 14 Pro OLED (UX6404) review – creative class

ASUS has updated its premium Zenbook Pro line, designed for professional users, with the Zenbook 14 Pro OLED (UX6404). This is a relatively compact 14.5-inch laptop with an OLED screen, weighing 1.6 kg and packed with powerful components. What it has to offer and whether it’s really suitable for those who are demanding in terms of speed and task scheduling, I’ll tell you in this review.

Zenbook 14 Pro OLED specifications

Package of Zenbook 14 Pro OLED

The laptop comes with a fabric carrying case, a 200W power supply, and a USB Type A to Ethernet adapter.

As you can see, the package is not very extensive, especially when compared to ASUS gaming laptops, but at least the case is a pretty nice bonus for everyday use.

Design and usability

Zenbook 14 Pro OLED has a simple, even a bit austere design with a minimum number of details, which, of course, contrasts with the latest Zephyrus and Vivobook gaming models. Apparently, this is supposed to immediately give the user the feeling that they are looking at a utilitarian work tool that should not distract with textured drawings and hidden inscriptions. Well, if this was indeed the intention, the designers have done their job.

To begin with, the lid of the display unit in Zenbook 14 Pro OLED is completely matte, and on its right side is the new ASUS logo monogram, which constantly reminds me of the Starfleet emblem from the Star Trek series and movies. At the bottom of the lid is a subtle ASUS Zenbook inscription.

The laptop opens very easily with one hand, passing the famous “lid test”. But don’t let the ease and smoothness of the hinge fool you when you first meet it, because it perfectly holds the screen in all positions

The Zenbook 14 Pro OLED display has thin bezels on all four sides, and above it is a small block with a FullHD webcam and an infrared sensor for face recognition via Windows Hello.

The keyboard occupies almost the entire width of the base of the case, and immediately below it is a large touchpad with the new ASUS DialPad.

The island-type keys on the Zenbook 14 Pro OLED with 1.4 mm of travel proved to be pleasant for typing large texts. The distance of 19.05 from the center of one button to the center of another, chosen by ASUS engineers, is excellent for fast typing. The short but noticeable stroke with a small click provides a pleasant feeling when typing and working with the keyboard for a long time.

The touchpad in Zenbook 14 Pro OLED is also very pleasant to use, it is large enough, has a glass surface and a special hydrophobic coating that provides a pleasant tactile feel and allows your fingers to slide more easily on the surface of the touch panel.

In the upper left corner of the touchpad is the ASUS DialPad, a round manipulator that is part of the touch panel and is slightly recessed into its surface. It is activated by a special touch button located in the opposite right corner of the touchpad.

This isn’t the first time ASUS has used a similar control in its laptops for content creators, but it is the first time it has been given enhanced functionality.

By default, DialPad in Windows 11 can change the speaker volume and screen brightness, but in the ProArt Creator Hub utility, it can be customized for almost any installed program. In fact, any keyboard shortcuts that can perform certain functions in the software can be assigned to one of the 8 options supported by DialPad for a single program.

I tried to assign the mouse to resize an image in the Affinity Photo editor, which is triggered by Ctrl+Alt+I, and although there was a delay between the action on the DialPad and the reaction of the program interface, there was a delay. But in general, the manipulator coped with its task.

By default, the ProArt Creator Hub has presets for Microsoft office suite and professional editors from Adobe, including Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Lightroom Classic, Illustrator, and After Effects. For the latter, DialPad has extended support with the ability to bring certain tools, such as changing the brush size, to the manipulator wheel, or assign a group of similar functions, such as working with layers, at once.

In addition, ProArt Creator Hub also supports Microsoft’s Surface Dial mouse, so there will be no conflicts when working with it and DialPad simultaneously, and you can move the necessary options between them.

Overall, this time around, the ASUS DialPad’s capabilities are really broader and it has more functionality, so it can speed up and make your content creation work faster and easier, especially in Adobe programs.

Returning to the design of Zenbook 14 Pro OLED, it is worth noting that its body thickness is 17.9 mm, which is quite small considering the powerful components. In addition, the model weighs up to 1.6 kg, which allows you to comfortably carry it with you throughout the day in a backpack or bag. At the same time, the laptop case is made of aluminum alloy and has passed a total of 26 endurance tests according to the MIL-STD-810H military standard.

Ports

To connect peripherals to Zenbook 14 Pro OLED, you can use the connectors located on the sides of the case. On the left side you can find ASUS’s own connector for connecting a power supply, HDMI 2.1, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, an audio jack for connecting headphones and a headset.

On the right side is a slot for SD memory cards (UHS-II, 312 MB/s), one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, and one Thunderbolt 4 USB-C port.

As you can see, the model offers a fairly balanced set of ports, especially considering the presence of an SD card reader, which is convenient for professionals working with photos and videos.

Display

The laptop is equipped with a 14.5-inch OLED screen with an aspect ratio of 16:10, a resolution of 2880×1800 pixels, a peak brightness of 550 nits, a minimum brightness of 0.0005, a contrast ratio of 1000000:1, a response time of 0.2 ms, and a refresh rate of 120 Hz.

The Zenbook 14 Pro OLED display is capable of displaying 100% of the DCI-P3 color space, has VESA DisplayHDR 500 True Black and Pantone certification. The laptop uses a high-quality matrix with good calibration, which the user can change at will. The MyASUS utility has four display options: Native – very vivid colors; sRGB – standard color palette for working with the Internet; DCI-P3 – cinematic colors; Display P3 – wide color space close to natural colors.

In addition to these manufacturer-preset calibration options, the user can also change the color temperature and reduce the amount of blue, making the picture “warmer.”

All in all, the Zenbook 14 Pro OLED offers a positionally appropriate screen that’s perfect for working with photos, videos, graphics, and content creation.

Productivity

The laptop is based on the Intel platform, and in the case of the test version, it is the familiar Intel Core i9-13900H – a 14-core 10nm processor with 6 high-performance cores and 8 energy-saving cores, capable of overclocking to 5.4 GHz and having 24 MB of cache. This is a popular chip among gaming laptop manufacturers, and ASUS uses it in the ROG Zephyrus line, including the recently tested ROG Zephyrus M16. Therefore, looking ahead, we can note that this is a fairly fast processor.

The platform is complemented by 32 GB of DDR5-4800 RAM. Interestingly, 16 GB are soldered on the board, while the laptop also uses a SO-DIMM slot, meaning that in Zenbook 14 Pro OLED configurations with 16 GB of RAM, the user can eventually increase its volume to a maximum of 48 GB.

For data storage, the laptop uses an M.2 slot with a PCIe4.0x4 NVMe SSD, in the case of the test configuration it was a 1 TB storage with a high read speed of 7010 MB/s and write speed of 5272 MB/s.

In addition to integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics with 1 GB of memory, the Zenbook 14 Pro OLED justifies the Pro prefix with a discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 mobile graphics card with 8 GB of memory.

The laptop uses Wi-Fi 6E to connect to the Internet, and there is a wireless connection via Bluetooth 5.2 for accessories and headphones.

Given the positioning of the laptop, we have an appropriate platform with a good level of performance, which is confirmed by synthetic tests. In PCMark 10, the laptop scores 7,678 points, which is more than the 6,374 points of the Vivobook S15 OLED with the same processor but Intel Arc graphics, and much less than the 11,629 points of the gaming ROG Zephyrus M16 with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics.

When disconnected from the charger, the laptop’s performance level decreases because the built-in battery cannot provide the processor and graphics with the required level of power. This is clearly seen in the PCMark 10 results, in which the laptop scores 4,399 points when powered by the battery. And switching performance modes does not greatly affect this result.

In the new Cinebench 2024 test, the laptop scores 652 points in multi-threaded mode and 116 points in single-threaded mode. In the first case, the result of the Intel Core i9-13900H is less than that of the M1 Max, but in the second case, the Intel chip is slightly faster.

Cinebench 2024 also has a video card benchmark in which the GeForce RTX 4060 scores 7711 points, which is a good result.

In general, the system’s performance is sufficient for working with photos, videos, and not too complex rendering tasks. As for gaming, the capabilities of the Zenbook 14 Pro OLED platform are sufficient for modern projects, but, for example, if you take the same Starfield, then with a native resolution of 2880×1800 pixels with graphics settings on Ultra, there will be a drop below 30 FPS, while when you downgrade to High, you can get a stable 30-35 FPS. Reducing the resolution, of course, will increase FPS even more.

Overall, the laptop delivers a high level of performance for a relatively compact model, which is consistent with its positioning.

Heating and stable performance

A fast platform raises a natural concern about the heating of the Zenbook 14 Pro OLED case under load, but I should note right away that the laptop’s cooling system does its job. In this model, ASUS uses the IceCool Pro system, which consists of five heat pipes, two thin fans with 84 blades, and four vents.

In the standard AIDA64 system stability test, trotting appears only at the very beginning of the load, when the cooling fans have not yet had time to spin up.

Subsequently, the processor temperature drops and averages 68 degrees Celsius, with an average frequency of 2.5 GHz, which is a good result for a laptop.

The Zenbook 14 Pro OLED body heats up the most in the upper left corner above the keyboard, but the keys themselves, the touchpad and the area around it remain barely warm. The noise level of the cooling system reaches more than 50 dB, which is generally on par with ASUS gaming models.

In the 3DMark Speed Way stability test, the laptop shows a score of 99.3%, which indicates the efficiency of the cooling system not only for the processor but also for the video card.

Speakers

Аудіосистема Zenbook 14 Pro OLED складається з двох динаміків, що розташовані по боках нижньої частини корпусу ближче до користувача. Вони підтримують просторове аудіо Dolby Atmos та програмний підсилювач звуку ASUS Audio Booster.

The speakers sound really quite loud and with tangible volume, however, like most laptops, they lack lower frequencies, so you can count on comfortable video viewing, but not all genres of music will sound good.

Autonomy

The laptop has a built-in 76 Wh battery, which is enough for 8 hours of work in office mode. Accordingly, depending on the complexity of the tasks, the model’s autonomy may vary.

Zenbook 14 Pro OLED is charged by the bundled 200W power supply.

The laptop also supports charging via USB-C ports from 65 W, but in this case it takes longer and the user will not be able to get the full power of the system when connecting such a power supply.