ASUS Zenbook 14X OLED (UX3404) laptop review

ASUS continues the active development of its line of compact laptops with OLED screens, one of the latest additions of which is the Zenbook 14X OLED (UX3404) model. The novelty is distinguished by an updated design and is equipped with a more powerful Intel Core i7-13700H processor. In this review, I will tell you what else it can offer users.

Zenbook 14X OLED (UX3404) specifications

Package contents

The laptop comes with a 65 W power supply unit, a USB-A to Ethernet adapter if you need a wired connection to the Internet or a local network, and also with a case for transportation. In general, as for modern realities, the package contents turned out to be good.

Design and materials

Zenbook 14X OLED (UX3404) is a 14.5-inch laptop, which, thanks to the thin screen frames, can be confused with a 13.3-inch model. However, the greater thickness reveals a more powerful configuration in it, which, in addition to the H-series processor from Intel, can also have discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 graphics. The test laptop had built-in graphics, but this does not affect the design of the model in any way, and it is generally pleasant.

ASUS uses a classic design with a hinge that opens the screen 180 degrees and slightly raises the keyboard, creating an ergonomic tilt for more comfortable typing.

The cover of the Zenbook 14X OLED display unit has an updated design with straight lines that form a partial ASUS logo. Visually, it is quite an interesting solution, which has already been seen in past models of the company, but the most important thing here is execution. The fact is that the model has two versions of different colors – dark gray Inkwell Gray and beige Sandstone Beige, which differ in the coating of the cover of the display unit.

The body of both versions is made of anodized aluminum alloy, but the beige model has an additional coating of plasma ceramization on the display cover, which is applied using the process of plasma electrolytic oxidation. This process is a new surface treatment and creates a thick, dense metal oxide coating that protects against fading and wear, as well as fingerprint resistance.

When touched, it provides the feeling of a ceramic matte coating. As if the screen cover is made of stone.

In general, with the release of the Zenbook 14X OLED, ASUS continues to update the design of this line, but the model itself stands out a little from it in terms of positioning because, in terms of characteristics and weight (1.5 kg), it is closer to the Pro models.

Ports

The laptop’s ports are spaced along the sides. On the right, you can find HDMI 2.1, a combined 3.5 mm audio jack, and two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C.

On the left is a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A.

In general, this number of ports is enough for comfortable work, but it is not very clear why this model does not have a slot for microSD cards, which is, for example, in the formally simpler Zenbook 14 OLED. After all, a laptop with a more powerful processor and a modification with a discrete video card is more suitable for working with photos and videos than a compact model for office work.

Display

The company ASUS has been transferring its laptops above the middle price segment to OLED panels for some time, and the Zenbook 14X OLED, as you can easily guess from the name, was no exception. The model received a 14.5-inch OLED screen with a resolution of 2880×1800 pixels, an aspect ratio of 16:10 and a refresh rate of 120 Hz.

The Zenbook 14X OLED display supports a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1, a peak brightness of up to 600 nits, coverage of 100% of the DCI-P3 color space and has VESA DisplayHDR 600 True Black and Pantone Validated certifications.

Factory calibration of the matrix is really done at a high level, while the color temperature can be adjusted manually from 5000K to 6600K. In general, the Splendid software in the proprietary MyASUS utility allows you to adjust the color transfer of the screen by choosing preset profiles of the color gamut, or by adjusting the temperature and the level of blue radiation.

Right here in MyASUS, you can enable options traditional for OLED models from ASUS to extend the duration of the display. As you know, matrixes on organic LEDs can burn out over time, especially if they constantly show a static image.

In modern OLED panels, this means many years of operation, but additional protection never hurts. For him, ASUS uses several options that have proven their effectiveness. This is an imperceptible shift of pixels to the user to prevent the constant display of a static picture, adding transparency to the Windows taskbar, its automatic hiding, and a special screen saver that starts itself after 30 minutes of inactivity to refresh the pixels.

Platform and performance

The test laptop is built on an Intel platform using a processor Core i7-13700H. This is a 14-core chip with 6 powerful and 8 energy-saving cores, manufactured according to an improved 10-nanometer technical process, which the company calls Intel 7. The letter H in the name of the processor indicates a higher level of power, the TDP of this chip is from 35 W, and its maximum frequency reaches 5 GHz.

I got a version of the laptop without discrete graphics, which, let me remind you, can be an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050, so all the graphics load falls on the built-in Intel Iris Xe.

The amount of RAM in the test model was 16 GB LPDDR5 4800 MHz.

And for data storage, a PCIe4.0 x4 NVMe M.2 drive with a capacity of 1 TB was used, which provided a read speed of 4687 MB/s and a write speed of 3619 MB/s.

In the PCMark and 3DMark tests, the laptop shows quite good results for a relatively compact model.

What can be said in general about the performance of the Zenbook 14X OLED? Not so long ago, we had a Zenbook 14 OLED on test with a similar design and characteristics, but with a less powerful processor of the previous generation. It’s worth noting here that it’s still a pretty fast mobile computer that’s capable of handling any office task. However, the Zenbook 14X OLED is significantly faster, even with integrated graphics.

Thus, the laptop provides a higher level of performance, both in basic tasks and in more complex tasks, for example, during photo or video processing. But here it is worth noting that the built-in graphics still do not allow to fully reveal the potential of the laptop.

A configuration with a discrete video card is a more rational purchase because it allows you to expand the capabilities of the model and work more comfortably with tasks that require graphics acceleration. It is all the more logical if you choose a laptop not just for working in the browser and messengers, but you need a really fast system, which is generally the Zenbook 14X OLED.

Among other capabilities of the laptop platform, it is worth mentioning the support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 wireless modules.

Heating and stability of operation

Given the powerful platform, the Zenbook 14X OLED uses an active cooling system with two thin fans and a warm air outlet on the left side of the case. It works quite quietly and efficiently.

In the stress test of the AIDA64 system under the maximum load of the processor, a small throttling appears only at the very beginning of the test, when the fans of the cooling system just start to spin up. In the future, the temperature of the processor decreases and remains below 80 degrees Celsius. The average frequency is kept at the level of 2.5 GHz, which is a good indicator.

The laptop body does not heat up noticeably under load, you may not even understand that the processor is loaded at 100% because all the surfaces touched by the palms and fingers while working with the touchpad and keyboard remain barely warm.

Keyboard and touchpad

The laptop is equipped with a comfortable island-type keyboard with a key travel of 1.4 mm and a slightly curved shape of the buttons, which provides higher stability during typing. Thanks to this and the good spacing of the keys (the distance from the middle of the button to the middle of the adjacent button is 19.05 mm), the Zenbook 14X OLED is comfortable to type large volumes of text.

The glass touchpad of the laptop received a hydrophobic and PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) coating, and as ASUS claims, its surface should remain as smooth even after 10,000 swipes. Be that as it may, the touchpad is really convenient to use, thanks to its size and accurate determination of the placement of fingers, it easily replaces a mouse.

In the Zenbook 14X OLED touchpad, you can additionally enable the NumberPad 2.0 touch digital keyboard, its activation key is located in the upper right corner, and in the left – its brightness adjustment. In the Zenbook 14 OLED, which I had for review not so long ago, I kept accidentally turning on the numeric keypad, but this did not happen in the new model. Maybe it’s a slightly wider case, or the button’s sensitivity is lower, whatever, but this time I didn’t completely turn off the numeric keypad, which can be done in the MyASUS utility.

Webcam and facial recognition

The laptop uses a Full HD webcam, the quality of which will be sufficient for video calls.

Through the MyASUS application, you can also apply additional effects to the camera image, such as blurring the background or highlighting the face.

In addition to the webcam, the Zenbook 14X OLED also uses an infrared sensor for the facial recognition system, which allows you to log into your Windows 11 account through the Windows Hello feature.

Audio

On the bottom panel of the laptop there are two external speakers that provide Zenbook 14X OLED stereo sound. They are loud and spacious enough to comfortably watch videos. For listening to music, the speakers are a little lacking in low frequencies.

Battery life

The laptop has a built-in 70 Wh battery, which is enough for almost 8 hours of work with the browser, documents, mail, and messengers. Accordingly, with a greater load, the battery life will decrease. This is confirmed by the PCMark 10 test, in which the Zenbook 14X OLED lasted more than 7 hours.

The test version of the laptop was charged through the USB Type-C port from a relatively compact 90 W power supply.

However, the manufacturer equips the modification with discrete graphics with a slightly more powerful 100 W power supply.