Going to college? Get this laptop over a MacBook Pro: ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA) - 14" 3K OLED 32GB Copilot+ PC Review
- Mike - Accounting 4 Cycling
- Jul 17
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 22
“Ceraluminum” clad Laptop powerhouse MacBook Pro challenger for the classroom, field & office with essential ports & all day battery!
CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 RAM: 32GB Memory Storage: 1TB SSD Screen: 14” 16:10 3K OLED Model: UX5406SA-S14.U732G1T Color: Zumaia Gray MSRP: US$1599.99
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Disclaimer
This is NOT a sponsored post, but I did receive this as a member of Best Buy's Tech Insider Program. As a member of this invitation-only program, I am provided products for the purpose of writing honest, unbiased reviews. I did not purchase this product.
Striking Design, Laptop or Art?
ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA-S14.U732G1T) offers an exceptional experience for those looking for an all-day Windows laptop that goes head-to-head with the MacBook Pro! The exterior is made with “Ceraluminum” a ceramic-aluminum composite material that adds strength, is lightweight, helps cool the internal components, stays cool to the touch, and looks cool! Especially with the silver metallic inlays that line across the lid! ASUS nailed the styling on this one, giving the Zenbook S 14 a clean, professional look while still being unique and stylish. The Ceraluminum finish is also one of the most fingerprint resistant finishes I’ve tested on a laptop in ages! Even fresh off a run on a hot day it barely showed any smudges, and all just evaporated or easily wiped away! A 16:10 3K 120Hz OLED screen (2880x1800) presents itself to you after opening the lid, as well as the excellent backlit keyboard, the lid itself is nicely balanced so you can open it with just one finger.
Powerful Laptop for the Power User
In terms of performance: the Intel Core Ultra 7 Series 2 258V with a base clock of 1.6GHz and a boost up to 4.8GHz brings a lot of brains and brawn to the table with 8 cores and threads, enough to take on heavy lifting in a rigorous graduate school program, law school, or data processing (and email & web) intensive professional fields like law, accounting, finance, engineering, and others. The 32GBs of RAM soldered to the chip package is ultrafast at 8533 MT/s and ready to help with that heavy lifting (and web intensive work/research), paired with a replaceable 1TB NVMe Gen 4x4 2280 m.2 SSD for a large amount of storage and the flexibility to expand it later. At 72Wh, the battery is enormous for this size laptop and will help push you through all-day use under heavy workloads and brighter screens, multiple days using the suggested lower power modes, and most of the work week using low-power mode! Though, the last one comes with a lot of compromises to get up to 24 hours of total batter life, like very dark screen, minimal wireless use, never touching Copilot AI, and a few others. I tried it, ended day 3 of only battery on low-power mode, and caved because I need more than one tab open at a time! Copilot AI is definitely present on here… for better or worse. I happen to be a fan of most things Copilot, but I know there are many who are not. For those who don’t like it, you can disable it and remap the key to whatever you’d like, a wonderful part of Windows! The Zenbook S 14 features an excellent, large trackpad and tactile chicklet keyboard, and a 16:10 aspect screen!
Battery & USB for the Power User!
Either way, this laptop easily brings all of those tools to your fingertips and with a battery life that I was able to consistently get to 10 hours of moderate to heavy usage before hitting the 10% Power Save mode warning. I had the screen at about 50-75% brightness and the power mode set to balanced for my daily driving. My video streaming test yielded very good results, as well, the laptop shutting down after listening to me ramble for 11.5 hours watching my YouTube at 1080p60, streamed over WiFi, with the speakers turned off, keyboard backlight on auto (stayed on), and the screen brightness (accidentally) set to 75%, instead of my usual 50%. So, I ran it again at 50% and forgot to set the power mode to Best Power Efficiency, 14.5 hours of run time. I'll likely run another run down test before I decide to sell the thing or see if I can fry an egg on the "Ceraluminum" lid on one of our hot summer days coming up, but until then, I'm happy with saying this laptop will easily get you through a full day of classes or a long work day (somehow) without a power cord. The Intel Core Ultra 7 Series 2 CPU is nice and efficient, 8 cores/8 threads is a good balance for everyday usage and even some light gaming without draining too much precious battery or pulling too much from the wall, the whole laptop works from the included 65-watt USB-C charger, or a compatible USB-C that can push 18 or more watts to it, though you'll get a warning that you might drain your battery with a weak charger. The two Thunderbolt 4, full size HDMI 2.1, Micro-SD card, and 3.5mm audio ports on the left, and a USB 3.2 Type-A on the right for 3 total USB ports is an amazing mix of I/O for such a thin laptop! On the inside, the 1 TB Gen 4x4 NVMe SSD is a standard m.2 2280 slot and user replaceable, as is the wireless chip!
Pros:
GORGEOUS 3K OLED screen!
16:10 aspect ratio.
Ceraluminum chassis, it’s just cool in all the ways!
Amazing battery life.
I/O Options – Full size HDMI & USB-A are winners!
Daily use performance under heavy business use, would handle almost anything a school would throw at it.
Great sounding speakers.
Weight, size, single finger lid openability.
Ceraluminum finish is VERY fingerprint and smudge resistant!
Cons:
Intel Arc Graphics are still just onboard graphics.
Low & medium worked well, better than old Intel graphics!
No expandable RAM (common for ultrabooks, still sad)
Possibly the Ceraluminum in very cold temperatures, even in a case? It should be fine based on ASUS’s specs.
Price.
Price again, but with a 😊.
Final thoughts & how to buy
Overall, this laptop is incredible! It’s not built to be Junior’s first laptop or something you replace in a year because the IT administrator & CFO couldn’t agree on why you should spend more than $400 on company laptops (for smaller company’s its not uncommon to buy “off the shelf, but in bulk orders”), this is the one you buy because Junior is going into a rigorous program that will be using software that will not work on MacOS and you want something built to take a beating, perform at a high level, make the movies/shows/videos look great on screen, do all of this while lasting all day, and look good doing it! The MSRP is a little on the higher end, but so is this laptop. Its direct competition are creator laptops with dedicated GPUs, gaming laptops, MacBook Pros, and others that you buy with a purpose, this is one of those laptops. The ASUS Zenbook S 14’s purpose is ultralightweight, high performance, excellent looks, long battery life, gorgeous screen that’s oriented toward documents, ERPs & spreadsheets, but when it comes to gaming and video editing, it’ll take a little longer or lower graphics settings.
I highly recommend this machine to those who are about to enter a demanding college program that you know you’ll need a powerful machine with great battery life, likely something in business, nursing, advanced medical, STEM, law, etc. or a business professional at a smaller firm that’s looking to upgrade your aging fleet of laptops to something that can run semi-advanced modeling (semi because there are still only 8 cores/8-threads… 8 items processing at a time) and operate the rest of your business tasks without worry of running out of storage or processing memory!
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