The latest buzzworthy features to appear in the venerable Asus ZenBook 13 line of ultraportable laptops are an OLED screen and the option for one of AMD’s new Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. These components take our latest test unit to a whole new level for prospective buyers contemplating using a compact notebook for multimedia content creation. (Models start at $750; Asus had not yet set firm pricing for our test model, which is coming to the US later in May, but it should be close to $1,000.) With exceptional contrast and color accuracy, not to mention outstanding performance from the Ryzen 7 5800U processor, the ZenBook 13 can serve as a capable video-editing platform that weighs just 2.5 pounds. It’s a groundbreaking achievement, even if mainstream users will arguably be better off with the Editors’ Choice-award-winning Dell XPS 13 or Apple MacBook Air.
ZenBook 13, Any Way You Want It
Like many flagship laptops, the ZenBook 13 comes in oodles of configurations, identified by esoteric model numbers. The latest versions, rolling out this spring, offer OLED displays and your choice of the latest Intel or AMD silicon. The configuration of our test unit (model UM325SA) includes a 13.3-inch, full HD OLED screen, the eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 5800U, 16GB of memory, and a 1TB solid-state drive. Many other configurations are available with Core i5, Core i7, and Ryzen 5 chips as well as various memory and storage amounts. We recently tested an Intel version with one of the latest “Tiger Lake” processors.
Some of these configurations, including our review unit, aren’t available to order quite yet, but Asus says it plans to launch them by the end of the month. Not all prices have been announced; the company says models will start at a reasonable $750 and its website lists a slightly slower Ryzen 7 5700U system for $899.99, with models climbing to $1,000.
Currently, Asus is offering only one display option, a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel OLED panel. The OLED screen offers stunning colors, and unless you care a lot about CPU performance (which the ZenBook 13 also has in spades), it’s arguably the laptop’s main attraction. As soon as I powered the laptop on, I could immediately tell that the OLED panel is superior in some ways to the tried-and-true IPS displays that most of the ZenBook 13’s competitors offer.
The main difference is the improved contrast ratio. At 1,000,000:1, this ZenBook’s screen offers many times the contrast of a typical LED panel like the one on the XPS 13, which supports a 1,500:1 ratio. The increased contrast makes for inkier blacks and richer colors. Asus says the ZenBook 13 can display the entire DCI-P3 color gamut and has VESA DisplayHDR True Black certification, which could appeal to professionals who intend to use this machine for super-accurate color correction in their digital art creations.
While OLED is certainly a leap forward in some respects, it’s no longer a cutting-edge technology. It’s now available in a host of other Windows laptops, and Dell will soon offer it as an option for the XPS 13. It also has some significant limitations. The version Asus uses lacks any form of touch support, and you can’t get higher than 1080p resolution. Those looking to interact with Windows via a digital stylus or enjoy the crisper text of a 4K screen will need to look elsewhere.
Svelte and Stylish
The ZenBook 13 is extraordinarily stylish and sleek for such a capable machine. Its 2.5-pound weight is impressive even compared with the MacBook Air, Apple’s lightest laptop at 2.8 pounds. The system measures 0.54 by 12 by 8 inches (HWD), roughly the same as the XPS 13. The MacBook Air is slightly thicker at 0.63 by 12 by 8.4 inches.
After using the ZenBook 13 for a few days, I noticed that it doesn’t feel quite as solid as its Apple and Dell competitors. There’s some slight flex in the keyboard deck, and the touchpad hinge is slightly loose, producing a rattling sound when you drag your finger across it. Those deficiencies aside, the ZenBook 13 certainly doesn’t feel cheap, and Asus says it’s sturdy enough to meet the shock, vibration, altitude, and temperature extremes of MIL-STD 810H testing.
The chassis and display lid of our ZenBook 13 tester are constructed from diamond-cut aluminum alloy and finished in a Pine Gray color scheme. It’s darker than Apple’s Space Gray color option, but significantly lighter than the black finish of the Razer Blade Stealth. If you’d rather go with an even brighter color, you can select the Lilac Mist scheme. It’s essentially bright silver, and although I haven’t seen it in person, I’d probably choose it over the gray of our review unit.
Lift the Lid to Type in Comfort
When you open the ZenBook 13’s lid, the hinge tilts downward to angle the keyboard slightly toward you. You can open the hinge to a maximum of 150 degrees—it doesn’t fold all the way flat—which results in a 3-degree keyboard tilt. In addition to improving typing ergonomics, Asus notes that the tilt increases the ventilation space under the chassis for improved heat dissipation. Despite the additional room for heat to escape, the ZenBook 13’s cooling fan is still clearly audible. I heard it spool up even when the laptop was idle or I was viewing a browser window with a single tab, scenarios in which the MacBook Air is silent since it has no need for a cooling fan.
Whether or not you find a tilted keyboard to your liking, you might take issue with the ZenBook 13’s key layout. The key switches are comfortable enough, with excellent stability and 1.4mm of travel, which is more than you get on the XPS 13. However, the keys are not full-sized. They’re vertically squashed and therefore have a slightly rectangular shape, which could reduce your typing accuracy if you have large hands and are used to a conventional keyboard with square keys.
The touchpad’s loose hinge notwithstanding, I found tapping and clicking to be fairly accurate. I appreciate the pad’s large size, even more useful since the OLED version of the ZenBook 13 doesn’t offer a touch screen for a second means of input. Unlike some other ZenBook and VivoBook laptops, the ZenBook 13 lacks the futuristic ScreenPad, so you don’t get a second screen in the touchpad. You do get a nifty calculator function, however, with virtual buttons embedded in the pad that light up when you press the upper right corner.
Asus touchpads have had these sort of bonus features for a while now, and using them to their full potential does come with a bit of a learning curve. For example, I always assumed that when you activate the calculator function, you can’t easily use the touchpad to move the cursor. But the pad can in fact detect finger swipes as cursor movements even when the calculator is activated. The ZenBook 13 lacks a fingerprint reader, but it does have a tiny webcam mounted in the incredibly thin upper display bezel. The camera includes IR sensors to allow you to log into Windows Hello using face recognition. Asus says the system has an improved algorithm for face detection that results in sharper images and more accurate white balance. In my testing, however, the webcam’s video appeared slightly noisy even in a brightly lit room.
Where’s the Headphone Jack?
The input/output selection of the ZenBook 13 is impressive for such a small laptop. You’ll find two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports (either of which can accept the USB-C power adapter), one USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, a full-size HDMI 2.1 port, and a microSD card reader. Oddly, there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack, but you might not need one if you have Bluetooth wireless headphones, and you can use a USB-C-to-3.5mm dongle if you don’t.
The lack of USB4 and Thunderbolt support is slightly disappointing. But overall, the cornucopia of available ports puts the MacBook Air and the XPS 13 to shame. Both of those laptops include a headphone jack, but they lack HDMI or USB-A ports.
Wireless connections include dual-band Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and Bluetooth 5.0. Asus notes that in order to achieve the ZenBook 13’s extremely thin bezels and 88% screen-to-body ratio, it had to place the wireless antennas under the keyboard, where they can potentially experience increased interference from the USB ports. To thwart this interference, Asus added electromagnetic filters around the USB ports. I experienced no issues connecting to Wi-Fi networks in my testing.
The ZenBook 13’s audio quality is average for a thin ultraportable. A dual-channel smart amplifier drives two stereo speakers, while noise-cancelling algorithms process the input from the microphone to help isolate and filter out background noise during video calls.
Testing the Latest ZenBook 13: Groundbreaking Performance From a Ryzen 7
Thanks to the powerful fifth-generation Ryzen 7 processor in our review unit, computing performance is excellent. This is a multithreaded chip, which means that its eight cores can handle 16 software instruction threads at once. Add a 4.4GHz maximum boost clock speed and robust Radeon integrated graphics, and the ZenBook 13 punches far above its weight and price when it comes to handling intensive workflows. (See more about how we test laptops.)You can see how the ZenBook 13’s specs stack up against those of a few rival systems in the table below. In addition to the MacBook Air, the Dell XPS 13, and the Blade Stealth, I’ve also included the Intel version of the ZenBook 13 that we tested late last year.
Overall, performance is exemplary. The AMD ZenBook 13 started things off with a bang by posting a score of more than 6,000 points in the PCMark 10 productivity benchmark, which simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. Scores above 5,000 are rare, and anything above 4,000 is an excellent result.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. The ZenBook 13 also performed superbly here, though it didn’t stand out since today’s speedy SSDs tend to yield similar scores.
Based on the PCMark 10 score, you should be expecting great things from the ZenBook 13’s eight-core processor when it comes to more intensive tasks like media creation and editing. You won’t be disappointed. The laptop took just eight minutes to convert a 12-minute clip of 4K video to 1080p using the Handbrake app.
It was also in a league of its own when it came to 3D rendering in the Cinebench R15 benchmark. The Apple M1-powered MacBook Air was the next closest competitor, but it was nearly a third slower. This test is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads, stressing the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image.
The ZenBook 13 is also excellent—though not in a class by itself—for image-editing workflows, if the results of our Adobe Photoshop test are any indication. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image, timing each operation and adding up the total. The ZenBook 13 finished the job in just over two minutes. That’s impressive, though not much quicker than the Intel version.
Gaming Isn’t Its Strong Suit
As good as its everyday and multimedia performance is, the ZenBook 13 isn’t a gaming powerhouse. Its AMD Radeon integrated graphics perform essentially the same as Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics, found in the other Asus ultraportable and the XPS 13. The Blade Stealth boasts a more powerful discrete GPU from Nvidia, so it outclassed its Windows competitors in our 3DMark and Superposition gaming simulations.
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but the former is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs while the latter is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.
Then there’s our Unigine Superposition test…
Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s rendered in the company’s eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario for a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess.
A Long-Lasting Contender
Lasting for more than 17 hours in our battery rundown test, the AMD ZenBook 13 should get you through a full day of light work without visiting a power outlet. Our battery test involves looping a locally stored 720p video with Wi-Fi turned off, screen brightness set at 50%, and volume set at 100% until the system conks out. It’s a fairly forgiving test, and the ZenBook 13 couldn’t match the MacBook Air’s amazing stamina, but it’s still the best of the Windows laptops here.
While the Dell XPS 13 and Apple MacBook Air remain our Editors’ Choice winners in the premium ultraportable category, the latest ZenBook 13 is worth a look for its exemplary computing performance. Its OLED screen is nice, too, although the lack of touch support holds it back somewhat. Overall, the Ryzen 7-based ZenBook 13 is best if you crave the absolute best raw CPU performance in the thinnest and lightest chassis available, and are willing to overlook quirks like a cramped keyboard and the lack of a touch screen.
