It’s March 2025. I went to Singapore to attend the Snapdragon SEA Summit that revolves around the Snapdragon X platform – and to my surprise, I won the Kahoot quiz and got myself the ASUS Zenbook A14 UX3407QA – a supremely lightweight laptop, promises superbly long battery life, and is also powered by the Snapdragon X chipset.
It’s so lightweight that I handcarried the entire laptop box, brand new and sealed, from the Singapore Changi Airport all the way back home. I never realized that I never complained about the weight at all because it is indeed supremely lightweight. Then carried it to the studio to film an unboxing – which I immediately dropped the entire box.
After unboxing, the only thing that I am curious about is how ASUS managed to pack so much into a 14-inch laptop weighing less than a kilogram. So, let’s talk about this laptop.
Design
Let’s first talk about the design. For this generation of laptops, ASUS opted for a different look. It’s available in both Zabriskie Beige and Iceland Gray, which is what we have here. The ASUS 30th Anniversary Logo that looks like something out of Star Trek is now gone – and we only have this reflective ASUS Zenbook wording on the lid. The only remnant of the 30th anniversary logo is at the top right corner of the keyboard.
The overall look of this laptop though, is quite similar to the new MacBook Air designs as there is a notch at the front to let you open the laptop screen easily.
Screen
And now, let’s talk about the screen. There are two variants of this laptop. The lower-end one uses an IPS LCD screen, whereby the higher-end version – which is the one we have, has an OLED screen. Both variants are using a 1920×1200 pixel screen with up to only 60Hz refresh rate – and it looks absolutely great.
The maximum brightness is at 380 nits and it also has a superbly great color gamut coverage of nearly 100% of both sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts. It even covers 97% of Adobe RGB color gamut!
I do think that this is a great screen, though the resolution is a bit disappointing as many other ASUS Zenbook screens are at least 2.8K in resolution.
At least we have a Windows Hello camera at the top of the screen – so that’s great.
Keyboard and trackpad
The keyboard and trackpad are also good. The keyboard itself is super bouncy but is lightweight and has a rather low actuation force. The travel distance is okay, and that makes the entire typing experience very fun and enjoyable. I even typed this entire script using the laptop!
There’s also backlight and it can automatically adjust its brightness according to the environment too.
As for the trackpad, it’s huge. There’s minimal gap between the edge of the keyboard and the laptop, and also responsive. For a Windows laptop trackpad, I’d say this is a good.
We still have the Smart Gestures where we can swipe at the edges of the trackpad to entire change the brightness, volume, seek across videos, or launch the ASUS ScreenXpert utility.
Just as a quick summary, the ScreenXpert utility is like a window manager and helps you snap windows across different areas of the screen. This is definitely more flexible than what Windows 11 has.
Performance
Now, it’s time to talk about the performance. The specs of the ASUS Zenbook A14 UX3407 varies from country to country – and our unit is from Singapore, so we only have:
- Snapdragon X X1-26-100
- 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM at 8448MT/s
- 1TB of NVMe SSD by Micron with the model number MTFDKBA1T0QGN
- 70Wh battery capacity.
To have a look at all the games ran using this ASUS Zenbook A14 UX3407 with the Snapdragon X chip, watch our gaming test video down below. In summary, least run games without constantly crashing. For example, Genshin Impact can now be launched consistently, doesn’t have any wrongly-rendered texture packs or lighting, and it just runs fine in terms of compatibility. Though the Snapdragon X X1-26-100 just can’t hold up.
Video editing is a no-go on this laptop, unfortunately. With our usual 1080p 60fps videos, the laptop struggles to even have a smooth playback, let alone doing cuts and scrubbing through the footages. This is utterly disappointing as the M1 MacBook Air manages to breeze through this workload while being about 4 years old and also passively cooled.
Battery life
Now, I can’t really tell how much power the Snapdragon X chip actually consumes since HWinfo just doesn’t work – I can tell you that the 70Wh battery can last me through more than a day’s usage of my work. It’s seriously astonishing.
Upgradability
One question – is the ASUS Zenbook A14 UX3407 upgradable? Well, only the M.2 SSD that can be swapped out. Everything else is soldered onto the motherboard and I already expected that. I guess this is better than the MacBooks as their SSD is soldered onto the motherboard.
A look under the hood
Since we’re here, I want to highlight some of the unusual designs of the ASUS Zenbook A14. The bottom cover itself has thick thermal pads on these chips, which I think are VRMs, though I can’t confirm since I can’t read anything on those chips themselves.
The fans are what piqued my interest. There are two fans – the first fan that works as usual, just take in air from the bottom and then exhaust it to the back. The second fan that is aimed towards the first fan. I’m not sure if this is a better airflow path since we don’t have anything else to compare with and HWinfo still doesn’t work on this laptop.
Ports
As a quick mention, the ports available on the Zenbook A14 is pretty standard for a Zenbook. It has a HDMI 2.1 TMDS – which is basically a HDMI 2.0 port – double USB-C 4.0 40Gb/s ports, a 3.5mm combo audio jack, and another USB 3 Type-A 10Gb/s port on the other side.
Should you buy the ASUS Zenbook A14 UX3407?
Now then, should you buy this laptop? Honestly, I’m really liking the build of this laptop. It’s superbly lightweight, has nice colors, and also magnificent battery life. Plus, the fans barely run too – even though I am using it in the full fan speed mode.
The price for the specs as shown here is actually pretty enticing. At least most apps are running natively on Arm or translated properly to Arm architecture codes.
The Zenbook A14 UX3407 is a great choice – and the price is also rather enticing. Just we’ll have to fork out an extra 20% of money to get an OLED screen – which I highly recommend to get. Still, I really do suggest you know what you’re getting into before purchasing a Snapdragon laptop.
I honestly might take up the challenge to use this laptop as my daily driver to see what’s the experience really like. If you want more information – click here.
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
Like our Facebook Page here at NasiLemakTech.com for more news and in-depth reviews! Also, join our Facebook Group for insightful information and memes!
Subscribe to our YouTube channel too!
