I think this is one of the most unique standard edition laptops made by ASUS that I’ve gotten the privilege to use. This is the ASUS Zenbook 14X OLED UX3404 and it is beautiful, powerful, and most importantly – has powerful hardware and an amazing screen.
So, let’s get into it.
This laptop is available in two different colors – the Inkwell Black and Sandstone Beige and it’s obvious which one we have. Now, this color is special because ASUS did a special coating on it called plasma ceramization to create a ceramic-like finish. It feels good to the touch, and absolutely amazing to look at especially with that new ASUS logo breaking up what would otherwise look monotonous.
Opening up the lid, I want to look focus on the keyboard deck first. It’s using the same beige but breaks up the monotony by using a different shade of beige. The keyboard – I do feel is a little stiffer to press on, but it feels very springy to type on and we have quite a lot of travel distance.
The keycaps also feel different from the Zenbook 14 Flip OLED that we reviewed recently, by the way. Not sure how to describe it – but I like the texture on this laptop more.
Since we’re here, let’s also quickly talk about the trackpad. It’s a good trackpad as it tracks well, feels nice to glide my finger across, and the palm rejection is good. We have the Number Pad feature here – so if you want to use it, it’s here.
Now, the screen. It has a slightly larger-than-standard size of 14.5-inch OLED screen with 2880×1800 pixels in resolution – that means 16:10 aspect ratio – and at 120Hz. This screen is so great that our colorimeter reports virtually 100% for both sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts with a reasonable maximum ΔE number.
What surprised me the most is the 120Hz refresh rate. I mean, it’s great that we can use a high refresh rate screen on a laptop and I can scroll smoothly, but is it necessary? Or the better question to ask is – can the laptop churn out that many frames? Well, that depends on what games you’re playing.
With this list of specs, it should be powerful enough to play quite a lot of games even without a discrete GPU. We also have to press Fn+F to change to the performance mode fan profile to get the best performance out of this laptop.
I also tried Genshin Impact but this game caps off at 60fps maximum. So, playing it at the lowest graphical settings, we can get about 50fps average consistently and I had a great time playing the game using this laptop.
To keep the Core i7-13700H temperature in check, this laptop actually has two heatsinks and two vents, located here. But once the fan speed goes high, the noise level is insanely high. It’s like a tornado up in here – but we’re still easily reaching above 80°C.
Since we already opened the back panel, we can see that there are no upgrades that we can do. We can only swap out the SSD but everything else is soldered onto the motherboard.
Now, we’ll also have to talk about the battery life. That 70Wh battery has to work extra hard to keep up with the Core i7-13700H processor and also the high-resolution OLED screen. To save even more battery, the laptop automatically tunes down to 60Hz when you unplug from the charger – that’s why the screen goes black for a second.
Using this laptop at 50% brightness at the whisper fan speed mode, we can get around 4-5 hours and that’s actually quite decent. However, since this is an OLED screen, the battery life is directly related to the screen brightness and what we’re viewing. If we look at more dark stuff – literally, not figuratively – then it’ll save a lot more battery.
Let’s not forget about the ports – we have a single USB 3 Type-A port at the left, and everything else – including an audio jack – is located on the right side. I do wish one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports is on the left side so I can plug in my high-speed ports to the left too. Currently, if I want to charge the laptop, it’ll be uncomfortable if I use an external mouse too. Same goes for the audio jack.
I also tried playing games using the included charger and using my own Ugreen 100W GaN charger – and it works the same. That’s great news for those who never want to take out the charger when we’re using it at home.
We do have Windows Hello as well – so you can log in as quickly as possible. Nice feature to have.
Should you buy the ASUS Zenbook 14X OLED UX3404?
And finally, the price. This laptop is priced at a whopping RM5,999 for this exact configuration and I think that it is indeed expensive. There is another Core i5-13500H version that has the same 16GB RAM but half the storage, is priced at RM4,999 only – which I think is a more reasonable price but doesn’t have the ceramic-like finish.
But, if you want to be a little more baller – then you can spend RM6,999 for the Core i9-13900H version too. You’ll get a lot more CPU power on paper, but I think it’ll probably thermal throttle very quickly. I do think that if you’re doing MATLAB or similar types of simulation, having a Core i9 will be a big boon for you.
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