Asus Zenbook A14 Review: The Best Copilot Plus PC So Far

The Asus Zenbook A14 turned heads at CES 2025 for its ultralight yet surprisingly rigid Ceraluminum chassis and a claim of 30 hours (!) of battery life despite featuring an OLED display that typically consumes battery resources at a greater clip than an LCD panel. After weighing, benchmarking and banging on the Zenbook A14, we are ready to give it another award. It won a Best of CES Award for best laptop and can now call itself a CNET Editors’ Choice award winner. 

Built around an Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor, the Zenbook A14 is the lightest Copilot Plus PC I’ve tested and the second-longest running. Its performance is fine for general use, but it’s definitely a step or two behind other Copilot Plus PCs with Snapdragon X Plus or Elite CPUs and those with Intel Core Ultra 200 series chips. And while the overall design is excellent, the touchpad and speakers are merely average for an ultraportable. 

Nitpicks aside, you won’t find another 14-inch OLED laptop that weighs less than 2.2 pounds with a battery life of more than 24 hours. If portability is paramount, the Zenbook A14 is the pick. 

The Asus Zenbook A14 I tested (model UX3407) is available from Asus and Best Buy for $1,100. It features Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X X1-26-100 processor, which sits one rung below chips in the Snapdragon X Plus series and two rungs below those in the Snapdragon X Elite series. It has the same  8-core CPU count as the lower-end Snapdragon X Plus processors but runs at a slightly slower clock speed — 3GHz versus 3.2GHz — with no boost frequency.

The Zenbook A14 UX3407 is otherwise well-equipped, with 32GB of RAM and 1TB SSD. It relies on Qualcomm’s integrated Adreno GPU and features the same neural processing unit capable of 45 trillion operations per second, which qualifies it as a Copilot Plus PC. The display is a 14-inch OLED panel with a pedestrian 1,920×1,200-pixel resolution and no touch support.

Asus is readying a second Zenbook A14 expected to hit Best Buy’s shelves at the end of March. It will cost $900 and feature a CPU upgrade — a Snapdragon X Plus — and half the RAM and storage space. It does have the same OLED display, though. Yes, you read that correctly: The cheaper model has a faster processor. You’ll be able to tell the two apart because they will be different colors; my test model is what Asus describes as Iceland Gray, and the other model will be outfitted in Zabriskie Beige. The best part is no paints are used; the colors are created through an oxidation process of the metal chassis. 

The Asus Zenbook A14 (UX3407) costs £1,100 in the UK and is not yet available in Australia.

Asus Zenbook A14 performance

The Zenbook A14’s performance in lab testing was like the opening to A Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It finished near or at the end of the pack of other Copilot Plus PCs based on Snapdragon X Plus or Elite processors and those with Intel’s Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200V series chips on our application benchmarks, Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024. It also trailed the M3 MacBook Air on these tests. 

The Zenbook A14 was unable to run PCMark 10, which highlights the Windows-on-Arm compatibility issue. Before purchasing the Zenbook A14 or another Copilot Plus PC powered by a Snapdragon X, check to ensure that the applications you use are compatible with Arm.

Compatibility also comes into play with our 3DMark Time Spy test. It doesn’t run natively on Arm but through the built-in Prism emulator, which results in a performance hit. But its result was poor even among the Snapdragon X-based Copilot Plus PCs, including the HP OmniBook X 14 and Microsoft Surface Laptop 7.

While the Zenbook A14’s application and graphics performance trailed other Copliot Plus PCs, it still offers more than enough performance for general use. Competing Copilot Plus PCs may be faster, but they don’t provide another class of computing. These are all general-purpose laptops that rely on integrated graphics that are better suited for office tasks than demanding graphics work or gaming.

The Zenbook A14 did better on Procyon’s AI Computer Vision benchmark, finishing in the middle of the other Copilot Plus PCs we’ve tested. This result is not surprising since all of the Snapdragon X CPUs feature the same 45-TOPS NPU, and the competing Intel Core Ultra 7 258V offers a similar 48-TOPS NPU.

The best of times arrived with battery testing. The Zenbook A14 is only the second laptop CNET has reviewed with a battery life of more than 24 hours, even if it was only by 7 minutes. The A14’s battery time is second only to the HP OmniBook X 14, which lasted 1 hour and 5 minutes longer. The Zenbook A14’s longevity is arguably more impressive than the OmniBook X 14’s because it features an OLED display, which typically drains the battery faster than an LCD.

Asus says the Zenbook A14’s battery can last up to 32 hours. On our battery tests, it came up a few hours short of that figure, but our test of constantly streaming a YouTube video is more demanding than a typical use case. At any rate, the Zenbook A14 offers such a lengthy battery life that you can go days at a time between charging it. 

Ceraluminum is certainly awesome

Many times, when a manufacturer attempts an ultralight design, the result is an enclosure that feels too light, with thin magnesium alloy, aluminum or plastic surfaces that flex and bend under the slightest pressure. With the Zenbook A14, you can have your lightness and rigidity too. It features a Ceraluminum chassis that’s a mix of aluminum and ceramic materials. Adding ceramic to the composition adds a great deal of rigidity and durability, which allows the Zenbook A14 to be incredibly light without feeling flimsy or cheap. 

The Zenbook A14 weighs just under 2.2 pounds, or less than a kilogram. By comparison, the slightly smaller 13.6-inch MacBook Air M3 is more than half a pound heavier at 2.7 pounds. Heavier still is the 13.8-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and 14-inch HP OmniBook X 14, which are still two of the lightest Copilot Plus PCs we’ve tested at roughly 3 pounds. The Zenbook A14 also has a small power brick that weighs less than half a pound, so the total travel weight is lighter than that of the MacBook Air by itself.

Asus includes a lightweight leather sleeve in a nice, off-white color. If you pack up the Zenbook A14 with the power cord and travel sleeve, you’ll still carry only 3.1 pounds. 

The Ceraluminum material not only results in an ultralight yet very rigid laptop, but it is also scratch, smudge and fingerprint resistant. I like the look of the matte gray finish of our test system — it marks a departure from the brushed aluminum finish that’s become so common — and it maintained its clean look during the two weeks I used it. And I’m often snacking while working, and the keyboard, touchpad and rest of the chassis remained smudge-free. 

The rigid keyboard deck aids the typing experience on the Zenbook A14. The keys offer shallow travel but a firm response. Any flex in the keyboard deck would make the shallow-travel keys feel mushy, but instead, they feel quick and snappy. The keyboard is also roomy with no shortened keys that you must learn to accommodate. 

The touchpad is also roomy and features smart gestures along the side and top edges to adjust display brightness and volume and control video playback. I didn’t find myself using the sides to raise or lower brightness or volume because I’ve grown accustomed to using the function keys for those, and the Zenbook A14 has dedicated function keys for each. There are no media control keys in the Zenbook A14’s function row, however, so I did use the top edge of the touchpad for scrubbing forward and back on YouTube videos and found it accurate enough to use effectively.

Besides its generous size and smart gestures, the touchpad is basic, with a mechanical click response. I much prefer the lively and uniform click response from the haptic touchpad of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7. The Zenbook A14’s mechanical touchpad’s click response offers too much travel near its bottom edge and not enough toward the top — the dreaded driving board effect. At the Zenbook A14’s price, however, it’s asking too much to get both an OLED display and a haptic touchpad. 

And you do get an OLED. It’s not a high-resolution OLED panel, but getting any type of OLED on a $1,100 laptop is a boon. It’s a 14-inch OLED display with a 1,920x-1,200-pixel resolution. That’s a high enough resolution for a 14-inch display that text and images appear crisp — just not as sharp as the image you get with the 2.8K OLED on the Asus Zenbook S 14. The HP OmniBook X 14 and Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 have slightly higher-res 14-inch displays, but they’re IPS LCD panels and not OLEDs. 

I’d much rather have the Zenbook A14’s OLED display than either LCD (and the added pixels) that you get with the OmniBook X 14 or Surface Laptop 7. The excellent contrast and deep black levels of the Zenbook A14’s OLED display are outstanding. Color performance is also strong; my tests with a Spyder X colorimeter showed 100% coverage of the sRGB and P3 spaces and 97% of AdobeRGB. It also hits 391 nits of brightness, which is a good number for an OLED that typically has a lower peak brightness than an LCD.

Along with the prosaic resolution, the Zenbook A14’s display also offers a standard 60Hz refresh rate. You’ll need to spend more to get a laptop with a high-res OLED with a speedy 120Hz refresh that results in smoother motion.

My other minor complaint about the otherwise excellent OLED display isn’t about the panel itself but the plastic bezels surrounding it. They give off budget vibes on a laptop where nearly everything else about the design looks spendier than its $1,100 price would indicate. I wonder how much more a seamless, edge-to-edge glass treatment would add to the Zenbook A14’s cost.

To end the display discussion on a positive note, I’ll mention the display hinge. Similar to a MacBook’s, it’s a single hinge that runs nearly the width of the display. And it’s fantastic, offering a true, one-finger opening of the display but still enough resistance to keep the display at your chosen angle with minimal wobble.

At the center of the top cover sits one other bit of budget-ness: the “ASUS Zenbook” wordmark. The font is boring, and the spacing between the letters looks off — why are the letters so widely spaced? I would’ve preferred a repeat of Asus’s stylized “A” that appears above the keyboard on the lid. Or just choose a better font with better spacing.

The dual speakers emit average laptop audio, which is to say it’s not very good. The sound suffices for YouTube videos and Netflix shows and video chats, but you’ll want headphones or an external speaker for music and some movies — dramas where dialogue is softly spoken or action flicks with large explosions and over-the-top effects.

The 1080p webcam produced a fairly sharp image in testing, but the picture was oversaturated. The camera has an IR sensor so you can use it for Windows Hello logins. That’s your only biometric option because the Zenbook A14 lacks a fingerprint reader.

Is the Asus Zenbook A14 a good laptop?

It’s a great laptop, particularly if you’re looking for an ultralight, ultralong-running laptop for travel. Its Ceraluminum enclosure is both rigid and lightweight, and the Snapdragon X processor allows it to run around the clock. Plus, its display is the icing on this Copilot Plus PC cake at this price.