ASUS Zenbook A14 Review: Thin, light and smart

Announced at CES 2025 earlier this year, the ASUS Zenbook A14 is their latest Copilot+ PC, the first in the Zenbook series powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. 

At just under 1kg, the Zenbook A14 is the world’s lightest Copilot+ PC according to ASUS. The lightweight chassis is thanks to ASUS’ Ceraluminum process which has now been infused throughout the laptop chassis giving a ceramic feel with a durable, lightweight strength which can withstand marks and scratches.

Despite the compact design, the Zenbook A14 includes a gorgeous, bright 14” LUMINA OLED display. Inside you get the Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor and Hexagon NPU offering up to 45 Trillion Operations Per Second (TOPS), powering the Microsoft Copilot+ experience.

The Zenbook A14 can come with up to 32GB of RAM and up to a 1TB M.2 SSD, with a 70Wh battery inside which promises over 32 hours of use.

I’ve had a couple of weeks with the Zenbook A14 and here’s how it went. 

Hardware and Design

The Zenbook A14 looks like a traditional laptop, but it looks and feels amazing with that Ceraluminum infused into the upper and lower decks. 

I didn’t test out the durability of the Ceraluminum, nor did I test out the MIL-Spec (810H) rating – but suffice to say it feels good in the hand, with little flex and, well, it feels like it could take a bit of punishment. 

There’s not a lot of branding on the laptop, with a simple ‘ASUS Zenbook’ logo on the lid and a small ASUS monogram logo on the lower deck above the Del key. It’s a clean look which I appreciate.

The laptop itself is super-light – weighing in at under 1kg – and the hinge opens with one hand but is strong enough to remain in place pretty well. It’s quite thin and slips easily into most bags or backpacks, but still manages to pack in an excellent array of ports including a USB Type-A on the right, with HDMI 2.1, USB4 (Type-C) port and Audio combo on the left. 

The upper deck is nicely dominated by the Four-sided “Frameless” NanoEdge FHD resolution OLED Display which has almost no bezel, except at the top which is where you’ll find the Windows Hello compatible FHD camera which includes IR to support touchless login.

The panel is in a 16:10 aspect ratio giving the laptop a more rectangular design, and works well for web browsing and watching videos .

The lower deck includes a nicely spaced backlit chiclet keyboard which is fantastic to type on, with just 1.3mm key travel. The keyboard layout of course includes the Copilot shortcut key, which gives fast access to the Microsoft AI assistant. 

There’s a large touchpad below the keypad which supports multi-touch, as well as offering touch shortcuts for volume and display brightness. 

Display and Audio

The 14.0-inch OLED panel comes with a WUXGA resolution (1920 x 1200) resolution and is paired with dual down-firing speakers on the base. 

The display is bright enough with 600nits HDR peak brightness, good enough to be easily used in a brightly lit office or at a cafe outside. The gloss finish on the display looks great, but does show some reflections. It’s not a touch display, so you won’t get many fingerprints on the finish.

The panel covers 100% DCI-P3 color gamut and supports HDR True Black 600 with TÜV Rheinland-certified less blue light emissions – suffice to say it’s a fantastic display with colours that really pop and those deep blacks you know and love from OLED panels.

On the audio front, the speakers are fairly basic in terms of quality with a stereo sound. There’s a decent amount of power and they’re decent quality with good midrange sound – though tend to lack that oomph of a good subwoofer.

Performance

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor with Adreno graphics, which is paired with up to 32GB DDR5 RAM and a 1TB M.2 gen 4 SSD on-board.

It’s a great system for media and work, with the Snapdragon X Elite processor easily able to keep up with work on the web. 

It’s a very quiet machine, with the dual fans included rarely heard even when you’re starting to push the limits. There’s plenty of airflow with the rubber feet clearing the vents on the base. 

This isn’t a gaming machine per se, but you can always knock out some Solitaire which still comes installed in Windows, unfortunately you still can’t run Minecraft Java Edition or Fortnite on the ARM64 platform.

You can still launch the Xbox GamePass app if you want to stream some games using their cloud streaming – and you can use the 3-month trial included. Minecraft is available through the Xbox app – though on the ARM64 platform I’ve consistently found the Xbox app has no search available. 

As far as the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite goes, as an ARM based processor it works quite well. As for benchmarks, I ran it through 3DMark and here’s how it went.

Battery and Charging

There’s a 70WHr, 3S1P, 3-cell Li-ion battery inside the Zenbook A14 with a 90W USB Type-C charger included in the box. 

The ASUS website lists up to 32 hours of battery life and that’s an enthusiastic approximation based on some fairly strict test guidelines. The actual usage is still very impressive with the laptop lasting a full day from 9am – 10pm doing a mix of work and video with the display around 60% brightness. I did this a number of times with similar results, so if you need a long battery life, this is a great laptop for it.

The 90W charger included in the box supports Fast Charging. My testing found the fast charging to be quite fast. If you need a top up you can easily get 25% charge in 15 minutes or 50% charge in 30 minutes, if you want a full charge it takes around two hours. 

Software

The Zenbook A14 comes with Windows 11 Home edition pre-installed. There’s the usual support with regular patches from Microsoft. 

There is of course some pre-installed apps on the laptop, mostly ASUS apps including the excellent MyASUS app, as well as GlideX, StoryCube and ScreenXpert. There’s also some utilities installed like Dolby Access. I love the MyASUS app, it’s quite handy for accessing settings and keeping all the features of the laptop in one place.

Prism

It’s timely to remember that Windows uses their Prism emulator to translate software written for x86 based CPUs to ARM64 – the platform Qualcomm builds their Snapdragon X Elite processors on.

Prism is decent at running pretty much everything, but you will run into problems, notably with things like Fortnite and Minecraft as above, or Adobe Premiere Pro to name a couple. Vendors like Adobe are working on bringing an ARM64 version to Windows, however it’s not quite here yet.

AI Power

The Zenbook A14 is a CoPilot+ PC powered by the Qualcomm X Elite processor which has the Hexagon Neural Processing Unit (NPU) offering up to 45 Trillion Operations Per Second (TOPS). 

In real terms, the Zenbook A14 has access to a host of AI assisted experiences like Copilot. The list of AI experiences you can expect in Windows includes:  

Co-create with AI within Windows: Generate endless images for free with the ability to fine tune to your liking, and save favorites to your collections

I’ve never found a hugely compelling reason for using this, and the Image Creator option in MSPaint requires a paid subscription to MS365 (0 per year each, or 0 for families) with the AI features built-in.

There’s also the upcoming feature: Recall, which Microsoft held back after privacy concerns were raised. The intent is to launch it soon, however with it is still only available as part of the Windows Insider Program at this stage 

There is of course some partners on-board who are partnering for AI powered experiences on Copilot+ PCs including Davinci, Luminar Neo, GIMP,  Stable diffusion and of course new Adobe experiences in apps like Illustrator and Photoshop – though as above, Premiere is still getting updated.

At this stage, we’re still waiting on some optimisation for ARM based PCs from both Microsoft, as well as vendors like Adobe, but it is all coming eventually – much like the AI apps.

Should you buy it?

The ASUS Zenbook A14 has so much going for it. The gorgeous Ceraluminum body makes the whole thing thin and light and just feels amazing. The OLED display is bright and colour accurate and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor offers battery life measured in days. 

There is the downsides with the 60Hz refresh rate on the OLED panel slightly disappointing – though the quality and colour representation is excellent. There’s also some rough compatibility issues on the software side. Overall though, the hardware here is fantastic. It’s thin, light, looks great and it’s ready to support the software as it becomes available. 

There’s multiple price points offered for the Zenbook A14 with the price starting at 99 – which makes it an option for students or anyone wanting an ultra-light office machine with plenty of grunt – and looks great. 

You can find the ASUS Zenbook A14 on-sale from today