Asus Zenbook 14 UX3402ZA 14″ 2.8K 400nits Laptop (Intel i5-1240P 12-Core Processor, 8GB RAM, 512GB PCIe SSD, Backlit Keyboard, Windows 11) Intel EVO Certified

4.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic laptop – with a snag
Typing experience is fantastic. The screen is beautiful, the build and finish feels very executive! The only issue for me, was unfortunately the fans. Chrome running? Fans. Edge? Fans. Outlook? Fans. It does run quite hot as well. The only downside of this laptop and the only thing preventing a perfect review.

4.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic display, decent performance, still bloated
Firstly, despite the “evo” sticker, this still comes with lots and lots of Asus apps & services (always running) that come back even when fresh install Win 11 due to firmware hooks. Still best to wipe the disk and start afresh with a clean Win11 download from Microsoft using Media Creator.

The display is OLED thus fantastic, but very glossy and thus prone to reflections; a matte overlay may be required depending on lighting. Pixel arrangement seems OK to be, the density is high enough that you don’t see it unless you’re 10cm from screen. 90Hz refresh is nice if you come from 60Hz laptops.

The CPU is a P thus has 4 P(performance) cores and 8 E(fficient) Atom cores but is also 28W rated (64W turbo max) – rather than the usual U (ULV) CPUs that you’ll find in 13-14″ laptops (with only 2P cores but 15W rated). Thus for some tasks it will be faster but it will consume more and laptop will get hotter.

Asus clearly goes for performance here – note there are even 14″ variants with H processors that are 45W rated! Note these are 13th gen (Raptor Lake) in name only, with none of the improvements the desktop versions have. If cheaper, the 12th gen version is just about the same.

Memory is decent at 16GB (LP-DDR5X 4800Mt/s) not the fastest but then again this is no gaming laptop. Naturally it is soldered so you won’t be upgrading it.

Graphics is your standard integrated “Iris XE” but at least with 80 EU that supports most modern graphics DirectX 12.1, DirectX ML, OpenCL, Vulkan – don’t expect RTX though. I’ve not tried top-end games, but Fornite and the like do work at lower resolution – 1080p looks decent enough and 1440p is doable with some restrictions.

SSD is PCIe 4 x4 (Samsung PM9B1) that is your standard OEM, again not fastest but decent speed. You can upgrade this and it has a heat-spreader also.

Wireless card is AX211 that supports Wifi 6E (and thus 6GHz channels) and is socketed! – thus you should be able to upgrade to Wifi 7 (e.g. BE200/201 range that just came out). It does have 160Mhz wide channels with 2.4Gbps link (on paper and next to router) but usually 800mbps or so.

Sound is pretty decent – no there is no bass naturally but basic frequencies sound pretty good to me. This is a great media machine – where movies, anime look fantastic. HDR is supported and with OLED screen it is really a treat.

Support seems decent with Asus generally releasing both BIOS and firmware updates for 3 years or so, similar to Dell XPS but not quite Lenovo business range of 6-9 years or so. But again different price.

Upgrading – you have your hex tiny screws but sadly some more screws under back feet ;( Please take care peeling those feed off as the rubber may break (mine did) and then it is a mess. In this respect the Dell XPS or similar Lenovo are much easier to service.

BTW, the thermal paste of CPU seems OK thus you don’t need to change it unless you got really expensive stuff. Better than what Dell / Lenovo usually put in.

Overall it is still a pretty cheap middle of road non-gaming laptop. A similar Dell XPS or Lenovo Carbon X1 are at least 2x for same spec thus in these difficult times hard to justify. But if you have the money, naturally those are better.

1.0 out of 5 stars A solid device, gimped by Windows 11
Update: So I am currently in the process of returning this unit. For the specs it should be able to handle everything ive thrown at it, and initially it did. However after a week and a number of updates it has become very sluggish. Booting up used to be a 30second thing, now it’s a couple of minutes for it to boot up and the camera to start looking for you. Then it takes another minute or so to find and let you. In the mean time you could have just entered your pin/password and logged in.

Running it struggles with basic browser functions. You have to switch it to performance mode to get any sort of stability. Which means heavy fan noise drowning out anything your watching.

Using it as a work device (as i intended) is again problematic. My work programs are not that intensive, but on this device they struggle and hang quite a lot. And while they do work in the end they’re significantly slower than my older, less powerful laptop.

The other problem is the heating, while this device on paper has some very good thermal cooling, in reality its not that good. The heat is (as in most laptops sadly) went out through the base of the laptop, straight into your legs which promptly cook, and yes can ve burnt. What more, on several occasions, sat on the desktop with NOTHING else running, it was hitting over 90c!

As for gaming, its really only a slightly bit better than the old EVO chips, not enough to warrant the cost increase. The few basic games i play (Dwarffortress, Factorio) ran well for a while but once you got to mid/late game things started to chug. Other more intensive game (snowrunner, euro truck simiulator) struggled to run at a consistent frame rate and ultimately started to show graphical glitches and stuttering. Ghost of Tsushima which just came out is just unrunable, audio and graphical glitches abound. Despite the game support arc.

Finally, i thought this might just be a one off issue with my device, however Amazon refused a replacement citing “policy” meaning i could only return for a refund.

For now im going to have to go back to my old Galaxy Book 2 laptop until i can find something else

As ultra lights go, this is a solid device. It’s light weight, but mostly powerful enough to get the job done….mostly.

So lets talk the device itself.

The screen is glorious, and as i’ve come to expect with Asus there are a lot of options for tweaking the screen to get your perfect experience. But honestly it was solid out the box. The processor is one of Intel’s new Ultra 9 chips with the arc graphics built in.

They rebranded the chips due to this iteration of chips being a total overhaul. In truth these chips are more inline with Apples M series of chips that anything Intel has done before. In that these chips have 3 sections, the CPU, a GPU, and a NPU. The NPU is the new thing, in that it’s onboard AI, rather than cloud based AI such as ChatGPT.

As of yet i’ve not actually seen it do ANYTHING, so not sure what it’s purpose is. I’ve checked the logs over the last day or so and it’s not even once done anything, even when i was using Copilot, microsofts OS AI.

The device comes with a replaceable 1TB nvme ssd, and can take upto a 2TB. Ther eare 4TB ssd’s but these are doubled up ssd’s and as such are too thick for the chasis.

As well as 32GB of ram. There is an Ultra 5 version of this as well, which has only 16gb of RAM, don’t bother with that version, it will be to restricted.

32GB of ram is the minimum that is really acceptable these days, even for the none SOC chips 16gb just isnt enough. With the Ultra series of chips though you are sharing that 32gb like this:

GPU: 1-8gb. It says it dynamically changes on the fly depending on your usage of the time. Which it does, in a janky manner. You will notice it swapping as things hitch and freeze. instead i reccomend you manually set it to 8gb (the highest you can) and just leave it like that.

NPU: The NPU takes upwards of 16gb of the ram, which is a huge chunk of it. Thankfully as i said it dosent really seem to be active (for me) at the moment so it’s not taking anything. However if it was active it would be leaving only 8gb for the system to use, which is frankly not enough.

Ports. The device is short on ports, and they’re annoyingly placed. You have 2 USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, which is amazing. However they’re placed on the right hand side of the device, so will get in the way of mouse usage (and it does!!) In the end i stopped using the provided charger and use my own 100w gan charger with a angled cable so it’s out of the way. However doing so blocks both the HDMI (full sized) and headphone jack. So in theory you could use 2 external monitors with this device. Which is awesome!

On the lefty hand side is a single USB-3.0 which again is a lovely addition. However glaringly missing from this device is a micro sd slot. There’s no reason for it not to be here as many other devices, both slimmer and cheaper have one.

The trackpad and number pad. Asus are still using their old method of making the track pad a mini screen and putting the numpad on it. I was surprised how quickly i was able to get used to using it. And for me as an excel user its much appreciated! Sure it’s no where near as good as a physical pad, but on this size of device its the perfect complement and the only way you could get one.

However my only niggle, is if you are using a external mouse and want to turn off the trackpad it disables the numpad as well. Which is frustrating and i would like to see an option to turn off the track pad for mouse, but leave it as a number pad.

Typing on this is not to bad, and i’ve done a lot of work on this device so far and not had any major issues.

Temps: This is the frustrating thing, the temps are not good. Your going to average around 80c in whisper mode. Which is the mode i tend to use the most for basic stuff, such as web browsing and the odd bit of work.

However turning on the dynamic fans instantly revs them up even when your doing nothing, and the temps only drop a degree or two to around 78-79c. Do anything strenuous and the fans switch to performance mode which ramps them up even more. However this usually happens when your trying to say game on this. So while the fan noise is really loud, your temps will still skyrocket to around 90-100c.

To be honest, i found that it was uncomfortable to have just in my lap if i was working and temps got to over 85c. Given the fans are all bottom facing (as in on the bottom of the chassis, where your legs are gonna be) your going to roast, and the laptop is going to thermal throttle.

But can you game on this?? Actually yes, a bit. Sure your not going to play any AAA high demanding games. Forget COD, or AC, God of War etc etc. They will just either refuse to run or turn into a slide show, even on low settings.

However i have had some games running and looking fairly well. Grim Dawn, Last Epoch, Farm Sim and a few others. As well as some strategy games have played fairly well on mid to low settings. Though your not going to be playing in 3k, your going to have to drop down to 900-1080. But it is possible!

Now, onto the horrific.

Windows 11 is terrible. Certain elements of the UI and placement of options make trying to use this laptop a chore. Trying to get the laptop to run at its best means hunting around through 3 different power setting menus to get it right, and they have to be done in the correct order or its just wasted time.

OneDrive has taken over your machine! I used to love OneDrive, it was a great cheap way of backing up my files. However in Win11 it’s mandatory install. As well as it tells you its backing up certain areas of your drive (desktop and all of the Documents folder) and will NOT let you turn it off. Which if like me your on multiple devices (work laptop, work desktop, home desktop and home laptop) and wanting to keep things separate, you cant.

Whats more windows likes to install stuff without asking permission, you just get a pop sying new services are being installed. But it dosent tell you WHAT or asks for you to decide if its what you want or not.

Finally the way it powers itself on and breaks EVERY time is blooming annoying. Microsoft removed the option to turn off windows updates, which means even if you devices is in hibernation or sleep mode it turns it self on and looks for updates. Which wouldnt really be an issue IF it turned itself off after the updates, but it dosent. So it’s wasting electricity.

I was tempted to remove win 11 and go back to win10. However intel have made the drivers for these new chips only for win11.

So, after all that would i recommend this laptop. Yes, so long as you dont mind fighting it for a bit. Or know your not going to be using it for anything to strenuous. Also if you can get it on offer.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great lightweight computer for general purpose computing tasks.
I have been using the new 2024 Ultra 9 model for a few weeks now for getting some work done on the train. I mainly use Visual Studio CE, Visual Studio Code, and various data science tools including Jupyter notebooks. Overall I am very pleased with the laptop.

The good bits:
==
Very light , about 1.2 kilograms. Easy to carry around in a backpack all day.
Fair selection of ports.
Excellent display, but given my use case a pretty display doesn’t really matter.
Does not get hot under the workloads I subject it to. I was worried about this from all the other reviews, but surprisingly I have not encountered any heating or loud fan issues.
Exceptional battery life, three days on a single charge (I use it a few hours each day on the train). No laptop I have ever used has this kind of battery life.
Great keyboard, good overall typing experience.

The only one not-so-good bit:
===
This is not a high-performance machine. When I compile a C++ project, the compilation time is like something I would get on an i5 that is 4 years old. No match in terms of performance against a desktop, or gaming laptop with 13th gen i9 units. Similarly, training a simple convnet takes a long while, and that does get the fan going.

I would not recommend throwing any heavy/performance intensive tasks at this machine. It will probably eventually finish it, but you will be disappointed by the time it takes.

Summary:
===

This computer is ideal for someone who wants a general purpose light-weight computer with incredible battery life. This is not something I would recommend for gaming, or any performance heavy tasks like training ML models.

For the weight and battery life alone, I am more than happy to accept reduced performance.

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent laptop with some minor flaws
Let me start by saying I actually returned this laptop as there were a couple of dealbreakers for me personally, but overall I think it was impressive and would be a great option for a lot of people, just not me!

I bought the top spec 32GB Intel Core 9 1TB version for 1349 GBP and for that money it needed to be perfect. For the most part it was great –

Pros:

*Touchscreen OLED display is amazing
* Nice keyboard to type on,
* Low fan noise and temps for the most part.
* Very snappy performance with the new ultra 9 processor.
* Battery life presumably less than an ultra 7 version due to higher TDP of the ultra 9 but battery life was still awesome.
* I didn’t try gaming as I bought it for work but the expectation is it would be fine for older games and certainly better than any integrated graphics from the past.

Cons:

* The TB4 ports are all on the right which was slightly annoying if your cables are coming from the left in your setup like me. In the end I bought some magsafe style right angle TB adapters which worked quite well
* This laptop despite being advertised as HDMI 2.1 is actually the inferior TDMS flavour (the other being FRL which is present in some of ASUS’s other models). HDMI 2.1 TDMS is really closer to HDMI 2.0 and can’t support 4k@120Hz. It will only support 4k@60Hz. The TB4 spec in theory supports 1 monitor at 4k@120Hz but I was not able to get this working with a compatible adapter. I did see the option appearing but it would not drive the monitor. If you want to run an external monitor at 4k@120Hz I would look for an HDMI 2.1 FRL option.
* Mine would occasionally set the fans to max speed on waking from sleep and it felt like the laptop was getting hot and starting to thermal throttle. The only way to stop this was to totally power off the laptop, after which it went away.
* After 10 days or so laptop stopped recognising my external monitor connected via TB. The connection was fine as it worked with another laptop. It did eventually work again later in the day after multiple reboots but didn’t fill me with confidence
* After 2 weeks the laptop occasionally would power off completely. This never happened while I was at my desk but checking event viewer showed some power related issues.

Ultimately there were a few issues for me, the first 2 I could live with and I could have spotted by reading reviews such as these. The last 3 may well have just been my unit, or could be fixed in future firmware updates, but I didn’t want to wait until after the amazon return window and have to deal with ASUS support which I’ve heard isn’t the best. Hope this helps some of you!