If your laptop purchasing budget is circa $500 and you want - or even need - the fastest laptop in that price range, then you can’t go wrong with the Asus Zenbook 14X.
Currently available from Best Buy for $499.99 (a saving of $300), this is a laptop with an OLED touchscreen display and an Intel Core i5 13500H CPU. Just to clarify, this is not a convertible laptop; the touchscreen display is just that.
It’s an absolutely gorgeous one with specs to match: 2880 x 1800 pixels, a peak brightness of 500 nits, a 120Hz refresh rate and 100% DCI-P3 color gamut on a 14.5-inch diagonal. Simply put, there’s no laptop with a better display on offer for $500 or less.
That’s not all though. The Core i5-13500H CPU that powers it is very note worthy, too. It has 12 cores, which is an indication of the firepower it can deploy. The other headline number worth keeping in mind is its base power dissipation (45W) meaning it can maintain a high clock speed.
It scores more than 23,000 points on the popular Passmark benchmark, the highest ever for a laptop in this price range (for a new product).
The rest of the specifications is as expected. There’s a 512GB SSD (Gen4), a fingerprint reader, a webcam, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a huge 90WHr battery (probably the biggest under $500), an HDMI connector, a USB Type-A one, and a backlit keyboard. It’s ultra thin, too at less than 19mm and weighs under 1.6Kg.
The only reservation we have - and it’s a big one - is that it has only 8GB of RAM and that system memory is not upgradable.
We reviewed an older 14X Model in May 2022 and found out that it had poor battery life and was expensive. The new model solves both of these problems and keeps the main features of the 14X: its gorgeous design and its stunning OLED screen.
