I benchmarked the Asus Zenbook A14 against various ultraportable competitors for this review. This group includes systems with similar Snapdragon processors, like the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus (7441), which was $999 as tested. I also included alternatives powered by Intel and AMD, like a Dell XPS 13 (9350) based on Core 2 Ultra ($1,699.99 as tested), and the 2025 Framework Laptop 13 ($1,627 as tested), respectively. Finally, I compared it with the 2025 Apple MacBook Air 13-Inch ($1,199 as tested), which features Apple’s custom Arm-based M4 silicon.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

Our primary tests for Arm-based laptops are CPU-centric or processor-intensive. Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we see how long the freeware video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 takes to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.

Other tests we usually use on Windows systems, like UL’s PCMark 10 and Adobe Photoshop (via Puget Systems’ PugetBench utility), aren’t available for Arm-based CPUs in a way that we can use, so they’re excluded from this comparison. Windows on Arm has far better app compatibility than before, but it can’t run everything that x86-based PCs can.

In Cinebench and Geekbench Pro, the Snapdragon-powered Zenbook A14 fell behind most competitors. Still, it wasn’t at the bottom of the barrel, notably pulling ahead of the far pricier Dell XPS 13 in both tests. Similarly, the A14 completed our HandBrake video transcoding test quicker than the XPS 13, but still put up a slower time than the rest of the crowd.

Regardless of where it fell in the rankings, the overall scores indicate reliable and capable (albeit, not category-leading) performance. Outside of edge-case compatibility issues (such as with legacy apps, some printers, fax machines, and scanners), the Zenbook A14 will handle your daily productivity tasks quite well. Just don’t buy one expecting to render larger projects without prolonged wait times—this laptop is for mainstream casual users and students in the humanities.

Graphics Tests

We challenge laptops’ graphics with a quartet of 3D animation and gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds, while Steel Nomad’s regular (4K) and Light (1440p) subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance. This benchmark works with native APIs and subjects 3D scenes to increasingly intense ray-traced workloads at 1440p. Unlike Macs, Arm-based Windows laptops are compatible with all five of these benchmarks.

While the Snapdragon X Plus’ general performance may have kept the Zenbook above water with decent scores, the chip’s onboard graphics processor simply could not. The Zenbook crawled to the finish line in every test. Whether I compared it with Intel, AMD, or Apple graphics, the Snapdragon X Plus fell behind. Sure, it’ll be fine for most uses, like video streaming or simple, casual games at lower settings (with supported drivers), but nothing beyond that.

Battery Life and Display Tests 

We test each laptop’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation, or what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show. We also measure each screen’s 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Zenbook A14 isn’t intended for productivity or graphics, but it does deliver some of the longest battery life I’ve seen in an ultraportable. In our video rundown test, it lasted just shy of 28 hours—significantly longer than already impressive competitors like the latest 13-inch MacBook Air. That’s nearly twice as long as the Framework Laptop 13, the shortest-lived system in our comparison lineup.

Asus’ laptop display quality was also way above average here, with the glossy OLED panel producing 100% of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts and 97% of the Adobe RGB space. The screen’s brightness was also decent, coming in at barely less than 400 nits. Say what you will about this laptop’s maximum output, but it’s featherweight and lasts all day, which is all some folks need.