VITAL STATS
Asus Zenbook 14 OLED UX3405
from £1300 /asus.com
Intel is ushering in anew AI-boosted era… and Asus’s latest laptop was at the front of the queue for the CPU upgrade
● Life during Core time
With its extra-skinny chassis and MacBooky good looks, nobody would blame you for focusing on the physical traits of Asus’s latest Zenbook 14 OLED; but that would be ignoring the fact that this is one of the first laptops anywhere on the planet to get one of Intel’s new Core Ultra CPUs. Sandwiched inside its 14.9mm metal frame, the UX3405 runs aCore Ultra 5, Ultra 7 or Ultra 9processor, each of which has its own Apple-style neural processing unit designed to blitz through AI-based work –handy now we’ve started to get robots to do everything from emailing our bosses to editing holiday videos.
●Core than afeeling
That doesn’t mean we can’t still spend some time admiring this Zenbook’s dashing appearance, though. Weighing just 1.28kg, it has alovely 14in touchscreen that packs in 2880x1800 pixels and a 120Hz refresh rate. That ultraportable build doesn’t come at the expense of ports either: two Thunderbolt 4 sockets are joined by one USB-A, one HDMI 2.1 and one to plug your headphones into. You’ll need to use one of the Thunderbolts to charge it, but you should be able to get 15hrs out of the 75Wh battery.
●Core latest trick
Those Ultra CPUs also have anew chiplet-based design, which moves easier tasks to a ‘low-power island’ while the performance
