Need an ultraportable with a seriously good battery life? These days, you’ve got quite a few choices. The new ASUS Zenbook S 14 UM5406 wants to add to those choices, bringing with it an Intel Lunar Lake Core Ultra CPU option to the table. You don’t need a Snapdragon CPU to have great battery life.
The Zenbook S 14 UM5406 is a really good laptop in many ways. There are two things that stood out for me. The first is about battery life. I’ve been fascinated with Snapdragon X processors that have succeeded in delivering truly impressive battery life, easily 20 hours in real-world tests. The Zenbook S 14 might not yet match the Snapdragon X, but it’s pretty darn good lasting beyond 17 hours in my YouTube 4K video loop test. The other thing is about how ultralight this ultraportable is. It’s just 1.2 kg.
Zenbook laptops have always been premium quality. The new Zenbook S 14 UM5406 is expectedly so. It features a new material that ASUS has begun to use on their new laptops like the Zenbook S 16 UM5606. It’s called Ceraluminum — aluminium that has been fused with ceramic. This is only on the lid. It’s light, it’s very sturdy, and it resists scratches, fingerprints, and dirt.The line pattern, though not really something I fancy, adds some character to the design, and together with the Ceraluminum material, gives the Zenbook S 14 a really unique look.
The display is a glossy 14-inch OLED panel with 3K resolution (2880 x 1800 pixels, 16:10 aspect ratio), 0.2 ms response time, and 120 Hz refresh rate. It has 400 nits of brightness, peaking at 500 nits with HDR, plenty bright for use in most environments. The display is PANTONE validated, TÜV Rheinland-certified, and SGS Eye Care Display.
Most important, it is touch-enabled, and with an added bonus, also supports stylus. It’s 2025 now, and while MacBooks still don’t have a single touch-enabled model, I feel touch ought to be a basic feature now for Windows laptops.
Atop the display is a Full HD webcam with IR function to support Windows Hello login. There is no fingerprint reader.
The keyboard has a chiclet design, with 1.1 mm key travel, backlit. All the keys are in their right position, and there’s a proper inverted-T arrow key layout. Typing is comfortable.
The touchpad is humongous, as large as they keyboard deck can accommodate, starting right below the edge of the spacebar and extending to the bottom edge of the laptop.
ASUS always tries to do something innovative with their touchpads, and the Zenbook S 14 continues to have these “smart gestures”. Sliding on the left edge of the touchpad changes volume, the right edge changes display brightness, and the top edge scrubs through video timeline. I think this is mostly gimmick, because it’s hard to control anything precisely. In a pinch, however, it might be easy to dial down the volume quickly, if you remember which edge of the touchpad to swipe.
The Zenbook S 14 measures just 310.3 x 214.7 x 11.9 mm, and as aforementioned, weigh just 1.2 kg. This makes it ultrathin, ultraportable, and ultralight. It’s extremely easy to take the Zenbook S 14 anywhere with you.
Despite it’s thinness, the Zenbook S 14 has several ports, including a full-sized HDMI port which is located on the left side.
The left side also has two more USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports with power delivery and display support, and a 2.5 mm combo audio jack.
The right side has just a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port (10 Gbps). I wished that ASUS could have put one of the two USB Type-C ports on the right, so we have some choices about where we connected our USB Type-C cable, which would also serve as the cable used to charge the laptop.
The Zenbook S 14 UM5406 is powered by Intel Core Ultra 7 Processor 258V. This new processor is built for AI, and includes a NPU with up to 47 TOPS. The laptop comes with 32 GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and 1 TB of M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage.
For connectivity, the Zenbook S 14 UM5406 has Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) tri-band 2×2 radios, and Bluetooth 5.4.
The table below shows the benchmark scores from PCMark 10 Extended tests.
| Battery, Balanced | Plugged-in, Balanced | Plugged-in, Best Performance | |
| Overall | 5707 | 7069 | 7072 |
| Essentials | 7189 | 10051 | 10264 |
| Productivity | 6821 | 10432 | 10349 |
| Digital Content Creation | 7975 | 9502 | 9549 |
| Gaming | 7331 | 6774 | 6665 |
There seems little difference between performance profiles when plugged-in. Running on battery does take away some performance, as expected, though there seems to be an anomaly that gaming performance on battery is better than when plugged-in.
Geekbench 6 scores are shown in the table below.
| Battery, Balanced | Plugged-in, Balanced | Plugged-in, Best Performance | |
| Single | 2073 | 2605 | 2620 |
| Multi | 8747 | 10893 | 10900 |
| Compute | 25833 | 29250 | 29690 |
Again, it appears that the performance profile makes little difference when plugged-in, while understandably battery mode does take a bit of hit.
PCMark 10 does not run on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 (with Snapdragon X Plus processor), but since Geekbench 6 does, I made a comparison between that and the Zenbook S 14. The Surface Laptop 7 always loses in Compute, which is expected from the Snapdragon X’s poor GPU performance. Interestingly, on battery, the Surface Laptop 7 outperforms the Zenbook S 14 in both Single and Multi-core tests, while when plugged-in, the Zenbook S 14 pulls ahead in Single-core tests but still lags in Multi-core tests.
My Cinebench R24 tests show the Zenbook S 14’s score of 101/484 (Single/Multi-core) in battery mode also lags (quite far) behind the Surface Laptop 7 with Snapdragon X Plus. While plugged-in, the Zenbook S 14 scores 118/479 (Single/Multi-core), which manages to pull ahead of the Surface Laptop 7 (with Snapdragon X Plus processor) in Single-core test but still lags far behind in Multi-core.
This seems to suggest that the Lunar Lake Core Ultra 7 258v processor may be able to sip power on battery because it has really throttled down its performance. However, I did not find the Zenbook S 14 slow or laggy while running on battery. Casual productivity work and web browsing were all fine.
For many people, this may be a good compromise. You want as much battery life as you want while on the move and away from any AC power source. If you need some extra performance, go find an AC power source.
The Zenbook S 14 ran 17 hours 9 minutes in my YouTube 4K video loop tests. This is the best I’ve seen amongst Intel laptops. It actually also outran some of Snapdragon laptops like the Dell XPS 13 and ASUS Vivobook S 15. You could easily go a whole day, forget to charge up at night, and still be good into the second day. It is certainly helped by a 72 Wh battery, which is perhaps a little more than often seen in other ultraportable laptops.
Overall, the Zenbook S 14 UM5406 is a great laptop for casual use, which includes general productivity apps, entertainment, and web browsing. Its battery life is very good. If you were considering a Snapdragon-powered laptop but are concerned about app compatibility with the ARM platform, the Zenbook S 14 is a great alternative. The laptop is ultraportable, ultrathin, and ultralight, making it an ideal everyday laptop that you can bring with you everywhere.
The Zenbook S 14 UM5406, as reviewed here (Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB storage) retails for $2,799.
View Comment Policy