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If you want something with a wider variety of ports while still being sleek and slim, the Lenovo Yoga 9i, a 14-inch Intel-based 2-in-1, may be up your alley. But in our testing, it was slightly behind in performance and more expensive when similarly configured. It did, however, have a slightly higher quality OLED display.
The major benefit of this redesign is the fact that hot air no longer blows into the display, as with all the previous ZenBooks. Instead, hot air is pushed out and away on the left edge.
Zenbook S 13 OLED (UM5302)
Finally, the performance on battery on the Performance mode in this test is similar to the Whisper mode plugged in, with the CPU stabilizing at around 12W of power. That, however, is changing with the release of the AMD Radeon RX 6000 Mobile series of GPUs (up to RX 6850M XT laptop series as of 2022), based on the AMD RDNA2 architectures, with powerful compute units, variable-rate shading, RT acceleration, and AMD Infinity Cache. The RX 7000 Mobile series is expected for sometime in 2023, and we’ll keep you updated when we know more. As for the storage, the laptop offers an M.2 2280 gen4 slot, and our unit shipped with a Samsung PM9A1 drive, one of the faster gen4 options available these days. ISO 22196:2011 specifies a method of evaluating the antibacterial activity of antibacterial-treated plastics, and other non-porous, surfaces of products (including intermediate products).
The Ryzen 7 6800U is an AMD Rembrandt 6000 processor, with 8 Cores and 16 Threads. This is a revision of the Ryzen 5000 platform previously implemented in the 2021 ZenBook 13 reviewed here (5800U model) and here (5600U model). The Asus Zenbook S 13's OLED screen proved decently vivid at 126% of the sRGB color gamut and 89.3% of the DCI-P3 gamut. That's more vibrant than the LED screen on the 13-inch MacBook Pro, but the OLED panels on Lenovo's Yoga 9i Gen 7 and IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon won out on both color spectrums. Generally speaking, U series chips on both the AMD and Intel side are found in thin, portability-first systems. The lower wattage ceilings are a good match for the lower thermal limits of these smaller laptops. You don’t need a load of variation at the U series level of laptops, and if you're configuring a new custom-build laptop or evaluating specs of ready-to-ship ones, you can drop down to an older Ryzen or up to an H chip as needed. The ideal use case for the latest U series processor is about getting the most performance you can out of a thin, ultraportable notebook. Asus makes use of magnesium-aluminum alloy for the case and the Zenbook comes across as very high-quality. It is also extremely compact and mobile with a weight of just over one kilogram. Our review unit comes in the Ponder Blue color variant and looks very elegant, and the slightly roughened surfaces also feel good. However, the surfaces are also quite fingerprint sensitive. Asus offers other optional color variants, the keyboards of which also change color. In addition to white, the Zenbook S13 is also available in light green and beige. Thanks to its decent cooling solution and a long-term CPU power limit of more than 20 W, the Mercury EM680 is among the fastest systems built around the 6800U that we know of. It can be at least 20% faster in CPU-bound workloads than the slowest system featuring the same chip in our database, as of August 2023.
Verdict: The Zenbook is a very solid mobile companion
Nonetheless, higher-power Ryzen 7 6800U models with dual-fan dual-heatpipe thermal modules will outmatch the performance that this S 13 can deliver, by as much as 25% in some cases. However, those won’t be as compact or lightweight, and they might not be even available – from what we know so far, Ryzen 6000 U hardware is in very short supply, and you’ll most likely have a hard time finding 6600U/6800U laptops in stores in the months to come. Time will tell.
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