ASUS Zenbook S 13 OLED – ‘Ultralight’ with Ryzen 6000

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In brief

The eight-headed Ryzen 7 6800U makes the Zenbook S 13 OLED one of the fastest laptops in its weight class. In its lightest configuration, it weighs just 1 kilogram. However, it does not appear to be faster than a previous generation AMD laptop, at least not if we look at the processor benchmarks. The integrated GPU has been greatly improved and is comparable to a separate entry-level GPU. You can see the efficient operation of the processor in the very long battery life under heavy load, but the cooling is sometimes a bit noisy. The Zenbook S 13 OLED also has a nice sturdy housing with a good keyboard and a good touchpad, modern connections and an OLED screen with a high contrast. The screen could have been a bit brighter and the color settings are sometimes confusing.

It took a while, but a few months after the launch at CES in January, the first Ultrabooks with AMD’s latest Ryzen 6000U processors appear. It’s about time too, because Intel seems to be making a comeback with its twelfth generation of Alder Lake laptop processors. AMD has had the upper hand over Intel when it comes to processing power in recent years. The argument was mainly settled on the number of calculation cores, with AMD processors for Ultrabooks having a maximum of eight and Intel’s only four. With Alder Lake, Intel is focusing on many extra cores, up to a maximum of fourteen in the top model Core i7.

So Intel has been catching up when it comes to the performance of its processors. AMD does not seem to be so concerned with this generation with this generation, but with the performance-per-watt. Ryzen 6000U should therefore enable even thinner and lighter laptop designs. The new Zen 3+ compute cores, baked on a smaller 6nm process, offer several efficiency gains over Zen 3 in the previous generation. You can read more about this in our previous background article about the new processor generation.

AMD sent us a very compact laptop so that we could experience Ryzen 6000U in practice: the ASUS Zenbook 13 S OLED. The 1.1kg machine is built around the Ryzen 7 6800U. The top model of AMD’s Ryzen 6000 lineup in the Ultrabook category – that is, processors with a power consumption between 15 and 28W – has been rebuilt from eight cores that can work on sixteen threads. AMD’s processor doesn’t have a mix of slow small and fast large cores, like Intel’s Alder Lake chips, but only large cores.

The Zenbook 13 S OLED also contains, as the name suggests, a high-resolution OLED touchscreen with pen support, plus modern connections, the latest Wi-Fi 6E and a relatively large 67Wh battery. The laptop should be on the market here in June for an amount of 1299 euros. The configuration we received looks identical to what will be available here in the shops, except for the screen: it is not a touchscreen.

Housing and connections

According to ASUS, the Zenbook S 13 OLED weighs only a kilogram, which makes it a real ‘ultralight’ like the LG Gram 14 or Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro. However, our test model is configured with a touch screen with a glass plate in front, bringing the weight to 1.1kg. That is still very light. Due to the relatively heavy screen cover, the laptop is a bit top heavy, which you notice when you try to open that cover. Disassembling the housing and screen cover is not so easy, also because the hinge opens somewhat stiffly, and when you open the hinge further, the base comes along a bit. Once opened, the hinge could have been a little stiffer. When adjusting the screen or moving the laptop, the screen flutters back and forth a bit.

ASUS applies the same trick to the Zenbook S 13 OLED as it does to many of its other laptops, where the back of the screen cover lifts the case slightly off the table when opened to allow more cooling air to be drawn in. The laptop then rests at the back on two tiny lugs at the end of the lid, which fortunately are not too far apart if you want to use it on a narrow table. Still, the laptop can slide back and forth a bit more over an unstable surface.

The hinge can therefore be improved in a next version, although we appreciate that the screen can be opened up to 180 degrees. In other respects, we find the laptop case of the Zenbook S 13 OLED to be successful. Like other super-light laptops, it’s made from a combination of aluminum and magnesium, and has been coated with a dark blue paint finish by ASUS. Minor damage is therefore clearly visible. The exterior feels a bit more “plasticy” than the bare aluminum of some other luxury laptops. The side edges of the 15mm thin device are neatly rounded and therefore do not cut into the hand.

We sometimes see manufacturers of these types of ultra-light laptops save on the thickness of the material in order to make the laptop as light as possible, which has consequences for the stiffness. The Zenbook S 13 OLED makes a very solid impression for an ultralight. As a whole, the housing can hardly be twisted if you grab it with both hands, and the compression of the part around the keyboard is also not that bad. The bottom plate is traditionally a weaker part and also with the Zenbook S 13 OLED it feels a bit slacker, especially at the ventilation grilles at the bottom of the back of the housing. The screen cover of our test model is quite stiff as a whole because it has a glass plate in front of it, but the back with ASUS’ new logo could have been a little more sturdy.

The keyboard of the Zenbook S 13 OLED has pleasantly large keycaps with a very light dimple for your fingers. For such a thin laptop, there is relatively a lot of travel available. The attack is pleasantly clear, but not very firm. The key lighting is somewhat uneven and because of the narrow font that ASUS uses, you see the LEDs shine more around the key than the letters are illuminated. The separate buttons for webcam, microphone and print screen are handy. The power button is part of the keyboard, but has a different height and design to distinguish it visually and by touch from the rest. A fingerprint scanner is also built into the button for quick login.

The Zenbook 13 S OLED doesn’t have facial recognition, unlike the 2020 Zenbook 13 OLED, which we looked at earlier for our Best Buy Guide. Perhaps the necessary infrared camera has been sacrificed to screen-to-body ratio to make possible. It must be said that the bezels around the screen of the new Zenbook are very narrow, including those at the top. That only leaves room for a tiny camera with the usual 720p resolution. The image quality is also quite average.

The touchpad of the Zenbook 13 S OLED is not an ordinary one, but a NumberPad 2.0, where you get to see a numeric keypad with the press of a virtual button in the top right of the touch-sensitive surface. The virtual button at the top left serves as a shortcut for the calculator. The surface of the touchpad is finished with a layer of glass and as large as it can reasonably be, considering the space that exists between the keyboard and the front of the laptop. Thanks to its large size, you can easily make multi-touch gestures with four fingers.

ASUS Zenbook 13 S OLED (UM5302) - Connections

While the Zenbook 13 OLED from the BBG still had USB-A ports, the Zenbook 13 S OLED no longer has them. There aren’t that many connections on the housing anyway, not only because of the thin housing thickness, but also because a large part of the left side is occupied by ventilation openings. The old Zenbook blew hot air into the space between case and hinge. The new model has one USB-C port on the left and two more on the other, accompanied by a 3.5mm headphone port. The latter did not have the Zenbook 13 OLED. The USB-C ports can be used for laptop charging and are ‘USB4 Ready’, essentially supporting the same features as the Thunderbolt 4 ports on Intel laptops. That means a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 40Gbit/s, DisplayPort 1.4 Alternate Mode for connecting displays with resolutions up to 8k, and support for external GPUs. To activate all those features, a bios update is required, which should follow in the course of June.

The article is in Dutch

Tags: ASUS Zenbook OLED Ultralight Ryzen

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