Asus ExpertBook B7 Flip Review

If connectivity is important to you, the Asus ExpertBook B7 Flip ($2,149.99) goes to the head of the class among 14-inch convertible laptops: Besides the usual USB and Thunderbolt ports, it has both HDMI and mini DisplayPort outputs for connecting external monitors, and both Wi-Fi 6 and a SIM card slot for 5G mobile broadband. An attractive thin-and-light design adds to the ExpertBook's appeal. Unfortunately for it, we just pinned our Editors' Choice award for premium 2-in-1 laptops onto the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 7, which is faster than the Flip, has a dazzling OLED display (versus a nice-but-not-exceptional IPS panel), and costs $420 less. Many Asus laptops are great bargains, but the ExpertBook B7 is an exception unless the 5G is your primary need.

Fewer Pixels for More Dollars 

Clad in Star Black aluminum, the ExpertBook B7 Flip measures 0.74 by 12.6 by 9.2 inches (HWD), nearly matching the Yoga 9i (0.65 by 12.5 by 9.1 inches) and a bit bigger than the Dell Inspiron 14 7415 2-in-1 (0.71 by 12.7 by 8.3 inches). At 3.15 pounds, it's like all but the smallest convertibles, more comfortable in your lap or on a desk than held up in tablet mode, but a fraction lighter than the Lenovo (3.26 pounds) or Dell (3.4 pounds). The system feels sturdy, with little or no flex if you grasp the screen corners or mash the keyboard.

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(Photo: Molly Flores)

Under the hood is a quad-core, 2.9GHz (5.0GHz turbo) Intel Core i7-1195G7 processor with Iris Xe integrated graphics. The Asus carries 16GB of memory and a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive, partitioned into a 380GB drive C: and 572GB drive D:. 

The bezels around the 14-inch touch screen are medium-thick. (Asus cites a not-too-high 81% screen-to-body ratio.) Our review unit's IPS display had a 16:10 aspect ratio with 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution; a more expensive ($2,449.99) model has lower 1,920-by-1,200 resolution, but also an integrated privacy filter that shields your data from the view of nosy airline seatmates. A battery-powered pen clings magnetically to the side of the screen.

As I said, ports are plentiful. The laptop's left edge holds two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, one USB 3.2 Type-A, an HDMI output, an audio jack, and a miniature Ethernet connector (with an adapter in the box that expands it to a full jack).

(Photo: Molly Flores)

On the right, you'll find another USB 3.2 Type-A port, a mini DisplayPort, the SIM card slot, the power button, a volume rocker for use in tablet mode, and a security-cable lockdown notch. The on/off button doubles as a fingerprint reader, joining the face-recognition-capable webcam to give you two ways to sign in with Windows Hello. But the button surface area is too small and fussy to read fingerprints well.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

A Bright, Colorful Camera 

Speaking of the webcam, it has the usual low-rent 720p resolution but captures relatively bright and colorful images with minimal static. A sliding privacy shutter thwarts unintended privacy breaches. Harman/Kardon speakers at bottom front produce barely adequate sound; it's hollow and not very loud, but you can make out overlapping tracks. DTS Audio Processing software offers music, movie, and game presets, along with an equalizer. 

The backlit keyboard doesn't have a numeric keypad (offhand we can't think of a 14-inch notebook that does), but an LED calculator appears in the large, buttonless touchpad if you press its top right corner. The pad glides smoothly and clicks comfortably.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The keyboard lacks dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys—you must team the Fn key with the cursor arrows for those functions—and the top-row keys (including Escape and Delete) are puny. But the layout is sensible, and the keyboard has a fairly pleasant, responsive typing feel with travel that's slightly deeper than most competitors' keyboards. 

As an IPS panel, the touch screen can't match the India-ink blacks and brilliantly vivid colors of OLED technology, but the ExpertBook's display is still a plus. White backgrounds are clean instead of dingy, and the contrast is good, with broad viewing angles. Colors are rich and well saturated, and fine details are sharp, with no pixelation around the edges of letters. We're rarely satisfied with laptop brightness, but the Asus screen is more than sunny enough. The supplied pen works well and offers good palm rejection.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

A handful of utilities bolster the Windows 10 Pro operating system preload. Asus Business Manager provides an encrypted file vault and secure deletion, while Asus ExpertWidget lets you program the Fn key and numbers 1 through 4 to toggle settings like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, or to launch favorite apps. A MyAsus control center offers assorted battery and performance/cooling modes, system updates, microphone noise canceling, network traffic optimization, and normal, vivid, and anti-blue-light screen palettes.

Testing the ExpertBook B7 Flip: A Five-Way 14-Inch Showdown 

For our benchmark charts, I pitted the ExpertBook B7 Flip against three other 14-inch convertibles. The Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 7 costs a few hundred bucks less, while the Dell Inspiron 14 7415 2-in-1 is even cheaper and the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio is more expensive. That left one slot, which I filled with the non-convertible VAIO SX14, which has the same CPU as the Asus.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Asus has perfectly fine performance for the office productivity and everyday apps it's designed for. Like its rivals, it easily cleared the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent throughput in Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. It also landed in the middle of the pack in Photoshop, though it trailed in our CPU tests. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The Surface Laptop Studio is the only entrant that doesn't rely on integrated graphics, so it charged ahead in 3DMark. The B7 Flip finished toward the back of the field, suggesting its after-hours priorities are casual games and video streaming rather than speedy shoot-'em-ups. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' 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. 

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

The Asus exhibited great battery life, tying the Microsoft laptop for second place behind the Lenovo, and it boasts superb screen brightness. But its color coverage is no match for the Yoga's OLED display. It's a capable choice for creative apps, though it lacks an SD card slot to import images from your camera or smartphone.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Verdict: Nothing That a Price Cut Can't Fix 

With a number of first-class convertible laptops available for $1,400 to $1,800, the ExpertBook Flip B7 doesn't dazzle at $2,149.99. That's not an outrageous figure for a trim, well-built 2-in-1, and business notebooks usually carry a modest price premium compared to even deluxe consumer systems like the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 7. Still, except for its plethora of ports and 5G connectivity, the Asus fails to stand out. Our advice: Wait for a sale.