Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED (2023) Review

When it comes to flagship models, ultraportable laptops are a hotly contested category, with every manufacturer pushing to make its laptop the thinnest, the lightest, the most powerful, or the longest lasting. The 2023 version of the Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED ($1,399.99) is no exception, showing up with a stunningly slim and light design that packs an OLED display and a new Intel 13th Generation U Series processor. We found plenty to love about this svelte system, but it sacrifices just a bit too much in the name of thinness and, following from that, comes in a bit too light on performance, keeping it from top honors. Nevertheless, the Zenbook S 13 OLED will handle daily work and entertainment in a gorgeous presentation for a competitive price.

Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED Configurations

Our review unit is the Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED UX5304VA-XS76T, which has an Intel Core i7-1355U processor with Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, 32GB of memory, and a 1TB solid-state drive. It sells for $1,399.99 on the Asus online store and at major retailers.

On the Asus website, tech specs show a lower-tier version of the Zenbook S 13 that has the same excellent OLED display but scales back the processing power with an Intel Core i5-1335U CPU, 8GB or 16GB of RAM, and just 512GB of SSD storage. This lower configuration doesn't appear to be on sale yet, but it will likely have a lower price point when it does.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

From Panel to Ports, a Sleek Design

The Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED is billed as the slimmest OLED ultraportable laptop on the market. It's not the slimmest ultraportable we've seen—the Apple MacBook Air is thinner at 0.44 inch—but among OLED-equipped models, it does indeed seem to be the thinnest. Weighing just 2.2 pounds, it's also one of the lightest ultraportables we've ever seen, matching the extremely light HP Elite Dragonfly G3 (2.2 pounds) and only a hair heavier than the featherweight Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 2 (2.1 pounds). With a footprint that measures just 0.46 by 11.7 by 8.5 inches, it is genuinely impressive how thin and compact this Asus system is.

Its looks are also pleasantly distinct, with a cool bonded layer of material that Asus calls “plasma ceramic.” It gives the lid a smooth matte finish, adorned with the company's stylized A glyph blown up to levels of geometric abstraction. Our review unit is a dark color called Basalt Gray, but it's also sold in Ponder Blue, which has been seen on past Asus models. In a world full of bare-metal lids with centered glowing logos, this flair is a welcome change.

The laptop's materials are more than aesthetic, however. The aluminum and magnesium-alloy construction is reassuringly rigid, holding firm whether you pick up the laptop from the corner of the palm rest, or pound away in a fit of writing inspiration.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

For such a slim machine, its port selection is robust, with both full-size HDMI and USB 3.2 Type-A (10Gbps) ports, plus dual Thunderbolt 4 connections and a 3.5mm audio jack. When some competitors—like the HP Dragonfly Pro—have slimmed down by opting for all USB-C or Thunderbolt, it's refreshing to see ports that can be used without an extra dongle. Need to plug in an older flash drive or a monitor? You're good to go here.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Wireless connectivity is also robust in this laptop, with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 providing the latest standards for networking and peripherals.

The OLED display panel is also decidedly premium, with slim bezels, 2,880-by-1,800 resolution, gorgeous brightness, and vibrant color. The only “omission” is the absence of touch-screen functionality, but that's less common among ultraportables that aren't 2-in-1 designs anyway. However, the OLED panel has some real benefits over the usual IPS, like deep and pristine black levels. OLED is also capable of true HDR: The technology's per-pixel illumination is best for contrast control, which also has Dolby Vision support. Pantone-validated color and up to 550 nits of brightness make the display especially sharp-looking and vivid. Matching that is a pair of Harman Kardon-certified speakers, with Dolby Atmos sound.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

While it's an ultraportable keyboard, which as a result has a markedly shallow key travel, the keyboard is fairly comfortable to type on. It's not that different from typing on the Apple MacBook Air, for example. The square-tiled keys are well-spaced, and the backlight delivers decent low-light visibility without a lot of distracting light leakage around the keys.

Testing the Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED: Intel 13th Gen Keeps Up But Doesn't Lead

For our performance comparisons, we looked at other ultraportables in this featherweight class, comparing the Asus with the Apple MacBook Air (the 2022 M2 version), the Dell XPS 13 Plus, and our top-pick HP Pavilion Plus 14, along with the business-oriented Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 and the recent MSI Prestige 13 Evo.

It's a mix of stunningly thin and surprisingly capable systems, all in a mostly similar price range and equally devoted to portability.

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, spreadsheeting, 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. (See more about how we test laptops.)

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 Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs 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 PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window) from workstation maker Puget Systems, 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. However, this laptop was unable to run our current version of this test, so the results have been omitted.

Compared with similarly equipped systems, like the Dell XPS 13 Plus and the MSI Prestige 13 Evo, which use portability-focused Intel CPUs, the Zenbook delivered fairly competitive performance, falling behind in some benchmark tests, but pulling ahead in others. The differences are more pronounced when compared with the HP Pavilion 14 Plus, which uses a beefier H-Series Intel CPU, the AMD-equipped Lenovo ThinkPad Z13, or the Apple MacBook Air, which has Apple's M2 chip. General productivity looks similar (as measured in PCMark 10), but for processor-intensive tasks, like video transcoding or even straightforward image rendering in Cinebench, the Zenbook lagged behind most competitors.

To be clear, the Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED is a plenty capable work machine. It hasn't compared well here, but the chip still cleared the 4,000-point baseline in PCMark 10 for reliable general productivity. However, to also be fair, we wouldn't expect to see much multimedia and content creation chops out of this laptop, which is a shame considering the OLED screen. The Intel Core i7-1355U endured a poor first outing here in a particularly thin-and-light laptop, so we'll have to see it implemented in a few more laptops before making any hard judgments as to whether you should opt for or avoid it.

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PC 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).

Additionally, we 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.

Thanks to the Zenbook's Intel Iris Xe Graphics, it was in fine company for most of our graphics tests. Gaming obviously isn't the intended use of an ultraportable but, for work tasks, it's more than capable. However, you will see that the M2-equipped MacBook Air and the AMD-powered Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 simply delivered better performance in GFXBench and 3DMark, respectively. As was already made clear by most of the productivity tests, despite its OLED screen, this Zenbook is not ideal for content creation or other multimedia work.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test each laptop's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) 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. 

To measure each laptop's screen, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and 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).

One area where the Zenbook did not disappoint is battery life: The laptop lasted nearly 16 hours in our video rundown test. That puts it in the familiar company of top performers, like the Apple MacBook Air (16:49) and the Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 (17:46), but coming in far better than the eight- or nine-hour stretches we got from the Dell XPS 13 Plus and the HP Pavilion Plus 14, respectively.

Display quality also measured as superb in the Zenbook, thanks to its OLED panel. Color quality was impeccable, with 100% gamut reproduction in both the sRGB and DCI-P3 color spaces, and it outperformed even other OLED ultraportables in Adobe RGB color representation.

Brightness wasn't as clear a win—OLED panels simply can't match the backlit IPS displays used by some manufacturers—but it's pretty decent here. Plus, even after hours of use, I never saw anything worth complaining about in the Zenbook's display.

Verdict: A Slick Ultraportable With Slight Performance

We noted plenty to love about the 2023 Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED. From its impeccable OLED display to its nearly 16 hours of battery life, this ultra-slim ultraportable is impressive in some respects. Unfortunately, despite housing a new 13th Gen processor, performance isn't one of those leading areas, with the Zenbook keeping pace among competitors but not leading. (This could be down to this particular implementation, but it's nevertheless disappointing.)

Even so, if you want a capable laptop that can go all day and looks fantastic doing so, the Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED will do the trick with its eye-catching screen and cool coated lid. You can find a better overall experience in other models, like the Editors' Choice-award-holding HP Pavilion Plus 14, but you won't feel let down by this delightfully svelte OLED ultraportable.