Ultrabooks and design + performance often go hand in hand. But a lot of times, the design part can take a back seat or at times, performance can take a hit to offer the design part. With the ASUS Zenbook 14X OLED Space Edition (UX5401ZAS), ASUS attempts to bridge the gap and give an capable notebook that can be taken outside without compromising on the performance part.

First things, the overall unboxing and early impressions of the gadget get approval. Not just you get a pleasant separate box for the laptop, there’s likewise a nifty boc for carrying around the power adapter, which doubles up as a laptop stand. Even the manual guide is packed in a shiny Velcro carry pouch.

Design: One of the note book’s little USPs is its 3.5-inch monochromatic LED on the lid. This little screen is just for showing you the time, battery left, and perhaps some text or animation that you can customize from the MyASUS application. No notification or some other utility there. The overall design on the 14X Space Edition is exactly what you would expect from a special edition device, and it’s not only the titanium color and morse code on the cover. There’s abstract space design on both the lids and close to the palm-rest space. You get a slightly lower typing position for the keyboard and higher for the chassis thanks to the Ergolift hinge design from ASUS that you would notice as soon as you open the lid.

There are two USB type C ports for charging, HDMI 2.0 (b) port on the left side; while the right side has the USB type A, 3.5mm audio jack, microSD card reader and the charging LED on the right side.

Display: The notebook has a 14-inch OLED display with a resolution of 2880 x 1800 that supports HDR content. It supports 90Hz refresh rate and has a lower blue light emission, for which it’s TUV certified. The display is really sharp and has good rich black levels expected from an OLED, alongside contrast and decent-ish brightness. The only disappointing thing about the display is its usage under direct sunlight and glossy finish since it’s a touchscreen. ASUS might have made it a little less prone to fingerprints and smudges. For high resolution videos and images, the display does a really a great job handling multimedia stuff with its default calibration.

Battery, keyboard and trackpad: The device packs a 63Wh battery and ships with a 100W charger (USB type C) with help for quick charging. The greatest disadvantage of this laptop is by all accounts the battery backup, where it barely lasted 4-5 hours in one stretch. The laptop requires around 2 hours to charge from 5% to full. With brightness at around 30% and performance setting set to balance, frequently, the laptop must be connected again in less than 5 hours. The keyboard here is backlit with different settings fro backlit though there’s no sensor for automatic backlit setting. Typing on the keyboard is fine, the give-in is quite decent, keys are responsive, don’t feel cheap at all and fit in well with the overall design and feel.

Performance and OS: The notebook packs a 12th gen Intel i9 Core chip clocked at 2.5GHz with Intel Iris XE graphics card, 32GB LPDDR5 RAM and 1 TB SSD. There’s likewise a 16GB + 512GB model and lower u5 and i7 chip models, as well. It runs on Windows 11 Home (21H2 variant) out of the box. with a three pre-installed applications. Overall performance of the laptop is top notch. playing games, on various modes watching high resolution video, while having your Web browser opened and maybe some documents, the laptop was as yet not very noisy while handling these tasks well. Graphic intensive games can likewise be played on this for which the GPU performance also seems up to the mark.

Basic Specifications of the ASUS Zenbook 14 Flip OLED: