Review Asus Zenbook S14 review: Intel Core Ultra 7 258V makes its debut

[Admin]

The Asus Zenbook S14, the first laptop we’ve tested with Intel’s Lunar Lake. It has longer battery life than last year, but lesser performance in multi-core workloads.

Asus Zenbook S14 review: Intel Core Ultra 7 258V makes its debut : Read more

 

[Altagon]

Still no Thunderbolt 5?! Where it is, I am lost between your bloody lakes!

 

[Gururu]

As Immortan Joe would decry "Mediocre!"

 

[Marlin1975]

As Immortan Joe would decry "Mediocre!"

Yea this is on the newest 3nm TSMC process and this is their best?

Not bad but disappointing.

 

[Nikolay Mihaylov]

Still no Thunderbolt 5?! Where it is, I am lost between your bloody lakes!

I don't care about TB5 at this point. Intel probably omitted it for fears of high power consumption.

What I find inexcusable, especially since the chip actually supports it, is the lack of a third TB port. There should have been one on the right so I can charge the laptop from whichever side is more convenient.

 

[ottonis]

This seems much less impressive compared to recent Intel marketing material that promised its new chips would blow the competition out of the water.
So, maybe Asus screwd up and didn't assemble a laptop with components that would synergistically help the new CPU/GPU shine in its brightest colors, but boy, this is certainly not a game changer, considering what could be expected based on Intel announcements some 2-3 weeks ago.

 

[TheSecondPower]

From reading multiple reviews I think it's quite certain that the OLED display is completely removing Lunar Lake's battery life advantage. I'm still looking for a review that controls that variable. The multithreaded performance isn't really surprising given the limited core and thread count and the fact that the LPE cores aren't on the ring bus. The gaming performance looks like it's every bit as good as promised, although even that is hard to tell because the one reviewer I found turned frame generation on when testing the Ryzen 370! Also we haven't seen the 2-ish models that have higher clock speeds yet. The Geekbench single-threaded score shows a 12% improvement over the 155H which has the same boost clock speed, so that's very close to the 14% promised IPC increase. I'd like to see a great deal more lightly threaded tests.

But I was expecting more battery life and slightly more single-threaded performance. This is moving from Intel's "way behind" 4 node to TSMC's N3B, which is better than even the N3E node Apple M3 chips use. I'm revising my estimation of Intel as a CPU designer down a little bit and Intel as a CPU manufacturer up a little bit in light of this.

 

[Albert.Thomas]

Um, did I miss something? Where are the iGPU benchmarks?

 

[Bikki]

My take with this is to wait for more samples to surface to see the new processor in it's best possible light. This big change for intel chasing efficiency may require vendors to do more than simple processor swap.

 

[Bikki]

Um, did I miss something? Where are the iGPU benchmarks?

I dont remember we have gaming benchmarks in tom's laptop reviews.

 

[Notton]

The IO is lackluster compared to what LNL-V IO is capable of.
At least one TB4/PCIe 40Gbps, and USB 10Gbps are missing.

 

[Giroro]

The 17 (base) Watt Ultra 7 258V is getting compared to the 28W 155H instead of the 15W 155U, which makes it look inferior by losing the nuance of power efficiency. Similarly it's being compared to the 28W (default) Ryzen AI 9 HX 370... instead of some lower wattage Ryzen AI 7 part that probably has a U in the name and I don't think exists yet.

I'm not complaining. Intel deserves these comparisons for being terrible at naming their products, completely fumbling the branding for Lunar Lake, and generally failing to set customer expectations for what Lunar Lake is trying to accomplish.

It's a bummer for Intel that Lunar Lake scores lower than Apple M3 at geekbench. Because I think comparisons against the M3 is where Intel was trying to shine. I don't know how big of a difference Mac OS vs Windows makes in that benchmark, though.

 

[BigNTall]

"September 10th, Microsoft released a security patch named KB5043080 to patch (yet another) critical security flaw in the OS. For some reason this patch hobbles the main benchmarking program the ignorati use to test with, and for some odd reason it only seems to affect Lunar Lake systems" - Cinebench

Charlie Demerjian
Sep 20, 2024

Microsoft Hobbles Intel Once Again​

Opinion: Plausible deniability and sleazy tricks come back​

 

[mwm2010]

I'd rather get the AMD version that came out a month ago, at least until we get some GPU benchmarks. It's a good showing from Intel!

 

[junos]

Typo on the article "On our battery test, the Zenbook S14 for an average of 14 hours and 7 minutes." but the graph shows 13 hours and 51 minutes. Also the wording is not right, should be "the Zenbook S14 lasted for"

 

[snarfbot]

How about an sd card slot, why are they always so stingy with io