Aesthetics, Portability, Media Creation In One Device: Asus Zenbook 14 OLED UX3402ZA Review

Asus Zenbook 14 OLED UX3402ZA Review

The Zenbook 14 OLED UX3402ZA is a good thin and light laptop. The OLED display looks stunning and the performance is good for office, school and media creation. The keyboard is comfortable, the trackpad works well, and it has an awesome built-in number pad when needed. The software is relatively clean and the bundled Asus apps are well-designed and useful.

The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (UX3402ZA) is a premium laptop with a 12th-generation Intel processor. It has Intel Core i7-1260P, with a 90Hz 1800p OLED display, 16GB of memory, up to 1TB of NVMe storage, dual Thunderbolt connectivity, and a 75Wh battery.

Design

The Zenbook 14 OLED has a clean and minimal design, with a soft-touch matte aluminium body and a large Asus logo engraved on the back of the display. The bottom lid also has a thin strip of vents.

The display has a traditional hinge mechanism but the bottom edge of the display is designed to lift the base slightly for better air intake. The hinge allows the display to open fully 180 degrees and remain flat.

The laptop comes in two colours, a greenish Aqua Caledon and the Ponder Blue.

Display

With a 14-inch OLED display, 2880×1800, 90Hz resolution, the display supports 10-bit colour and HDR10 content. As with most OLED panels, the display has an incredibly wide colour gamut, with full coverage of the sRGB and DCI-P3 colour spaces and 97% Adobe RGB coverage.

By default, the display is set to a more vibrant colour profile with a cool colour temperature. Through the MyASUS software, the user can switch the display to sRGB, DCI-P3 or Display-P3 colour spaces, as well as adjust various other settings.

The device has a very good panel, it responds well to calibration and you can get excellent results with it. Being an OLED panel, you can also have infinite contrast, with perfectly deep blacks. The added contrast adds depth and dimensionality to the image which is difficult to describe but easy to see, even on this relatively small panel.

The viewing angles are decent. OLED panels have no luminance shifts when viewed out of angle. The display has exceptional response times.

The HDR performance on the Zenbook 14 OLED display is outstanding, reaching around 330 nits in SDR and can go up to 600 nits in HDR. The excellent quality display is one of the strong points of this device.

Keyboard

In the top row is the power button, which has a built-in capacitive fingerprint sensor. In the lower right corner, Asus has used an inverted T-shaped layout for the arrow keys, which makes them much easier to distinguish by touch when navigating.

The keyboard is comfortable to type with good spacing and decent tactile feedback. The keyboard is also backlit and the brightness can be adjusted in three steps. The backlight is uniform and readable in the dark.

The trackpad underneath is spacious with a relatively smooth surface that is comfortable to use and all gestures work reliably. The Asus Numberpad feature projects the numeric keypad, allowing you to quickly type in a few numbers without the need for a separate numeric keyboard. This function can be activated with the button in the upper right corner of the trackpad.

Connectivity

The Zenbook 14 OLED has most of its ports on the right side, a full-size HDMI 2.0b port, a headphone jack, two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, and a microSD slot. On the left is a single USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port.

The Thunderbolt 4 ports also double as a charging port for the notebook. In addition to the wired options, you also get dual-band Wi-Fi 6 connectivity and Bluetooth 5.2.

Performance

The Zenbook 14 OLED is equipped with an Intel Core i7-1260P. It has 4 P-cores and 8 E-cores, for a total of 16 threads. The P-cores / E-cores have a base clock of 2.1 GHz / 1.5 GHz and can increase up to 4.7 GHz / 3.4 GHz. The base power is 28 W, but can increase up to 64 W.

Intel Xe integrated graphics is also included. It has a maximum frequency of 1.4 GHz. The MyASUS application allows you to adjust the fan profile, which in turn also adjusts the performance of the device. There are three modes: Performance, Standard and Whisper.

Performance mode runs the fan to the maximum. Standard mode causes the fan to spin a little slower and also increases more gradually. Whisper Mode is pretty much exactly what it says on the box. The fan is barely audible and doesn’t turn on, regardless of the system load.

Storage performance is excellent. The included 512GB Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 SSD performs very well, producing excellent read / write results.

Overall, the Zenbook 14 OLED offers good performance for everyday use for a thin and light machine.

Battery Life

The Zenbook 14 OLED UX3402ZA has a 75 Wh battery. The laptop comes with a 65W USB-PD charger which claims to charge the battery to 60% in 49 minutes.

The laptop provides approximately 5-6 hours of battery life under normal use of web browsing, document editing and video playback with the display set to 90Hz and 250 nits of brightness and performance set to Standard / Balanced mode. This could be further improved by using the Whisper profile, reducing the brightness and keeping the display at the default 60Hz mode.

The Zenbook 14 OLED UX3402ZA has a pair of bottom-up speakers on both sides with a pre-installed and activated Dolby Atmos app. It also has a 720p webcam.

The laptop comes with Windows 11 Pro. The MyASUS app has its dedicated keyboard shortcut. Through this app, you can check battery charging settings, fan profiles, OLED pixel refresh settings, display colour profiles, webcam and microphone settings. You can also update the drivers for your machine and check out the promotional offers that Asus has available on various software and services. It is well-designed and easy to use.

The MyASUS app has options that allow you to select the amount of battery you want to charge. You can choose between 100%, 80% or 60% and the lower the figure, the longer the theoretical battery life. It’s a good option, especially for those who don’t necessarily use their notebooks outside.

Basic Specifications
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