The Zenbook has been among the most well-known mainstream laptops from the house of Asus for years now. The new ZenBook 14 (UM3406GA), priced at ₹1,12,990, aims to cater to both productivity and entertainment needs. Let’s try and see if it’s worth that:
The Zenbook 14 comes with a familiar design with an aluminium chassis and an anodised lid that has lines all over it and subtle ASUS Zenbook branding near the bottom.
It does catch on to smudges and fingerprints rather quickly, and you would need to wipe it clean quite frequently if not sitting still with it at a place. The bezels around the 14-inch touch display are not too broad, while the front camera and its physical shutter sit subtly at the top. The backlit keyboard has decent travel and a comfortable but quicker keystroke than you might expect.
It’s comfortable and well spaced out, though, to work on the go. The trackpad is large and generally responsive with standard Windows gestures. The left side houses the HDMI 2.1 port, 3.5mm audio jack, 2 USB Type-C ports, of which one is USB 4.0 Gen 3, and the other is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port. The other side has one USB 3.2 Gen 1 type A port. It would have been nice to have one USB Type-C port on each side rather than on the same side. The hinge of the laptop seems sturdy and has never once shown any creaks or anything worth noticing.
The 14-inch full HD+ (1920x1200) OLED display with support for 60Hz refresh rates is quite bright and has decent viewing angles—it handles HDR playback okay, but nothing too great. The details on videos and images are retained with good colour reproduction.
The device runs on Windows 11 Home 25H2 version and is equipped with AMD Ryzen AI 5 chip (2GHz quad core processor), along with integrated AMD Radeon 840M graphics chip, 16GB DDR5 RAM and 1TB m.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD. Day-to-day performance of the laptop is reliable with Office apps, Web browsers, playback of full HD videos, as well as running a game like Call of Duty at low settings, but don’t expect much more than that in terms of gameplay. The touch display is reasonably responsive, though I didn’t really find any standout compelling reason to use it—this is all with the default balanced mode. I didn’t see the Zenbook 14 show any heating issues or fans going berserk. Running a local AI LLM model over LM Studio worked okay, so one could do some less intensive work, such as getting work tips, basic research on some general topics, and so on.
The 75Wh battery lasted me a little over one working day most of the time with moderate to heavy use, and the laptop rarely showed any battery drainage issues on standby, though with some of the recent Windows updates, they seemed to be roughed out. The bundled 65-watt charger can charge it in around 1.5 hours when the laptop is open. The speakers on this thing are loud, but not the best in terms of depth for watching movies and TV series, but okay for music tracks.
The new Zenbook 14 comes across as a safe incremental upgrade over the predecessor, with not too much of a jump in any specific areas but reliable performance in most departments. While RAM and storage prices aren’t going down any time soon, value may not be the right word here, but for what it brings, the device doesn’t necessarily let you down for a work and entertainment laptop.