All righty, folks. Big video today. It is a two for one. We’re going to be reviewing Asus’s new Zenbook 14s for 2025. We are also going to be doing an Intel verse AMD comparison as we have two identical ZenBooks other than the processors. This one has Intel’s new Core Ultra 7 Arrow H processor and this one has AMD’s competitor, the Ryzen 7 350 Kraken Point. Now, since I value your time, I’m not going to make you watch this whole video to find out what the story is. Instead, I’m going to tell you right now. These books continue to deliver a somewhat premium experience for a somewhat reasonable price. In an era of massive inflation, I’m glad to see that this is still kind of true in 2025. You can buy the new AMD model for under $1,000 and the Intel model is a little over. This is about $100 more than these were in 2023. Also, important note, Asus laptops MSRP is not their real price. They regularly go on big sales, so you should really be buying these for around $800 to $900 depending on tariffs. At that price, these new ZenBooks offer very good value. A solid all round laptop with a powerful CPU. Oh, and please don’t confuse these two with the ZenBook S14. That is a more premium, thin, and light that has a less powerful CPU. Seriously, the people naming these products are really keeping me in business. Anyway, if you’re choosing between the Intel or the AMD models, the Intel version has better CPU performance and significantly better graphics. However, if you’re doing performance tasks, our Intel unit has high pitch fan noise, whereas our AMD model, it didn’t. But note, the AMD version from last year, it actually performs almost identically. So, if you can find that older model on sale, I’d get that one. When it comes to Intel, there is a big jump between processor generation. So, I’d avoid the older Intel model. And with that said, let’s go through the details. Aerolake H is Intel’s new mid-range processors. These give you more performance than Intel’s Luna Lake, whose chips end in a V, which is really weird. But AiraLake H draws more power. On the flip side, you get less performance than Intel’s new AiraLake HX found in large gaming laptops. You can think of AOL H is kind of the processor you would want if you need solid performance, but still want decent portability. So, larger 14-in laptops and smaller 16s. Compared to the Arrolakeh Cordra 9 that we have thoroughly tested, this new Ultra 7 variant is very similar. It just has lower max clock speeds. Compared to the first gen Ultra 7s known as 155H, although core count is the same, there are quite a few differences. Lithography has changed and power drawn clock speeds are now higher. We’ll see how this plays out in a sec. On AMD’s Kraken Point, the difference is bar material. That’s when compared to their Zen 5 Ryzen 9 chips. We have significantly less cores and the GPU is noticeably cut down. It literally has half the compute units. Compared to the older Ryzen 7 8840HS that this chip replaces, the new one has slightly slower clock speeds. Let’s jump into CPU performance. Starting with Geekbench. This tests a variety of common performance tasks that you may actually do on your laptop. The ZenBook 14 with Intel’s Ultra 7255H is the fastest ZenBook 14 we’ve ever tested. That’s in multi-core. This being said, it looses out to the ZenBook Duo, which has the Ultra 9 version of this Aerol Lakeake H processor, more so than we would think from just looking at the specs. This new Core Ultra 7, it isn’t as fast in both multi and single core as the Ryzen 9 Zen 5 chip in our Omnibook Ultra, nor as fast as the M4 processor in the MacBook Air. Switching to the AMD Ryzen 7 Kraken Point, it beats out Arrow Lake in single core and gets very close to it in multi-core. Compared to the Zen4 processor it replaces, it’s a good amount faster in single core, but not much faster in multi-core. Swapping over to Cinebench, which tests the laptop’s performance under a max load. The Intel 255H takes a clear lead over the AMD Ryzen 7 chip, both in multi and single core. You can see that in this test, the Arolech H Ultra 7 and Ultra 9, they are very close. On the AMD side, you can see the immense difference between the Ryzen 7 and 9. The Ryzen 9 chip is much faster in multi-core, which is a testament to the difference in core count that I spoke about earlier. Another interesting point is that the older ZenBook 14 with AMD’s Ryzen 7 8840HS performs around the same in multi-core, but it trails the new chip in single core. The difference between them, it’s super small. Now, let’s take a look at sustained performance over a 10-minute torture test. The ZenBook 14 with Intel, it can’t maintain its full performance. It has to throttle down a little. This is in line with last year’s Intel Zenbook 14 with the Ultra 7155H chip. AMD’s Kraken Point, on the other hand, has no problems maintaining its performance. This is an improvement over the older AMD’s ZenBook, which saw a slight performance drop. Power draw is an interesting one. The Intel laptop can burst higher, but on average is around the same as the AMD variant. It’s nice to see that the Intel version only draws a little more power on average than last year’s Intel model, but as I showed you, it gives you a good amount more performance. 21% more power, but 34% more performance. On the AMD front, it’s not such a good story. The new model can burst 10 watts higher, but over our test, it sustained power draw was around the same, 32 watts. This is in line with what we saw earlier with the Ryzen 7 360 processor that we recently tested in the ThinkPad T14S. These new Ryzen 7 processors, they perform around the same as the older Zen 4884HS for around the same power draw. This is really disappointing. Funnily enough, their power efficiency is neck andneck with Intel’s. similar score over a 10-minute test and similar power draw on average. That being said, as I showed you, the Intel CPU performs better in short tasks. In the case of the Ryzen 9 CPU, if that’s what you’re considering, it performs around 20% better than Intel’s Ultra 9 in multi-core. But guess what? It draws around that much more in power. This means that Intel and AMD are kind of neck andneck right now in power efficiency for these types of laptops. But I would say that Intel does have the upper hand as their single core is better, as is their graphics, which we’ll get to in a sec. Taking a look at CPU core temperatures, the Intel chips hit a high max temperature, but they actually drop down quickly and average lower temperatures than the Ryzen processors. That applies to both the Intel Ultra 7 versus the Ryzen 7 and the Intel Ultra 9 versus the Ryzen 9. When we switch to heat, you actually feel we see an interesting result. The Zenbook 14 with Ryzen 7 is noticeably cooler to the touch on the keyboard deck than the Intel variant. But I want to mention something important here. Most of the heat that these laptops generate, it’s concentrated around the number row and the function row that’s at the top of the keyboard deck, nowhere near the palm rest. So, this difference, it looks stuck on our graphs, but in real life, it isn’t nearly as noticeable. Fan noise under a max load between all our ZenBooks, it’s pretty similar. The only one that is noticeably quieter is our ZenBook S14, but that has Intel’s lower powered Luna Lake processor. Now, in real world use, doing light office tasks like writing the script for this very video, both laptops felt comfortably cool to the touch. They were also both very quiet. However, if you do any performance tasks, the fan noise on the Intel model was much more noticeable. It was high pitched whereas the AMD model was not. This is odd as their cooling solutions seem identical. Perhaps this is a manufacturing variance or maybe it’s caused by other changes within the internals. For example, the SSDs are located in different spots. If you have the Intel Zenbook, please let me know with a comment below if your fan noise is high pitch, too. Continuing with noise, both models unfortunately have coil wine. This is faint electrical noise emanating from the keyboard deck. It was a little more noticeable on the Intel model, but was there on the AMD model, too. Before we get into GPU performance, if you are interested to know how the laptops perform on each of their performance modes, here are the results. Intel outperforms AMD at the higher performance modes, but underperforms at the lower modes. Temperatures you feel are pretty similar, other than the anomaly at full speed, where the AMD laptop feels unusually cool. And yes, we did retest this. Fan noise between the Intel and AMD laptops are pretty much identical at each mode. Looking at these performance modes, normally would tell you to run at the default standard mode for minimal drops in performance for significantly less heat and fan noise. That is still true with the AMD model, but the Intel model, it is not. It’s a pretty significant drop in performance. Also, if choosing between the two performance modes, just go for full speed. The performance mode has similar fan noise and heat, yet just performs a bit worse. Asus, for the sake of my team who has to test all of this, please don’t give us two performance modes that just do the same thing. Taking a look at GPU performance in Time Spy, a gaming rasterization benchmark, the Intel Zenbook just thrashes the AMD one. It’s not even close. The 860M graphics in the Ryzen 7 350 is significantly worse than the 890M in the Ryzen 9 HX375. As I explained earlier, on the Intel front, this Ultra 7 processor gets the same ARK140TG GPU as its bigger Ultra 9 brother, but it is noticeably slower. In fact, it doesn’t even outperform the older Intel Zenbook from last year. Anyway, this big GPU difference between the Intel and the AMD models, it carries across to the heat you’ll feel while gaming. The AMD model, it gets hotter for similar fan noise. Let’s take a look at Wildlife Extreme, a crossplatform GPU benchmark that uses Vulcan. This allows us to compare these laptops with Apples. You can see that the Zenbook 14’s GPU, it can’t compete with Apple’s M4s found in the fanless MacBook Air. We didn’t do any creator tasks as these really aren’t creator laptops obviously, but generally speaking, Intel’s quicksync does help beat out AMD laptops in such tasks. Given that the Intel laptop is already faster in CPU and GPU tasks, we expect Intel to be in the lead here. When it comes to Wi-Fi, the Intel model has Wi-Fi 7, but our AMD model only has Wi-Fi 6E. All righty. Let’s now take a look at battery life. We charged both laptops up and played a movie on repeat with the brightness dimmed to 200 nits until they died. The AMD model was the winner here with almost 19 hours of battery. The Intel model trailed at 17. Regardless, these are both very good results, likely aided by the ZenBook’s large 75watth battery and our unit’s low resolution displays. Both these new ZenBooks do significantly better than their older versions. Please note the abysmal score by our Intel model from last year is because we sent back our 2024 model with a 1920 x 1200 resolution display. That’s before we started including this test. So we had to run it on our unit with a higher resolution 3K panel. To give an indication of performance tasks while on battery, we ran Cinebench while unplugged. The Intel model was not able to maintain its full performance. The AMD model was, but given that the AMD model actually performs worse, guys, it’s much of a matchness here. After playing Cinebench on a loop for 30 minutes while unplugged, the Intel model had much more battery remaining than the AMD. In this test, even the older Zenbooks from last year beat out the AMD model. The laptops, they look and feel very basic. Nothing much has changed here for 2025. The AMD1 has the edgeline design on the lid, and our Intel unit has the flat design. Both of these MBOs picked up a lot of fingerprint grease on their lids. The laptop screen feels very rigid, but their keyboard decks do have a little flex. Moving around the laptop, you get a single USBA 5 GB port on the left side. On the right side, two Thunderbolt 4 ports which support charging for the Intel model and two USBC ports for the AMD that support charging, but only one of them is 4.0 speeds. You also get one HDMI 2.1 TMDS port and a headphone mic combo jack. Overall, a pretty decent port selection. However, both charging capable ports are on the right side. If what you’re plugging into is on the other side, the cable may get in your way. The display, unfortunately, it doesn’t open easily with one hand. Once open, both our ZenBooks have the 14-inch OLED 1920 x 1200 touchscreen. There is also a higher resolution 3K version that is available on some variants. We know these panels pretty well, and they haven’t changed from the prior years, which is kind of disappointing. Whether you get one with a lower or higher resolution, they both only hit around 380 nits of brightness. This is not as bright as many other laptops sold at this price point. What’s worse is that they have very glossy touchcreens. This combined with their lower brightness means that you are going to battle reflections if you use these laptops with a bright light source behind you. This has been a consistent problem with Asus laptops with OLED displays and is the reason I don’t personally use them. Furthermore, the lower resolution Zenbook also caps out at a 60 Hz refresh rate. The higher resolution ones, they do go up to 120. Regardless of which you get, the displays exhibit PWM flickering when lowering the brightness. That is common on OLED panels. We were able to detect it at around 70% brightness and lower. The panels also have a slight screen door effect, meaning that when you stare closely at white colored content, you may see colored pixels peeping through. Look, for what it’s worth, the displays on these laptops are certainly very usable as long as you angle them away from reflections. If these panels were in a cheaper laptop, we’d be cheering. But in 2025, for a laptop at this price point, it’s a mare and a pity Asus just still hasn’t addressed these issues. The keyboard is basic, but good enough. The keys have 1.4 4 mm of key travel, a good amount of spacing between them, and the layout is standard. Now, huge news, everyone. Asus claims this keyboard has their revolutionary quiet keyboard technology, which elegantly eliminates intrusive noises. Guys, what a bunch of baloney. Yes, most of the keys on this keyboard are quiet to type on, but not all. For example, the backspace key is noisier to press, and you press that one a lot. The keyboard does have a multi-stage backlight, but not a lot of light passes through the key characters. So, it works, but you may find yourself squinting to find a certain key in a dark room. Once again, thinking about the price that these laptops are sold at, this keyboard just feels a little cheap. The key press, it doesn’t seem as precise as on other keyboards. They also have a little wobble to them. And the Andes key specifically, they required more force to press than I’d like. The Intel one, on the other hand, was very comfortable. So, perhaps there are some manufacturing variances between our units. Onto the trackpad. It is definitely usable, but once again, it’s not a top one at this price point. It’s a mechanical trackpad with tracking that feels a little too slippery for my liking. It’s better than the ones in Lenovo’s Yoga and Slim Laptops, but it’s nowhere near as good as the haptic trackpad in the Surface Laptop 7 or the MacBook Air. The speakers sound okay. I found the sound pleasing, but the speakers, they really don’t get as loud as they should, and they completely lack bass. Take a listen. Here I am on the AMD version of the Zenbook using its 1080 webcam. Colors to me seem just a little bit off. Now I’m on the Intel version. Can you see a difference? By the way, both these webcams, they do have a physical privacy shutter at the top. On both laptops, the only thing that was upgradeable was the SSD. The single fan cooling solution, it looks the same on both, which is odd. As I mentioned, the Intel variant, it definitely has high-pitch fan noise, which the AMD1 doesn’t. To test Linux, we booted up Fedora 41 on both laptops and had a little play around. For the most part, it was a success. Wi-Fi, brightness up and down, the webcam, it all worked. The only thing that didn’t work on both was the speakers. And on the Intel Zenbook specifically, Bluetooth didn’t work. Fedora 42, by the way, it was just released while I filmed this video, so we will test that one in future. Well, since I gave you my conclusions right up front, I’m going to keep this ending brief. If you find these laptops on a good sale, they are a very good buy. I do mean that. If these aren’t on sale, there are a lot of options to consider. Lenovo Slim 7i or Edition gives you better battery life and a better display. It does use Intel’s Luna Lake processor though, so it isn’t as powerful. If you want more performance, HP’s Omnibook Ultra has AMD’s Ryzen 9 processor, which is much more powerful, and the laptop as a whole, it feels more premium. If you are open to using a Mac, we highly recommend Apple’s MacBook Air with M4. you’ll get a much more premium laptop with a more powerful processor. I’ve linked all of these recommendations down below. On that note, make sure to head on over to our website at bestlaptop.deals. We just changed its name. Over there, you’ll be able to track prices across retailers to ensure that you are getting the best deal. We even link you to the retailer currently offering the best price. There has never been a more important time to save money as laptop prices, they are on the rise, particularly here in the USA. Finally, we are really trying to produce the best possible videos we can. I hope you’ve seen that in today’s one. If you do, please, please, please get subscribed. It really does make a big difference and it helps us grow. That means that we can make more videos for you and boy do we want to. Till next time, go do something awesome with your day and I will catch you later.