ASUS Zenbook A14 UX3407 (2025) Laptop Review

The ASUS Zenbook A14 is available in an Iceland Gray or Zabriskie Beige colorway. See the bottom of the laptop.

The ASUS Zenbook A14's build quality is good. Dubbed 'Ceraluminum', the chassis' material is an alloy made of ceramic and aluminum. The body feels relatively sturdy—there's a fair amount of flex on the keyboard deck, but only a little bit on the lid. An element in the construction that could be better is the display's hinge. It isn't so much a build quality issue, but the hinge's resistance could be tighter, as it would prevent the screen from moving when picking up the laptop. The finish has a soft matte feel that's similar to some mice (think Razer DeathAdder V3 Pro), albeit more metallic and premium. It doesn't pick up many fingerprints or smudges; minor scratches appear with regular use, but a quick wipe with a microfiber cloth buffs them away almost completely. The feet feel solid and stick firmly to the bottom.

Our unit's display is slightly warped, which you can see in the reflections photo; however, the warping is so minor that it's unlikely to be an issue in terms of durability.

The hinge operates smoothly when opening and closing the lid. As mentioned in the Build Quality section above, its resistance is on the looser side, which makes the laptop easier to open with one hand but causes the screen to move when picking up the laptop. Heavy typing doesn't make the screen wobble, though.

Accessing the ASUS Zenbook A14's internals is very easy; you only need to remove 10 screws and release the bottom panel's clips. A prying tool isn't necessary, but might help. The screws are of two different sizes, so it's best to keep them organized to facilitate the reassembly. The storage slot supports M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

Download the service manual here.

• 65W power adapter
• Documentation

Note: Models with a Snapdragon X Elite SoC come with a 90W power adapter.

The ASUS Zenbook A14 is only available with an FHD+ OLED display. The FHD+ resolution looks pretty sharp on a 14-inch screen—you can see individual pixels up close, but this isn't a problem at typical viewing distances. A 16:10 aspect ratio is great for productivity, as it gives you more vertical space than a standard 16:9 screen, allowing you to see more information at once when reading a document or website. OLEDs are susceptible to permanent burn-in, but it's unlikely to be an issue if you take active measures to prevent it, like hiding Windows' taskbar.

You can only get this laptop with a 60Hz display, which is fairly typical when it comes to productivity laptops. A higher refresh rate improves motion smoothness and input responsiveness, but it won't matter much if you mainly look at static content like documents and spreadsheets. This panel's response time is excellent, resulting in only a tiny amount of ghosting behind fast-moving objects.

The display's contrast ratio is effectively infinite since OLEDs can turn off individual pixels to produce perfect blacks.

The display gets bright enough for use in most indoor settings but not outdoors in broad daylight. Visibility can be an issue, even indoors, as the display's glossy finish struggles with bright light sources like lamps. ASUS advertises a maximum brightness of 600 cd/m² in HDR; we could only achieve 534 cd/m², and that's only in scenes with small highlights.

The display's glossy finish doesn't handle reflections all that well, struggling especially with bright light sources like lamps and open windows during the day. These reflections are visible even with the screen at full brightness.

The display's out-of-the-box accuracy is okay. Overall, the white balance is very good; the inaccuracies are mostly at higher brightness levels where there's too much red. As for color accuracy, the color dE is high, mainly because the panel uses a wider color space by default, resulting in oversaturation. Unfortunately, the gamma doesn't follow the curve at all, making dark scenes too dark and bright scenes too bright.

The display's color gamut is superb. It has full coverage of the sRGB and DCI P3 color spaces, as well as near-full coverage of the Adobe RGB color space. This panel is suitable for general media consumption and color-critical work like photo and video editing.

The display's flicker is unlikely to be an issue for most people, as the flicker frequency is relatively high. However, it may still cause eye strain if you're sensitive to display flickering.

The ASUS Zenbook A14 has a great keyboard. Its layout feels spacious and is easy to get used to. The keys could use slightly more travel and tactility, but this is otherwise a comfortable keyboard to type on for long periods. There's some padding to provide a more cushioned feel when bottoming out, which helps reduce the harshness you would typically feel on keyboards with short travel. There are three backlight brightness levels; the backlight shines well and evenly through the legends.

The ASUS Zenbook A14 has a large, smooth touchpad that tracks all movements and gestures well. Palm rejection works as intended, and there are no issues with actions like dragging and dropping items. Swiping at the edges of the touchpad lets you quickly access some system settings, like changing the screen brightness and audio volume level—you can disable this feature in the MyASUS app. This is a diving board touchpad with mechanical buttons. You can perform clicks pretty far up (almost three-quarters of the way up); it just takes more effort the higher you go. The actuation feels reasonably tactile—not super clicky but not mushy either.

The ASUS Zenbook A14's bottom-firing speakers get reasonably loud with only a small amount of compression at higher volume levels. Unfortunately, they sound unnatural, boxy, and hollow, with very little bass.

The webcam is decent. The image is a little soft, with a small amount of noise here and there, but you can still see some fine details. There's a slight greenish tint, and the color temperature is on the warmer side. Voices sound clear, though there's some static noise in the background.

The ASUS Zenbook A14 has a great port selection. The USB-A port supports USB Gen 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speed of up to 10Gbps. Both USB-Cs support USB4 data transfer speed (up to 40Gbps), DisplayPort 1.4, and Power Delivery. ASUS advertises the HDMI port as an HDMI 2.1 TMDS (Transition-Minimized Differential Signaling), which has a resolution output limit of 4k @ 60Hz; however, we can confirm that the port can output a 4k @ 120Hz signal.

The ASUS Zenbook A14 uses the Qualcomm QCNFA725A Wi-Fi 6E wireless adapter. Models with a Snapdragon X Elite X1E 78 100 SoC have a Wi-Fi 7 wireless adapter. Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 have faster speeds, lower latency, and less signal interference than previous Wi-Fi standards. However, you need a Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 router to benefit from these features. Check out our best router recommendations if you want to upgrade your home wireless network.

The ASUS Zenbook A14 is available with the following SoCs:

• Qualcomm Snapdragon X X1 26 100 (8 cores/8 threads, up to 2.98GHz, Adreno X1-45 iGPU, 30MB cache)
• Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P 42 100 (8 cores/8 threads, up to 3.2GHz, Adreno X1-45 iGPU, 30MB cache)
• Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E 78 100 (12 cores/12 threads, up to 3.4GHz, Adreno X1-85 iGPU, 42MB cache)

All three are ARM-based SoCs (System-on-Chip) using Qualcomm's Oryon cores. Qualcomm has three tiers of SoCs: Snapdragon X Elite, Snapdragon X Plus, and Snapdragon X, with the latter being the lowest tier. These are power-efficient chips designed for general productivity, like text processing, spreadsheets, web browsing, and video playback. The top-end Snapdragon X Elite chip can handle fairly demanding multi-threaded workloads, but as we've seen with other ARM-based laptops with these Snapdragon processors, hardware isn't really the problem; it's software compatibility, since many programs don't run natively on an ARM-based system. This means some apps, especially professional third-party apps, might not work or will run poorly through emulation. Compatibility will likely improve over time, but for now, just check that the apps you use run properly. All three SoCs have the same NPU (Neural Processing Unit) with a rated performance of 45 TOPS (Trillions of Operations per Second) to handle AI tasks.

See more information about the Snapdragon SoCs in Qualcomm's product brief.

The ASUS Zenbook A14 is only available with an integrated GPU. The Snapdragon X X1 26 100 and Snapdragon X Plus X1P 42 100 have the same Adreno X1-45 iGPU, while the Snapdragon X Elite X1E 78 100 has the Adreno X1-85 iGPU. These iGPUs are primarily designed for light productivity tasks, so don't expect to do anything intensive, like 3D graphics or gaming. The X1-85 is faster than the X1-45, but the difference isn't big enough to make much difference in practice.

You can get this laptop with 16GB or 32GB of RAM. The memory isn't user-replaceable.

You can get this laptop with 512GB or 1TB of storage. The storage is user-replaceable—the slot supports M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

The ASUS Zenbook A14 scores fairly well in the Geekbench 5 benchmarks. The Snapdragon X X1 26 100's single-thread performance is a little low compared to current-gen competing processors from the likes of AMD, Intel, and Apple, but its multi-thread performance is pretty good, scoring in the same ballpark as Intel's Lunar Lake SoCs. This performance is suitable for common, everyday productivity tasks. The Snapdragon X Plus X1P 42 100 is only slightly faster overall, while the Snapdragon X Elite X1E 78 100 is significantly faster, especially in multi-threaded workloads. The GPU compute test doesn't run in Geekbench 5, but as mentioned in the GPU section, the integrated GPU is pretty weak and isn't suitable for intensive tasks. It runs in Geekbench 6, though; here are all three results: 

Geekbench 6

• Single-Thread: 1599
• Multi-Thread: 8042
• GPU Compute: 7408

Cinebench R23 doesn't run properly on ARM-based systems, resulting in unusually low numbers, so we've performed additional benchmarks in Cinebench 2024, which has a native ARM version. Here are the results:

• Single-thread (Best Performance): 72
• Multi-thread (Best Performance): 541

The Snapdragon X X1 26 100's performance is only suitable for light and some moderately intensive tasks. Compared to the Apple MacBook Air 13 (M4, 2025)'s base M4 SoC, its single-thread performance is 58% slower, while its multi-thread performance is 25% behind. The Snapdragon X Elite X1E 78 100 is the best option if you need to run heavier multi-threaded applications. For highly intensive workloads, you're better off getting a gaming or workstation laptop.

While you can render 3D images in Blender using the CPU, getting a laptop with a discrete GPU is best, as even an entry-level GPU, like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050, can render images much faster.

The Snapdragon X's Adreno GPU is an integrated graphics processor designed for light productivity tasks, so don't expect to play any graphically intensive games. You can play some simple, puzzle-like games or older titles, but you'll have to play at a lower resolution or with low graphics settings to get playable frame rates. Also, since most games don't run natively on an ARM processor, the performance will vary significantly from one game to another, depending on how well the Prism emulation layer works for a particular game.

Models with the Snapdragon X Elite X1E 78 100 SoC will likely have a shorter battery life.

Borderlands 3 isn't playable on the ASUS Zenbook A14. The Snapdragon SoC's integrated graphics aren't powerful enough to handle this and other similarly demanding titles. Also, the game doesn't run natively on an ARM-based processor, so there's likely some performance loss from running it through Microsoft's Prism translation layer. The Snapdragon X Elite's iGPU will fare better, but not enough to make the game playable. 

Civilization VI runs terribly at 1080p. You can get over 30 fps with low graphical settings, which is enough for a strategy game such as this, but the gameplay is still choppy, and the average turn time is very long.

Counter-Strike 2 isn't playable at 1080p. The gameplay is extremely choppy, even with low graphical settings.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider runs poorly on the ASUS Zenbook A14. The gameplay is too choppy due to frame drops, even with low graphical settings.

The keyboard deck gets quite warm under load, but the hot spot is near the top of the deck, away from where most people rest their hands. The bottom of the laptop reaches 43.5 °C (110.3 °F), which is warm but not enough to cause discomfort when using the device on your lap.

The fans are fairly loud at full speed. You can change the fan profile via the MyASUS app, albeit at the cost of some performance loss.

We can't test the performance over time because the software we use to perform the test isn't compatible with Windows on ARM. That said, there's likely some thermal throttling, which is typical for most thin and light laptops.

The ASUS Zenbook A14 has a few pre-installed applications; see this video for the full list.

The ASUS Zenbook A14 has a Windows Hello facial recognition IR camera. You can use it to log in quickly, authorize purchases in the Windows Store, and auto-fill saved passwords on supported websites.