ASUSZenbook S16 OLED UM5605WA 16.0' 3K 120Hz OLED Touchscreen Laptop (AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Processor, 32GB RAM, 1TB PCIe SSD, UK Layout Backlit Keyboard, Windows 11 Home, Wi-Fi 7)

I’m genuinely wowed by my new ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406)! From the moment I unboxed it, I was struck by how slick and slimmer it is than I expected—truly a premium feel. The build quality is solid yet lightweight, making it perfect for both work and travel.Performance-wise, it handles everything I throw at it effortlessly, from multitasking to more demanding applications. The display is sharp and vibrant, and the keyboard is incredibly comfortable to type on. The sound is incredible and battery life has also been very impressive so far.This is absolutely good value for money!Overall, this laptop has exceeded my expectations in every way. ASUS really nailed it with this one. Highly recommended!

This is an amazing device, easy to setup and very fast for an ultra portable laptop.So light and very well designed, sound from speakers is excellent.

The Asus Zenbook 14 UX3402VA i5 non-touch version is all we wanted from a light laptop for domestic duties. 14 inch is the sweet spot for size (and 1.6:1 so not too letterbox), the 2.8K OLED display is great for the money, with an i5 it runs not too hot with decent performance, good keyboard and trackpad and you can still plug in a monitor over HDMI, a USB A mouse dongle, or 3.5mm jack for headphones unlike a lot of pricey ultra portables. These ZenBook Intel i5 based machines are discounted I guess as the intel ultra and especially the imminent QUALCOMM X versions will push these a bit more downmarket - which is good for us. This is a great package. I wanted non-touch as the display is even better that way.The downsides: mine had McAfee preinstalled, I uninstalled it and I am unsure if it completely 100% uninstalled. May need to download and use the McAfee complete removal tool - isn't that so last century? PLEASE STOP preinstalling invasive stuff like this - people will just want to put on what they are used to or already have a license for if they consider Windows inbuilt AV, firewall etc is lacking (which is splitting hairs these days) - and I would steer well clear of McAfee from bitter experience. It even tried to scare me that my machine may be unprotected from viruses inviting me to cancel the uninstall. This is a blatant lie - the machine falls back on Microsoft AV which is quite capable. I read the uninstall guide which told me I should have activated my license before uninstalling. Ooops. Ah - but then that is just to make sure I am OK to reinstall later. Which I will never do. Hurdles, trip wires and rubbish.Next up is Amazon: the product info says this machine is full HD with HD pixel dimensions. The title says it is 3K. Wrong and wrong - it is 2.8K. You only know if this is touch or non-touch if "touchscreen" is nowhere in the description. I've seen other machines having a tick in a box indicating if the machine has a touchscreen or not when comparing models. Absent here. The description to pay attention to is under "From the manufacturer" Product "At a glance" panel. That seems accurate. Took a while to work this out when looking at different Zenbooks - which you need to do when spending £100s.ps - the panel doesn't wobble when you type, only the bottom edge will sit on the surface you put the machine on due to the nature of the 180 degree hinge (which is only of use for touchscreen versions). It has two tiny rubbery plastic bumpers on the screen edge for this.

I've been using this laptop for a few weeks with Arch Linux installed and I have to say I'm very satisfied.I've stressed the processor enough to say it's very reliable. Battery consumption is good and the screen is excellent.The only flaw is the memory, which is not expandable: 32GB is sufficient today, but in a few years it may not be enough, especially for my use.

Update: So I am currently in the process of returning this unit. For the specs it should be able to handle everything ive thrown at it, and initially it did. However after a week and a number of updates it has become very sluggish. Booting up used to be a 30second thing, now it's a couple of minutes for it to boot up and the camera to start looking for you. Then it takes another minute or so to find and let you. In the mean time you could have just entered your pin/password and logged in.Running it struggles with basic browser functions. You have to switch it to performance mode to get any sort of stability. Which means heavy fan noise drowning out anything your watching.Using it as a work device (as i intended) is again problematic. My work programs are not that intensive, but on this device they struggle and hang quite a lot. And while they do work in the end they're significantly slower than my older, less powerful laptop.The other problem is the heating, while this device on paper has some very good thermal cooling, in reality its not that good. The heat is (as in most laptops sadly) went out through the base of the laptop, straight into your legs which promptly cook, and yes can ve burnt. What more, on several occasions, sat on the desktop with NOTHING else running, it was hitting over 90c!As for gaming, its really only a slightly bit better than the old EVO chips, not enough to warrant the cost increase. The few basic games i play (Dwarffortress, Factorio) ran well for a while but once you got to mid/late game things started to chug. Other more intensive game (snowrunner, euro truck simiulator) struggled to run at a consistent frame rate and ultimately started to show graphical glitches and stuttering. Ghost of Tsushima which just came out is just unrunable, audio and graphical glitches abound. Despite the game support arc.Finally, i thought this might just be a one off issue with my device, however Amazon refused a replacement citing "policy" meaning i could only return for a refund.For now im going to have to go back to my old Galaxy Book 2 laptop until i can find something elseAs ultra lights go, this is a solid device. It's light weight, but mostly powerful enough to get the job done....mostly.So lets talk the device itself.The screen is glorious, and as i've come to expect with Asus there are a lot of options for tweaking the screen to get your perfect experience. But honestly it was solid out the box. The processor is one of Intel's new Ultra 9 chips with the arc graphics built in.They rebranded the chips due to this iteration of chips being a total overhaul. In truth these chips are more inline with Apples M series of chips that anything Intel has done before. In that these chips have 3 sections, the CPU, a GPU, and a NPU. The NPU is the new thing, in that it's onboard AI, rather than cloud based AI such as ChatGPT.As of yet i've not actually seen it do ANYTHING, so not sure what it's purpose is. I've checked the logs over the last day or so and it's not even once done anything, even when i was using Copilot, microsofts OS AI.The device comes with a replaceable 1TB nvme ssd, and can take upto a 2TB. Ther eare 4TB ssd's but these are doubled up ssd's and as such are too thick for the chasis.As well as 32GB of ram. There is an Ultra 5 version of this as well, which has only 16gb of RAM, don't bother with that version, it will be to restricted.32GB of ram is the minimum that is really acceptable these days, even for the none SOC chips 16gb just isnt enough. With the Ultra series of chips though you are sharing that 32gb like this:GPU: 1-8gb. It says it dynamically changes on the fly depending on your usage of the time. Which it does, in a janky manner. You will notice it swapping as things hitch and freeze. instead i reccomend you manually set it to 8gb (the highest you can) and just leave it like that.NPU: The NPU takes upwards of 16gb of the ram, which is a huge chunk of it. Thankfully as i said it dosent really seem to be active (for me) at the moment so it's not taking anything. However if it was active it would be leaving only 8gb for the system to use, which is frankly not enough.Ports. The device is short on ports, and they're annoyingly placed. You have 2 USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, which is amazing. However they're placed on the right hand side of the device, so will get in the way of mouse usage (and it does!!) In the end i stopped using the provided charger and use my own 100w gan charger with a angled cable so it's out of the way. However doing so blocks both the HDMI (full sized) and headphone jack. So in theory you could use 2 external monitors with this device. Which is awesome!On the lefty hand side is a single USB-3.0 which again is a lovely addition. However glaringly missing from this device is a micro sd slot. There's no reason for it not to be here as many other devices, both slimmer and cheaper have one.The trackpad and number pad. Asus are still using their old method of making the track pad a mini screen and putting the numpad on it. I was surprised how quickly i was able to get used to using it. And for me as an excel user its much appreciated! Sure it's no where near as good as a physical pad, but on this size of device its the perfect complement and the only way you could get one.However my only niggle, is if you are using a external mouse and want to turn off the trackpad it disables the numpad as well. Which is frustrating and i would like to see an option to turn off the track pad for mouse, but leave it as a number pad.Typing on this is not to bad, and i've done a lot of work on this device so far and not had any major issues.Temps: This is the frustrating thing, the temps are not good. Your going to average around 80c in whisper mode. Which is the mode i tend to use the most for basic stuff, such as web browsing and the odd bit of work.However turning on the dynamic fans instantly revs them up even when your doing nothing, and the temps only drop a degree or two to around 78-79c. Do anything strenuous and the fans switch to performance mode which ramps them up even more. However this usually happens when your trying to say game on this. So while the fan noise is really loud, your temps will still skyrocket to around 90-100c.To be honest, i found that it was uncomfortable to have just in my lap if i was working and temps got to over 85c. Given the fans are all bottom facing (as in on the bottom of the chassis, where your legs are gonna be) your going to roast, and the laptop is going to thermal throttle.But can you game on this?? Actually yes, a bit. Sure your not going to play any AAA high demanding games. Forget COD, or AC, God of War etc etc. They will just either refuse to run or turn into a slide show, even on low settings.However i have had some games running and looking fairly well. Grim Dawn, Last Epoch, Farm Sim and a few others. As well as some strategy games have played fairly well on mid to low settings. Though your not going to be playing in 3k, your going to have to drop down to 900-1080. But it is possible!Now, onto the horrific.Windows 11 is terrible. Certain elements of the UI and placement of options make trying to use this laptop a chore. Trying to get the laptop to run at its best means hunting around through 3 different power setting menus to get it right, and they have to be done in the correct order or its just wasted time.OneDrive has taken over your machine! I used to love OneDrive, it was a great cheap way of backing up my files. However in Win11 it's mandatory install. As well as it tells you its backing up certain areas of your drive (desktop and all of the Documents folder) and will NOT let you turn it off. Which if like me your on multiple devices (work laptop, work desktop, home desktop and home laptop) and wanting to keep things separate, you cant.Whats more windows likes to install stuff without asking permission, you just get a pop sying new services are being installed. But it dosent tell you WHAT or asks for you to decide if its what you want or not.Finally the way it powers itself on and breaks EVERY time is blooming annoying. Microsoft removed the option to turn off windows updates, which means even if you devices is in hibernation or sleep mode it turns it self on and looks for updates. Which wouldnt really be an issue IF it turned itself off after the updates, but it dosent. So it's wasting electricity.I was tempted to remove win 11 and go back to win10. However intel have made the drivers for these new chips only for win11.So, after all that would i recommend this laptop. Yes, so long as you dont mind fighting it for a bit. Or know your not going to be using it for anything to strenuous. Also if you can get it on offer.