The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Review: Meteor Lake Marks A Fresh Start To Mobile CPUs
by Gavin Bonshor on April 11, 2024 8:30 AM ESTASUS Zenbook 14 OLED UX3405MA: Closer Look
The ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED is one of Intel's EVO-certified notebooks, offering plenty of style and substance within the thin 14.9 mm chassis. While ASUS hasn't provided information on what the chassis is built from, it does look and feel like an aluminum chassis, which doesn't feel particularly cheap and looks the part. As with the rest of the chassis on the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED, the lid is made from the same aluminium-like material, and it looks very stylish with the Ponder Blue color.
At 312.4 x 220.1 x 14.99 mm (W x D x H), it's portable. The inclusion of the 14-inch 2.8K OLED display and a total weight of just 1.28 kg (2.82 lbs) makes it very capable for its size, as well as a very lightweight offering to travel with. For comparison, the Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (M3) weighs just 0.04 kg less.
Opening up the traditional clamshell design, we can see the 14-inch OLED panel dominating the top half, with the keyboard and the centrally located island-style trackpad. The trackpad doesn't have any discrete buttons, and instead is entirely touch-based. The keyboard keys themselves have a shallow key press and combine the cursor arrows with the (Fn) key functionality while offering a subtle white backlight behind the keyboard, making the Zenbook 14 OLED 'pop.' Although ASUS doesn't include a dedicated fingerprint scanner, along the top of the panel's bezel is a 1080p webcam with a privacy shutter with support for Windows Hello, which can be configured to provide IR face recognition without needing a PIN.
Touching on the display, with a 2.8 K (2800 x 1800) OLED panel, it's fair to say that with the brightness turned up, it's very vibrant and colorful, to say the least. The 14-inch display, according to the official specifications, has a peak brightness of 500 nits when using HDR, while it has a 400 nits peak brightness when HDR is turned off. It can cover 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, with a 0.2 ms response time. Regarding refresh rate, the panel supports 120 Hz, while ASUS allows users to switch between either 60 Hz or 120 Hz operation. The panel also has a capacitive touch layer, and ASUS includes a stylus within the packaging for this model.
Looking at the I/O on the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED, ports and connectors are on both sides of the chassis. Focusing on the left side, it offers a single USB 3.2 G1 Type-A port towards the fold. Three ports look like connectors, but these are just ventilation gaps for airflow to escape.
On the right side are two Thunderbolt 4-capable USB Type-C ports, which support external displays and offer USB power delivery (USB-PD) capabilities. The Zenbook 14 OLED doesn't have a dedicated connector for charging, and instead relies on carging through its USB Type-C ports, with ASUS including a 65 W AC Type-C charger in the box. Also on the right-hand side is a single HDMI 2.1 video output and a single 3.5 mm combo audio jack. ASUS includes a USB Type-A to Ethernet adapter in the box, which I haven't seen for a while.
Overall, from looking at and considering the feel of the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED UX3405MA, it's certainly a quaint premium 14-inch ultrabook. The bottom-mounted Harmon Kardon linear speakers, which don't look much, sound great and are certainly better than typical stock speakers. There's also the 14-inch OLED screen, which looks great and is vibrant and crystal clear, as expected from an OLED panel.
With a price tag (as configured) of $1299, the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED UX3405MA is certainly a capable offering, which is powered by Intel's latest Core Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake SoC, but style and design are one element; performance is perhaps the most important element.
ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED UX3405MA: Software
Before we examine the performance, we'll quickly examine the software bundle supplied. Everything on the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED revolves around the MyASUS software, which acts as a centralized hub for functionality, profiles, updating drivers/software, and customization.
The MyASUS software has many different device settings that users can customize, such as enabling battery care mode, which limits battery charging beyond 80% immediately. Users can also select between three different fan profiles, including performance mode, which maximizes performance, although this does mean the notebook runs very loud. The other options include standard mode, which dynamically adjusts based on the temperatures, and whisper mode, which is very useful for watching moves in bed.
There are also many display-related options, including allocating more system memory to the integrated Arc Xe graphics and different visual profiles to select from depending on the task. Overall, there are plenty of functionalities within the MyASUS software hub, and having it all within a unified piece of software makes things much better for the overall user experience.
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jeenam - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I've been an anandtech reader since 1998 or so and I'm not here to pick a bone. I'm a fan, and hope AT lives on. But did a quick search and the only two major websites with GPU reviews that referenced Returnal or Company of Heroes were Hot Hardware and Ars Technica. An expanded test suite of games might have been more appropriate because it's likely the ARC GPU would have been handily beaten across the board. Replysjkpublic@gmail.com - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Strange. Some of the tests list the 155H as 28W with test results. This is misleading as the SoC uses much more power doing the test. ReplyGavin Bonshor - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
When we review CPUs, especially when highlighting them in the charts, we list the base TDP, as every motherboard has its own interpretation of what level of power it will push through the chip (Multi-core enhancement). ReplyCarmen00 - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
Yet in another comment, we have Ryan Smith saying "With these integrated devices, we're reviewing the notebook as much as we're reviewing the chip inside."So if you're doing what he says—post the right numbers, because that's what you're doing. And if you're NOT doing what he says, then don't post useless stuff that seems, to my (perhaps overly-critical eye) to exist so that the article can claim that Intel is scoring SOME kind of a win, when the graphs really don't seem to show a heck of a lot of CPU-related win.
I'm fine with either, let me be honest. But I want to see some consistency, that is all. Reply
Ryan Smith - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I'm all for trying to make sure you guys get the data that you want to see. But not sure I follow here. We are being consistent in our testing methodology, and taking care to be explicit in that our test systems don't have identical TDPs.https://images.anandtech.com/doci/21282/Core%20Ult...
In a laptop, sustained TDPs are our primary concern, as these devices cannot turbo multiple cores for more than a few seconds. So this is what we're noting in an article like this, to illustrate how we aren't testing devices with matching TDPs. Reply
ballsystemlord - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I agree with Ryan here, sustained performance is what you should be looking at. Anything can turbo to infinity.The only real use case for turbo, would be application start-up. But even then, you'd have to be waking the PC from idle and selecting the application in record time for it to matter at all. Reply
lmcd - Wednesday, April 17, 2024 - link
The problem I'm seeing is that this article takes the format of previous laptop reviews but not the depth (in part due to the declining access this publication), and the headline could better fit the contents. It could even be something silly like "The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Review: Meteor Lake starts with a Moment of Zen(Book)" and be more valuable to the reader.It also did not feel like we really got (even a rehash of) an overview of Meteor Lake as a platform. So to me, this was an ASUS Zenbook review. Framing this as "ASUS ZenBook 14 OLED: A Meteor Lake Thin&Light Review" also better captures its content. Reply
eastcoast_pete - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I am not surprised that the Core 7 Meteor Lake isn't beating the Ryzen 7840HS in compute or graphics - that particular Ryzen 4 monolith is (IMHO) currently AMD's best foot forward, and a great APU. However, Intel did do its homework when it comes to the intended use of Meteor Lake SoCs: mobile, especially light and ultralight laptops and 2-in-1s. I don't expect a ~ 1 kg notebook to do that much higher level gaming or compute. I do expect long runtime on battery, fluid use of office and other productivity apps, and otherwise decent performance (speed). Again, AMD's Phoenix/Hawk APUs are, right now, the most performant solutions in that class, but it's good news for all of us that Intel has closed the gap. It'll mean that AMD will have to keep evolving its APUs, and maybe do a better job making them broadly available with good drivers within a few months of announcing them. Because that was not the case with Phoenix, which just took too long to be ready for prime time, and left the opening for Intel to move back into.Lastly, I find that one of the most remarkable things about Meteor Lake is that Intel got its tile design and packaging working quite well. Being able to combine different chips from different fabs (Intel and TSMC) and nodes into a cohesive unit without incurring large hits on performance and efficiency is big step forward. Reply
nandnandnand - Saturday, April 13, 2024 - link
Lunar Lake will be the one to watch. It's Meteor Lake-U evolved (4+4 instead of 2+8, on-package memory by default, decent graphics). Low power mobile chips are more interesting than the 45W+ ones. Replymode_13h - Monday, April 15, 2024 - link
> Being able to combine different chips from different fabs (Intel and TSMC)> and nodes into a cohesive unit without incurring large hits on performance
> and efficiency is big step forward.
AMD combined chiplets from both TSMC and Global Foundries in the same CPU, all the way back in Zen 2! If you count HBM, they combined chiplets from different foundries as far back as their HD Fury GPUs.
As for performance and efficiency, I find Meteor Lake underwhelming on both fronts. Idle performance and things like video playback gain a benefit from the new SoC architecture, but when it comes to compute-intensive tasks, we see why Intel kept around Raptor Lake for the performance-oriented segment. Reply