Asus ZenBook 14X OLED Space Edition review

The Space Edition is smattered with a lot of intrinsic details that you could read on the box in the next page. The Zero-G Titanium colourway looks downright stunning on the aluminum chassis and represents the exact colour of the material actual space equipment is made from.

The lid has an etched Morse code of the Latin proverb astra per aspera, which means “Through Hardships to the Stars”. The cylindrical design also symbolizes the design and appearance of a space capsule. We love it!

It’s not just a looker either. The Space Edition is SMC-S-016A certified, which is the US Space Systems Command Standard and MIL-STD 810H standard. It will basically survive any harsh environment and can withstand temps ranging from +61C to -24C. All that cramped into a package that weighs just 1.4Kgs! Impressive? Hell yea!

The OLED display is stunningly rich. It’s a 90Hz unit with a 2800 x 1800p resolution and 550nits of brightness. Any content you throw at it comes up in razor sharp detail and deep rich colours. What impressed us most were the inky blacks that looked downright stunning!

While the main display is the star of the show (excuse the obvious pun), there’s another tiny one that tugs at our nerdy heartstrings. The cute 3.5in OLED display on the lid can tell the time, display custom messages and also has the ability to show a barcode scanner! There’s space-themed animations too which is a really nice touch here.

Our review unit packed the new Intel Core i9 -12900H with 32 gigs of RAM. It’s lightning quick, in fact one of the quickest units we’ve used. Cinebench R23 clocked scores well over 11,480 on the multicore benchmark for reference. The Alder Lake is seriously powerful. Like the other ZenBooks, it doesn’t come with a dedicated GPU and instead has the Intel Iris X Graphics on board. That unfortunately means gaming is off the table. Now, if you’re not going to use all that power this mean little chip churns out, you might as well save some money. The Core i9-12900H is stupendously overkill for someone who uses it just for regular work emails and the sort. If you’re one to edit, then by all means, do indulge…

If you do type a lot like us, there’s some news for you. The beautiful OLED display uses Asus’ Ergolift hinge which lifts the laptop’s bottom up for cooling and better typing ergonomics. We love the keyboard and typing on it is intuitive with a lot of palm space around for comfort. The keys are backlit so you aren’t lost either however, some may find the silver-on-white approach a bit irritating. The power button also doubles up as a fingerprint scanner, making the laptop extremely easy to unlock with Windows Hello. Of course all the other ways of logging in also feature here including face recognition

While the OLED display hits the visual scenery out of the park, the speakers aren’t that far behind either. Tuned by Harmon Kardon they put out a decent performance and get plenty loud in a room with decent definition.

There’s more affordable options out there at this price and level, some even in Asus’ own portfolio, however you aren’t considering those parameters if you’re thinking of getting this. Sure it pays homage to its predecessors that have been into space, but there’s a deeper sentiment here harking at human curiosity and the urge to explore.