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The Asus ExpertBook Ultra is easily one of our favorite business laptops of the year, and not just thanks to its powerful Intel Core Ultra X7 processor. From its elegant design to its gorgeous tandem OLED touch screen, you'll find a lot to love. The ExpertBook isn’t without its quirks, and given its $3,599.99 asking price, this laptop shouldn’t have quirks. Regardless, with such phenomenal performance and style, you'll likely find it easy to overlook these. We can; if you can’t, our current Editors' Choice laptop for work, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14, is a co-winner that starts at a much lower price. For a business ultraportable that needs to be top-tier all the way, though, the Asus ExpertBook Ultra gains a PCMag Editors' Choice award.
Configuration: Keeping It One-Model Simple
You'll find just one configuration of the ExpertBook Ultra available. Asus paired the 16-core (four performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and four low-power efficiency cores) Intel Core Ultra X7 358H processor and Arc B390 integrated graphics with 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, a 1TB PCIe 4.0 solid-state drive, and a 14-inch tandem OLED display with 2,880-by-1,800-pixel (1800p) resolution. This setup will run you $3,599.99 direct from Asus, but you can likely find it for cheaper through negotiated enterprise distribution channels.
Our review unit arrived for testing with a 2TB SSD, but that version isn't available through Asus' web store or anywhere else online. This variant may be exclusive to business customers, which might make you dream of at least a few more component options to tweak.
Design: An Absolute Stunner
Right out of the box, the nano-ceramic finish on the ExpertBook Ultra's shell is dazzling, and it feels even better than it looks. Laid atop the magnesium-aluminum alloy frame that feels feather-light in your hand, the finish has a textured, premium feel that few other laptops can match. Yes, that includes the latest 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro with M5.
Part of this is thanks to Asus' matte Morn Grey color, a sleek alternative to the typical boring silver aluminum you find on a lot of work laptops that aren’t straight up black or dark gray. (The ExpertBook Ultra also comes in a darker Jet Fog color.)
At just a hair thicker than half an inch (0.65 inch when closed) and just 12.2 inches wide, this laptop squeezes in a 14-inch display, making for a 91% screen-to-body ratio. Weighing just 2.18 pounds, the ExpertBook is also about as light a laptop as you'll find on the market right now. This thinness almost inherently eliminates flex in the body, even when opened. If I have one thing to knock about its design, it’s that the laptop is a bit too stiff to open with one hand, especially since the physical camera shutter tends to bind on the edge of the touchpad.
The only other issue I experienced with this model's frame here is that its hinges are a bit weak when the screen is opened beyond a certain point. As a result, the lid tends to drop to a fully extended position if the display is rotated beyond 90 degrees. Asus has assured me that this issue has been addressed in production models shipping to stores and online retailers.
Display and Audio: Sublime Screen and Sound
Asus' 1800p tandem OLED touch screen is one of this laptop's marquee features. A Corning Gorilla Glass Victus Matte touch panel, it features an anti-glare finish. The screen refreshes at anywhere between 30Hz and 120Hz, thanks to variable refresh support.
As an OLED panel, it can reach 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, though this model narrowly missed that mark in testing. Finally, Asus amped up the screen's brightness, promising up to 600 nits when maxed out on standard content and up to 1,400 nits when displaying HDR video. It all amounts to an excellent viewing experience for both still content and video.
This is a thin-and-light laptop, so its internal speakers won't replace a dedicated speaker system, but with two top-firing tweeters flanking the keyboard and two sets of dual woofers firing both up and down along the sides (six total speakers), the ExpertBook Ultra delivers impressive audio from such a trim chassis. The dual microphone array is about what you’d expect from a built-in mic, suitable for video calls and the like, with AI noise cancellation built in.
Keyboard, Touchpad, and Webcam: Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad
If you type a lot of reports and work on complex slide decks on the road, the ExpertBook Ultra's keyboard and haptic touchpad will serve you well. The keys are well-spaced in a lattice orientation, given the laptop's size, and they provide deep travel. They’re also super-comfortable to type on for extended stretches. The six-sensor haptic touchpad is a spacious 17 square inches that runs right to the front edge of the laptop. This can sometimes work against you, though, since bumping the front of the laptop can register as an input. It’s a small quibble.
As for the webcam, it has a physical privacy shutter, a welcome feature. The webcam's recording quality, however, isn't quite what I'd expect at this price. It’s a 1080p IR camera (and thus Windows Hello-compatible), but the image quality is grainy at times, especially in less-than-ideal lighting. Is it a deal-breaker? No, but it's a surprising shortcoming from an otherwise spectacular device.
Ports and Connectivity: Everything You Need to Succeed
For connections, the ExpertBook Ultra comes with a broad selection for all your peripherals, including two Thunderbolt 4 ports (40Gbps with power delivery and dual 4K display out), two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports (10Gbps), an HDMI 2.1 output, and a 3.5mm audio jack.
The only thing missing here is a microSD slot, but for a business laptop, this isn’t essential. You also get the latest connectivity options, in the form of Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. If you’re looking for a 5G-connected laptop, however, you won’t find that option here. (The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14, in contrast, does offer that.)
Security: Keeping Things Locked Down When Needed
The ExpertBook Ultra is an enterprise-first device, so security is a must-have, and you’ll find plenty of measures here. Starting with the physically isolated Asus security microprocessor, the laptop features BIOS-level and system firmware protection, including self-healing from isolated flash memory.
The Asus ExpertGuardian feature is built on the Intel vPro platform and is NIST SP 800-193-compliant (a cybersecurity guideline that establishes a framework for Platform Firmware Resiliency). The system also comes from the factory with BitLocker enabled for on-device encryption. In addition to Windows Hello, you'll find a fingerprint sensor built into the power button for added login security.
Performance Testing: A Beast for Business Needs
To gauge the ExpertBook’s overall performance and speeds in specific tasks, like productivity and graphics processing, we'll compare it with several competing business laptops to see how it holds up in its class.
First up is the 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro M5, which we tested at $2,349, to address the fruit-shaped elephant in the room. Then we have the HP EliteBook 6 G1q ($1,699 as tested), a second Arm-based alternative, though instead with a Snapdragon chip. Next up is our $2,374 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 review configuration, the most obvious rival to the ExpertBook. Finally, we included the latest Microsoft Surface Pro for Business tablet ($2,799.99 as tested), which occupies the same super-premium work device space.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. (The Arm-based Mac and Snapdragon systems do not support these two tests, and so are missing from those charts.)
Three more tests we rely on are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image-editing prowess through a variety of automated operations in the seminal photo editor Adobe Photoshop 25.
According to PCMark 10, the ExperBook Ultra is in a class of its own among our field of competing Windows-based devices here, almost lapping the Surface Pro. In the Cinebench and Geekbench tests, the ExpertBook clearly held its own against Apple’s premier professional laptop, shrinking its lead while outpacing everything else.
For creative work, the ExpertBook Ultra was, once again, second only to the MacBook Pro, encoding a 4K video to 1080p about 20 seconds slower. However, the MacBook Pro continued to dominate in Adobe Photoshop. These numbers suggest a mighty laptop for almost any task short of those that require dedicated graphics or an HX-class processor, such as workstation jobs.
Graphics Tests
We challenge all systems’ graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next pair, Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Last up, we turn to 3DMark Solar Bay to measure ray-tracing performance.
Here again, the ExpertBook Ultra’s Arc B390 GPU thrashed its Windows 11 competitors across the board. However, Intel's advanced integrated graphics still could not dethrone the MacBook Pro’s 10-core M5 GPU. At any rate, this won't make much of a difference for a business laptop, but at least you know it can handle more advanced visual workloads than most ultraportable work laptops.
Battery Life and Display Tests
We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
For longevity, the ExpertBook Ultra finished toward the bottom of this test set, beating only the Surface Pro. Still, it wasn't that far behind the rest of the pack, with a result of 22 hours and 37 minutes, which should translate to plenty of time to work on a charge. (A showing of nearly 23 hours on this test is no slouch.) The ExpertBook also wasn't too far from the MacBook Pro's time. The ThinkPad ran away with this one, though it also had the dimmest display at 50% brightness for the test.
We've already mentioned that the ExpertBook's screen is spectacular, and here we are doing it again. While it doesn’t quite hit Asus' promise of 100% DCI-P3 coverage, it matches the MacBook Pro's 97%. The panel also displays 100% of the sRGB gamut and has the second-broadest Adobe RGB coverage in this test group. It’s also the brightest display of the lot, which bucks the trend of dimmer OLED screens compared with basic LCDs.
