This is the fastest laptop under $500 for Cyber Monday — meet the sublime Asus Zenbook laptop with the best display ever in its category
Asus has somehow managed to cram an ultra powerful processor and a fantastic OLED display for just $499.99
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Asus Zenbook 14x:Was $800Now $500 at Best BuySave $300I am amazed that Asus and Best Buy managed to pull such a deal. For the outlay you get the fastest mobile Core i5 processor ever and an OLED touchscreen display with the sort of color reproduction you’d expect from professional monitors.
If your laptop purchasing budget is circa $500 and you want - or even need - the fastest laptop in that price range, then you can’t go wrong with the Asus Zenbook 14X.
Currently available fromBest Buy for $499.99 (a saving of $300), this is a laptop with anOLEDtouchscreen display and anIntelCore i5 13500H CPU. Just to clarify, this is not a convertible laptop; the touchscreen display is just that.
It’s an absolutely gorgeous one with specs to match: 2880 x 1800 pixels, a peak brightness of 500 nits, a 120Hz refresh rate and 100% DCI-P3 color gamut on a 14.5-inch diagonal. Simply put, there’s no laptop with a better display on offer for $500 or less.
That’s not all though. The Core i5-13500H CPU that powers it is very note worthy, too. It has 12 cores, which is an indication of the firepower it can deploy. The other headline number worth keeping in mind is its base power dissipation (45W) meaning it can maintain a high clock speed.
It scores more than 23,000 points on the popular Passmark benchmark, the highest ever for a laptop in this price range (for a new product).
The rest of the specifications is as expected. There’s a 512GB SSD (Gen4), a fingerprint reader, a webcam, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a huge 90WHr battery (probably the biggest under $500), an HDMI connector, a USB Type-A one, and a backlit keyboard. It’s ultra thin, too at less than 19mm and weighs under 1.6Kg.
The only reservation we have - and it’s a big one - is that it has only 8GB of RAM and that system memory is not upgradable.
We reviewed anolder 14X Modelin May 2022 and found out that it had poor battery life and was expensive. The new model solves both of these problems and keeps the main features of the 14X: its gorgeous design and its stunning OLED screen.
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Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.
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