We have taken a look at the ASUS Zenbook 13 like way too many times at this point that most of the laptop aspect is pretty much the same – still comes with a USB-C dongle to connect a headphone, USB-C Easy Charge capabilities, extremely light form factor and so much more. But this time the Zenbook 13 gets the OLED treatment too – which we saw with the previous Zenbook Flip S OLED actually. So, now in this ASUS Zenbook 13 OLED UX325 Review, we are going to take about the two things: ASUS OLED and the Performance as this variant comes powered with the 11th Generation Intel Core i5 with Iris Xe Graphics.

If you want to learn more about the other aspect of the Zenbook 13, click here to read our in-depth review on it.

ASUS OLED Display is Good

ASUS venturing into OLED displays with their laptop – I’d call it a leap of faith because generally OLED displays tend to cost a lot and we witnessed that with the Zenbook Pro Duo which we reviewed a while back. But it’s in a right step because equipping a higher resolution display would have been nice, yes but given that in a 13-14” range, it doesn’t make any difference. So, OLED is the next best thing. ASUS has put in a lot of thoughts to bring the best experience to the table and their 5 pillars are:

  • 100% DCI-P3 Color Gamut Support
  • 70% Less Bluelight
  • Clear Image at any Brightness
  • DisplayHDR 500/600 True Black
  • 2ms fastest Response Time on any Laptop

Now yes, given that this particular laptop isn’t really a professional tool per se to edit videos to take complete advantage of the display (you could, with an external GPU) – but given that the Iris Xe is here – you can still take good advantage of the display for light editing via Lightroom or even enjoy good content through Netflix to get amazing viewing experience despite the form factor. A good display makes up for most of the experience and it definitely checks the box. It does use a glossy finish display which is somewhat of a trade off for the matte finish on the LCD panels, but it does have some anti-glare coating that makes the ASUS Zenbook 13 OLED UX325 easier to use under most lighting.

Performance

The ASUS Zenbook 13 OLED UX325 we have this time around is powered by the following specification:

  • 11th Generation Intel Core i5-1135G7 Processor
  • Intel Iris Xe Integrated Graphics
  • 8GB DDR4 RAM (Soldered)
  • 512GB PCIe Gen4 SSD

Breaking the boundaries of performance for thin and light laptops​, the 11th Gen Intel® Core™ processors with Intel® Iris® Xe graphics​ offers an unmatched speed and intelligence that makes your experience fast, smooth, and easy​.

Now in the above specification, you can notice that it’s pretty decent for everyday use case and isn’t over the top – but if you want to learn more on how the 1165G7, that is the i7 – then click here to read about it. All these while, its no surprise that brands tend to send the highest specification for us to review and the performance is as what you’d expect: great for the most part. But the mid-tier processor Core i5 in this case performs well and shows how much it does better these days.

Starting off with the Cinebench R23 – scoring 1344 points in Single Core and 3984 points in multicore performance. It is slightly behind the 1165G7 and honestly, that’s fantastic because the marginal difference in scores shows that it isn’t necessary to pickup the i7 variant to have the best experience, and you can even pickup the i5 to have almost on par experience.

Moving onto benchmarks like PCMARK10 and 3Dmark – it too gives a much obvious scores with PCMARK10 Extended benchmark giving 4212 points which is pretty good for an Ultrabook in my opinion and scoring 1442 in Time Spy, over 10k in Wildlife and 13k+ in Night Raid. Regardless of the benchmark, this gives you an idea that the laptop does a fantastic job in handling daily task and slight graphics task.

You can play some super light game titles like Among Us or Fall Out but do take note that the thermals are going run hot and its not recommended to play over long hours. But performing light editing work should be okay, given that the laptop fits the minimum requirements for Lightroom. Video editing is questionable, especially if you want to use Premiere Pro or Davinci Resolve as they require heavy duty hardware, but light editing over Wondershare Filmora should be okay.

It is indeed surprising to live in a time where Intel has taken their Graphics Processing capability seriously enough to know that the Iris Xe is capable of decent tasks. It would have been nicer to see the Iris Xe Max in a laptop this thin, with dedicated discrete GPU rather than sharing memory like this Iris Xe we see here. But nonetheless, good performance from the 1135G5 and Iris Xe.

Conclusion

There isn’t much to say to conclude with the ASUS ZenBook 13 OLED UX325 as it has the 11th generation Intel specification running under the hood but the addition of OLED to its existing laptop for better display experience, makes it an absolutely worthy choice. Because trust us when we say this, you cannot find any other brands offering OLED in this price bracket and ASUS is already leading in it.

Special Thanks to ASUS Malaysia for sending the ASUS Zenbook 13 OLED UX325 for us to review.