Asus ExpertBook

Asus is championing the benefits of Project Athena.

There are other laptops in this roundup using the Intel Core i7-10501U CPU, but we didn’t really see this chip’s potential till we came to the ExpertBook. You see, the base clock sits at 1.8GHz, but the quad-core i7 can boost to a speedy 4.9GHz, which means that while it has the power to perform demanding tasks, it can also be super efficient. Asus has taken this feature and run with it in the Expertbook, adding a 66Wh Li-Po battery to give it serious longevity. While the 24 hour lifespan claimed in its marketing material is a little lofty, we did get seven hours and 30 minutes in PCMark 8’s battery life benchmark, which we’re guessing could last 12 or so hours under light work conditions. This is the best offering of the roundup by about an hour (and is only outlasted by the 15-inch Surface Laptop 3 according to our records), which is a great feature on an ultraportable work laptop. Despite being more efficient, when it comes to general work tasks and RAW CPU performance the ExpertBook actually outperformed most quad-core processors here. There is a bit of a sacrifice in terms of graphical performance, netting between half and a third of the devices with the Intel Iris Plus Graphics.

The ExpertBook is wrapped in a magnesium lithium alloy that is lighter than aluminium and allows the device to come in at an impressive total weight of 995g. The 14-inch 1080p frameless NanoEdge display has a nice 94% screen-to-body ratio and the device takes the screen’s 16:9 footprint.

A powerful compact ultrabook that’ll last as long as you do.