ASUS Vivobook S 14 OLED Laptop Leads Lunar Lake's Charge Into Sub-$1K Territory

Not only are there are handful of laptops available based on Intel's latest Core Ultra Series 2 lineup, otherwise known as Lunar Lake, but they're mostly all relatively affordable models. There are several options hovering around the the $1,000 mark, the least expensive of which is the ASUS Vivobook S 14 with a 14-inch OLED display.

Incidentally, even though it's the least expensive Lunar Lake model at the moment, it's not actually on sale—you can find the ASUS Vivobook S 14 OLED (Q423SA-U5512) for $949.99 at Best Buy. This marks the laptop's entrance into the US market, and apparently ASUS wanted to make a splash. Mission accomplished.

You can think of Lunar Lake as Intel's return salvo to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and Plus silicon (which Qualcomm claims smokes Lunar Lake on battery power). Qualcomm managed to score a deal to power the first wave of officially-branded Microsoft Copilot+ laptops featuring its Arm-based silicon, and now we're seeing AMD and Intel enter the fray with competing x86 solutions, Lunar Lake being one of them.

Lunar Lake is what Intel calls a "flagship SoC for the next-gen of AI PCs," with claims of up to 40% lower SoC power, similar single-threaded performance at half the power, up to 1.5X better graphics, and up to 120 platform TOPS, versus Intel's previous generation silicon.

The chip residing inside the Vivobook S 14 is the Core Ultra 5 226V, which is an 8-core processor split evenly between 4 performance cores clocked at up to 4.5GHz and 4 efficiency cores.  clocked at up to 3.5GHz. It also features 8MB of L3 cache and Arc Graphics 130V clocked at up to 1.85GHz.

Other specs include 16GB of LPDDR5X-8533 memory (soldered), a 512GB PCIe 4.0 solid state drive (SSD), Wi-Fi 7 + Bluetooth 5.4 wireless connectivity, and a decent assortment of I/O options, including twoThunderbolt 4 ports, a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, an HDMI 2.1 output, a microSD card reader, and a 3.5mm combo audio jack.

"Featuring a 0.55 inch-thin, all-metal chassis, the ASUS Vivobook S 14 (Q423) weighs only 2.87 lbs, making it easy to carry around. It features ASUS IceCool thermal technology with two 97-blade IceBlade fans and two air vents, allowing for optimal performance even under demanding workloads," ASUS says.

Regarding the OLED display, it's a 14-inch screen with a 1920x1200 resolution (16:10 aspect ratio), 60Hz refresh rate, 600 nits peak brightness, and 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space.

Other notable features include an RGB-backlit keyboard with a dedicated Copilot key, 75Wh battery rated for up to 16 hours of battery life, and "military grade durability" (MIL-STD 810H).

From our vantage point, that's a lot of laptop for the money. Alternatively, you can find several other Lunar Lake laptops at Best Buy with prices starting at $999.99, including a slightly lower-spec'd version of the Dell XPS 13 (9530) that we recently evaluated—it's on sale for $999.99 at Best Buy (save $400).