Asus ExpertBook Ultra (2026) Review

Design and Keyboard

• Lightweight and durable
• Good port selection
• Responsive keyboard and trackpad

The ExpertBook Ultra (2026) is a fetching ultrabook, with my sample shipping in a silver colourway, although Asus is also offering it in a darker grey finish if you’d prefer. Standard across the range is a lovely magnesium alloy chassis that gives this laptop a durable feel in hand, especially with a ceramic coating in tow.

What’s remarkable about this Asus laptop is that, even with the amount of grunt inside, the weight is less than a kilo. It tips the scales at 990g, so technically just under a kilo, and with a compact 14-inch form factor in tow, it makes this quite the portable powerhouse. It’s like an even beefier Asus Zenbook A14 (2026).

Even with that low weight and a slender 11m thickness at its thinnest point, the ExpertBook Ultra (2026) doesn’t skimp on ports. We’ve got a Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C on the left alongside a full-size HDMI and USB-A, plus a headphone jack. The right side has another Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C port and a further USB-A.

Open up the lid, and you’ll find a responsive small form factor keyboard with solid travel and tactility that I enjoyed using over my time with this laptop. It is also backlit with a bright white backlight to make after-dark working a breeze.

Asus has also put a large trackpad with the ExpertBook Ultra (2026) that runs to the bottom edge of the chassis. It’s a smooth and responsive surface with multi-touch capabilities that’s one of the better laptop trackpads I’ve used in recent times.

Display and Sound

• Smooth and detailed OLED panel
• Excellent black level, contrast and colours
• Solid six-speaker array

Asus hasn’t skimped on the ExpertBook Ultra (2026)’s screen in the slightest, kitting it out with a 14-inch 3K (or 2880×1800) resolution tandem OLED screen, complete with 120Hz refresh rate for slick, detailed action. It also says this screen requires 40% less power than most standard OLED screens, making it more power efficient and helping this laptop’s excellent endurance.

Tandem OLED screens are slowly but surely becoming more common in laptops, with Asus already kitting out updated ProArt P16 models with a similar screen that stacks layers of OLED panels atop one another to yield higher brightness and efficiency figures. We’ve seen it fitted to everything from TVs to the latest iPad Pro models, and it makes sense to apply the same tech to laptop panels.

The virtually perfect colour accuracy is no surprise. To be specific, we’re getting 100% coverage of the mainstream sRGB, plus 99% of the creative DCI-P3 gamut, while Adobe RGB coverage at 88% is also excellent, making this screen an ideal pairing for both mainstream and more colour-sensitive workloads.

In addition, there are deep blacks and gorgeous contrast, with a measured 0.07 and 8590:1, respectively. The 6800K colour temperature is also pretty good, too.

Asus is quoting up to 1400 nits of peak HDR brightness from the tandem OLED screen, alongside up to 600 nits of peak SDR brightness. My colorimeter measured a peak of 596.8 nits, putting it bang on Asus’ quoted results.

The ExpertBook Ultra (2026) features a six-speaker array that provides surprisingly immersive audio for a set of laptop units, with solid body and volume. There is a decent amount of bass, although it can still feel a little lacking.

Performance

• Fast Panther Lake processor
• Much beefier integrated graphics
• Fast SSD and solid RAM headroom

In terms of processor choice, the ExpertBook Ultra (2026) sample I have features the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H, which is one of the top options available in Intel’s new crop of Panther Lake processors, besides the top-end Core Ultra X9 388H.

It is, in essence, the follow-up to the potent Core Ultra 7 255H that impressed me inside the Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2025), which provided very similar performance to its beefier brother, the Core Ultra 9 285H, in spite of it being a theoretically worse chip by name.

The Core Ultra X7 358H features 16 cores and 16 threads, the same as the Core Ultra X9 388H, but is downclocked to a boost of 4.8GHz against the X9’s 5.1GHz. Plus, there’s the same Intel Arc B390 iGPU with its 12 Xe3 cores that make for a hefty improvement over the Intel Arc 140T and 140V integrated graphics in last year’s chips.

As a quick refresh, Intel’s new Panther Lake chips aim to blend the gains we saw in the last generation of Intel’s mobile chips with the power of Arrow Lake H and the efficiency of Lunar Lake in a new range. They’re also built on Intel’s new 18A process that makes some small but noteworthy changes to the way transistors are made to make sure the processor is using as much of its power as efficiently as possible, in basic terms.

The synthetic benchmark scores in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 put this Core Ultra X7 chip as being marginally slower than the Core Ultra X9 388H found in the Asus Zenbook Duo (2026) in single-core loads, although it’s on par in multi-threaded benchmarking.  

These numbers are higher than both Arrow Lake H and Lunar Lake-powered laptops, not least owing to gains from the new architecture, I imagine, plus it beats out some of the Strix Point laptops and trades blows with the AMD Strix Halo chip inside the Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025) – for a business-centric laptop, that’s a surprise.

As mentioned previously, the real gains of Panther Lake are more on the side of its integrated graphics, rather than its modest increase in raw grunt. The Intel Arc B390 iGPU that’s found in the top tier of these new Panther Lake chips features 12 of Intel’s new Xe3 cores with a major boost in raw power over last year’s offerings, resulting in a virtual doubling of the 3DMark Time Spy score over older Intel SoCs.For reference, last year’s Arc 140T and 140V laptops fell in the 3000-4500 range, while the ExpertBook Ultra (2026) managed a score of 7586.

It pushes this Panther Lake chip closer to the Strix Halo chips from last year, even if Intel isn’t quite on par with AMD in this regard. Nonetheless, this is a chip designed for a fully-fledged ultrabook, rather than a mini PC or gaming tablet, as it were, giving it a different appeal entirely.

With the same iGPU inside as the beefier Core Ultra X9 388H, it makes sense to expect similarly impressive gaming numbers. It’s not a top priority for a business laptop, but the ExpertBook Ultra (2026) can hold its own with the B390 iGPU inside. At 1080p, I saw 44.94fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 64fps in Returnal, while 90fps in Rainbow Six Extraction proves it’s well up to the task for lighter, more competitive titles.

Going up to 1440p, Cyberpunk 2077 sat at 27.83fps and Returnal at 39fps, providing surprisingly playable base frame rates, although with the benefits of upscaling and such, they will be more playable.

Of course, there are limits to the power of the B390, and the 18.71fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at RT: Ultra at 1080p demonstrates that it isn’t playable like this on integrated graphics just yet. Drop some settings down and apply Intel’s improved XeSS 3 upscaling, and you’ll see the FPS numbers climb to much more playable levels. On RT: Ultra, it doubled the FPS to 36.74fps.

With the move to XeSS 3, Intel has also added Multi Frame Gen powers in a similar vein to Nvidia’s move to DLSS4 (and now DLSS 4.5) with the RTX 50 series of discrete cards. This is operated in a different manner to DLSS, utilising a multiplier override in Intel’s graphics software, rather than the game itself, requiring the game’s graphics to have XeSS Frame Generation enabled before restarting once enabling the chosen multiplier (2x, 3x, or 4x). There is likely to be a latency hit with Intel’s MFG as with Nvidia’s, and it’s common sense to aim for as high a base FPS figure as possible to minimise latency and for a smoother experience.

Intel has said that if a game already supports XeSS 2, then it’ll automatically support XeSS 3, which was the case with Cyberpunk 2077, where I tested it. It was as easy as enabling XeSS Frame Gen in the game’s settings, shutting it down, choosing the 4x multiplier in Intel’s software and rebooting Cyberpunk. At 1080p, it took rasterised Ultra Cyberpunk 2077 up to 176.04fps, and RT: Ultra to 118.39fps. For an iGPU, it’s very impressive.

My sample of the ExpertBook Ultra (2026) came with 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM and a decent capacity 1TB SSD, which also proved to be one of the fastest PCIe 5.0 options I’ve used, with tested read and write speeds of 14,076.83 MB/s and 11,052.63 MB/s, respectively.

Software

• Copilot+ PC offers AI smarts
• Reasonably clean Windows 11 install
• Some Asus-specific software installed

The ExpertBook Ultra (2026) comes with a reasonably clean Windows 11 install, with a handful of Asus-specific apps in play. There is MyAsus, which comes as part of the taskbar when you first open the laptop. This is where you can check on everything from battery level and enabling battery care modes to choosing which type of workload this laptop’s network connection prioritises.

As this is more of a business laptop, it also has some of Asus’ enterprise software installed, such as ExpertPanel, which is a small control panel that provides quick access to system functions such as AI Meeting Minutes, AI Translated Subtitles and a screen recorder. From the menu, you can also enable the laptop’s dynamic lighting under the display bezel and change power modes.

There is also enough AI horsepower from the Panther Lake chip inside to mark this laptop as a Copilot+ PC, providing access to Microsoft’s AI functionality for generative powers and filters in the Photos and Paint app, as well as the clever Windows Studio webcam effects for background blurring, auto framing and maintaining eye contact. With the latest version of Windows 11, there is also the controversial Microsoft Recall feature.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 20 hours 27 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for between two and three working days

The ExpertBook Ultra (2026) features a large 70Whr battery, which is hefty considering how slim and light this business-class ultrabook is. Asus rates it to last for up to 26 hours on a charge, which would make it the longest-running laptop I’ve tested overall if it holds true.

In running the PCMark 10 video loop test at the requisite 150 nits of brightness, this Asus laptop managed 20 hours and 27 minutes before conking out. That’s a fantastic result, and means you’ll easily be able to get two working days and more before needing to plug it back into the mains. The result isn’t quite on par with the Dell Pro 14 Premium, which remains our endurance champion, but this Asus choice is a beefier laptop, so it’s swings and roundabouts.

The 90W charger of the ExpertBook Ultra (2026) is also brisk, taking just 27 minutes to get this laptop back to 50% charge, while a full charge took 75 minutes.

Should you buy it?