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

Angled front and rear renders of the ASUS Vivobook S 14 OLED laptop.
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.

Intel Lunar Lake slide outlining performance claims.

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.

Rear angled render of the ASUS Vivobook 14 S OLED laptop on a gray gradient background.

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.

Open look at the ASUS Vivobook 14 S OLED laptop on a table.

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).