The sustained performance is illustrated by the long-duration benchmarks such as Blender Classroom, where the Ryzen 7 6800U @25W ends up outmatching the Core i7-1260P @30W. My Tiger Lake NUC with 96EUs and my Ryzen 5800U based notebook both manage to do without EDRAM and only get slightly better RAM bandwidth but evidently manage to get a lot more GPU power out of the extra SMs. The Zen 3+ chips aren't all that different from Zen 3 that was used in the 5800U and so there isn't much headroom to improve performance. On the other hand, the 1260P is significantly faster than Intel's previous-gen, the Core i7-1165G7, a huge 71 percent performance uplift allows Intel to close the gap, and surely, the much better naming scheme helped here, too. The iGPU is the main differentiator of the 6800U vs the 5800U, so to leave it out is missing the USP: very disappointing! The Ryzen 7 6800U is AMD's latest and greatest chip from their new Zen 3+ line for ultraportables, while the Intel Core i7-1260P is headlining a number of today's powerful thin and light systems based on the Alder Lake architecture.

The Core i7-1260P seems to struggle with DDR4 memory as if this chip was designed to be paired with DDR5 or LPDDR5 instead. But even if it did have faster DDR5 memory, the 6800U would likely still beat it, as the 6800U was 18 percent faster than even the Core i7-12700H running at 45W with its GPU configuration being identical to the 1260P. In 2021, AMD launched the updated Ryzen 5000 series of APUs, which, confusingly, consist of two broader types of processors: some based on a marginally revised Zen2+ architecture, as part of the Lucienne Zen2+ platform, and some based on the newer Zen3 architecture, under the Cezanne platform. On to more demanding loads, we start by testing the CPU’s performance in the Cinebench R15 loop test.For AI accelerated workloads like Gigapixel AI, Intel processors are the way to go due to their AI acceleration hardware, which this generation of Zen does not include. The 1260P performs well without a discrete GPU, and as we saw last generation, adding a low power Nvidia GPU actually hurts performance unless you disable it. The 6800U doesn't perform horribly without AI acceleration, still beating the 1165G7, but performance is 24 percent slower than the 1260P.

At 321 nits of brightness, the Zenbook S 13 is absolutely usable. But the MacBook won out again at 435 nits, while the Yoga 9i (352 nits) and Ideapad Slim 7 Carbon (369 nits) were also both a bit brighter. The testing regime includes the requirements of both military-grade standards and ASUS quality tests, and varies depending on device. MIL-STD-810 testing is conducted on selected ASUS products only. Note that the MIL-STD-810 testing helps to ensure the quality of ASUS products but does not indicate a particular fitness for military use. The test is performed under laboratory conditions. Any damage caused by attempts to replicate these test conditions would be considered accidental, and would not be covered by the standard ASUS warranty. Additional coverage is available with ASUS Premium Care. As always though, the devil is in the details, and especially when it comes to the overall performance capabilities of this sort of an ultraportable design. Down below, in this review, we’re going through all these important details that you should be aware of if you’re considering buying a ZenBook S 13 as your next ultrabook. Specs – Asus Zenbook S 13 UM5302 Battery life isn’t immune to this effect. How long a single charge lasts depends not just on the processor, but the battery size and the display’s power consumption, too. Still, a battery benchmark helps identify which chips provide particularly good or bad performance, even when it’s a simple video rundown test.

Zenbook S 13 OLED (UM5302, AMD Ryzen 6000 series)

On GPU workloads or games Tiger Lake was around 20% faster than the 5800U, so the iGPU update on the 6800U should definitely help to bring overall leadership in the 15-28 Watt class of laptops without a dGPU.

For a game that's demanding on both the CPU and GPU, the 6800U holds up well in Age of Empires IV running using medium settings at 1080p. Once again it's faster than Intel H-series parts which present an ideal case for Alder Lake's Xe integrated graphics, and if you turn down the settings slightly the experience is very playable for this sort of title.As we saw earlier in the year when comparing more gaming focused CPUs, Alder Lake holds a decent performance advantage over Zen 3+ for single threading. The 1260P is 18 percent faster than the 6800U, and 13 percent faster than Intel's last-generation part. The 6800U doesn't gain much over the 5800U in this workload, as the newer Zen 3+ model receives only a 7 percent frequency bump. Note: We haven’t yet tested any of the Ryzen U 7000 platforms. I’m updating this section in the future, as we get to review the Ryzen 77840U, Ryzen 7 7735U and Ryzen 7 7730U processors. I also added a few other iGPU platforms from AMD and Intel, for comparison. Here’s what we got. Low settings

The latest platform features like DDR5 memory and USB4 are supported, and the whole thing is built on TSMC's N6 node. Radeon RX 6700S – designed for 1080p gaming in ultraportable performance notebooks, with a design power of up to 105W;

In Resident Evil 2 the 6800U also performed very well, smashing the 1260P with DDR4 memory and outperforming Intel's H-series parts with DDR5 memory by 16 percent despite the gulf in power consumption. While this class of ultraportable is still a way off an entry-level gaming system with an RTX 3050, the sorts of performance numbers put up here are playable. This section is reserved for designs based on mid-tier AMD Ryzen U platforms such as Barcelo-R and Cezanne, with Zen3 Cores and Vega graphics. Model I don't know if its vastly bigger caches or software drivers that know how to use them in such a way that only the final render has to suffer from the relatively low bandwidth of their DDR4/5 frame buffers. Where 48EUs on a Gen8 NUC with the bigger Iris Plus only offered 50% uplift of performance vs. the 24EU NC Gen10 iGPU, the 96EU iGPU on the Gen11 NUC reached 4x the performance of the 24EU variant or linear uplift. This section includes premium and mid-tier thin-and light notebooks built on the most capable AMD Ryzen U platforms currently available, such as the 2023 Phoenix AMD Ryzen 7 7840U and Pro 7840U, a well as the 2023 Rembrandt-R AMD Ryzen 7 7735U.