ASUS ExpertBook 14" /grey/14.0 Review

The ASUS ExpertBook with its RTX 4070 GPU is a bit of a puzzle. On one hand, that graphics card lands in the 86th percentile, which is genuinely impressive for a 14-inch laptop. It's a gaming powerhouse crammed into a compact frame. But then you look at the rest of the specs: a 32nd percentile CPU, a tiny 16GB SSD that's in the bottom 4% of laptops, and just 16GB of RAM. This thing has a serious identity crisis.

It scores a 57.7 for gaming, which makes sense given the GPU, but a weak 35.5 for developer tasks. That tells you everything. This isn't a balanced machine. It's a fast graphics card attached to a platform that can't really keep up with it outside of gaming. For around $941, you're paying almost exclusively for that RTX 4070.

Let's talk about that GPU first. An RTX 4070 in a 14-inch laptop is no joke. It puts this machine in the 86th percentile for graphics performance, meaning it'll handle modern games at high settings without breaking a sweat. That's the headline act.

Everything else is the supporting cast, and it's not a strong one. The Intel Core i5-1335U CPU sits at the 32nd percentile. It's fine for everyday tasks and gaming, but don't expect heavy multi-threaded workloads to fly. The 16GB of RAM is also at the 32nd percentile, which is becoming the bare minimum these days. The real killer is the storage. A 16GB SSD is essentially unusable; it's in the 4th percentile. You'll be upgrading that drive on day one, which adds to the real cost.

At $941, the value proposition is weird. You're getting an RTX 4070, which is a $600+ component on its own, for less than a grand. That's the hook. But the rest of the laptop is so compromised you have to factor in the immediate cost of a proper SSD upgrade, and probably more RAM down the line. Once you do that, you're creeping up toward the price of more balanced competitors. It's a budget entry point into high-end mobile graphics, but you pay for it with major sacrifices everywhere else.

Stack this up against something like the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i. The Legion will have a much faster CPU, more RAM, a proper 1TB SSD, and a better screen, all for a few hundred dollars more. You lose the ultra-portable 14-inch size, but you get a complete, no-compromise machine. Compared to an ASUS Zenbook Duo, you gain a much better GPU but lose the innovative dual-screen design and likely get worse battery life. The Apple MacBook Pro is in another league for CPU performance, screen quality, and build, but of course, it can't touch the gaming performance of the RTX 4070. This ExpertBook carves out a niche solely on portable gaming power.

Here's the deal: only buy this if you want a very portable gaming machine above all else, and you're willing to immediately upgrade the storage. The RTX 4070 is fantastic, but the 16GB SSD and middling CPU make it a terrible choice for anything else. If your needs extend beyond gaming—like content creation, development, or even just having a usable amount of storage—look at the Lenovo Legion or even a more balanced ASUS ROG Zephyrus. This ExpertBook is a one-trick pony, but it does that one trick very well.