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ZDNET's cardinal takeaways
- The Asus ExpertBook Ultra B9 is simply a premium concern PC launching successful April 2026.
- It's an awesome instrumentality with a sleek design, beardown show from an Intel Panther Lake chip, and fantabulous artillery life.
- Preliminary accusation suggests a precocious terms tag.
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The Asus ExpertBook Ultra B9 is simply a peculiar laptop for me. It's the archetypal laptop I'm reviewing this year, and it's the archetypal Panther Lake-powered instrumentality I've utilized extracurricular of an authoritative Intel event. I've been anxious to effort one, and this instrumentality is simply fantastic. From plan to performance, it is simply a laptop that is definite to impress.
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Asus' latest instrumentality is an incredibly lightweight laptop, clocking successful astatine conscionable 2.18 pounds and measuring 0.65 inches astatine its thickest point. It is truthful sleek that it doesn't adjacent consciousness similar a laptop erstwhile you transportation it around. It feels much similar an existent notebook.
It's besides perfectly balanced, passing the one-finger trial with flying colors. Thanks to a tiny divot beneath the trackpad, you tin assistance the surface without the instrumentality sliding around.
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Thoughtful engineering
The laptop is chiefly made of a magnesium alloy, with Asus' proprietary Nano Liquid ceramic coating, for a chassis that's some airy and durable. You mightiness not beryllium capable to archer conscionable by looking astatine it, but you tin decidedly consciousness the difference. The ExpertBook Ultra B9 has a flimsy ruggedness.
I besides person to outcry retired the large keyboard. It uses chiclet-shaped buttons with 1.5mm of question distance, making typing fast, comfortable, and, astir importantly, satisfying. There's capable feedback that you don't person to propulsion the cardinal each the mode successful to registry an input. It's a benignant much often seen connected mechanical keyboards, and it's a large crushed they're truthful fashionable with gaming enthusiasts.
I usually don't dwell connected laptop trackpads, but ExpertBook's deserves a peculiar mention. It's large, ensuring comfy navigation, and each property produces a crisp, tactile click. The trackpad besides has a neat feature. By placing your thumb astatine the bottommost and a digit astatine the top, you activate a dedicated scrolling mode. This relation lets you scroll done lines of substance without needing the cursor. When it's engaged, the pad vibrates and emits a subtle clicking sound.
Brilliant to see
Asus' ExpertBook Ultra B9 houses a stunning 14-inch 3K OLED surface that covers the full DCI-P3 colour gamut and is Pantone validated. This means colors look affluent and incredibly lifelike, to the constituent wherever it genuinely puts my HP Omen 4K desktop show to shame. Plus, its 91% screen-to-body ratio ensures that what you're looking astatine is astir each display, with minimal bezels closing successful connected the image.
The sheet reaches a highest brightness of 1,400 nits, enabling wide visibility adjacent successful agleam conditions. Asus besides applied Corning Gorilla matte to trim glare by up to 80%, and the solid itself is protected by Corning Gorilla Victus, giving it other durability and scratch resistance.
The ExpertBook Ultra B9's dependable strategy is arsenic impressive. Asus gave its instrumentality a six-speaker strategy that includes dual magnetic woofers for heavy bass and tweeters for clear, elaborate high-frequency sound. No substance what I played, from euphony to spoken-word videos, the audio sounded lush and well-balanced.
What truly stood retired to me, however, was the level of instrumentality separation. Listening to jazz and lo-fi hip-hop tracks, each constituent of the song, the drums, piano, and occasional trumpets, had its ain abstraction successful the soundstage, adjacent to each other. Audio from these speakers carries crossed the country without overmuch distortion, allowing maine to intelligibly perceive dialog from 20 feet away.
Efficiency meets power
My reappraisal portion of the ExpertBook Ultra ran connected an Intel Core Ultra X7 processor, 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and a 1TB SSD. This operation delivers precisely the level of show you'd expect from a premium concern laptop.
In day-to-day use, the ExpertBook Ultra B9 felt snappy. Apps opened instantly, browser tabs loaded without hesitation, and I could hop betwixt aggregate apps seamlessly. The generous magnitude of RAM ensured thing slowed the instrumentality down, reinforcing the laptop's absorption connected delivering no-compromise productivity.
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Below is simply a array comparing the Asus ExpertBook Ultra B9's benchmark results with different work-centric laptops I've tested. You'll instantly announcement that the Asus exemplary boasts a importantly higher Geekbench multicore people than its competitors, signaling stronger multitasking show and accurately reflecting what I experienced first-hand.
Its benchmarking scores besides suggest the laptop is well-suited for contented creation. During testing, I edited drone footage and high-resolution photographs without contented -- the laptop handled those workloads comfortably. However, it whitethorn conflict with dense tasks similar analyzable 3D rendering since it operates connected an integrated Intel Arc graphics paper alternatively than a discrete Nvidia GPU. These benignant of tasks would beryllium amended suited to a much specialized laptop.
Battery beingness is thing abbreviated of phenomenal. The ExpertBook lasted implicit 16 hours connected a azygous charge. Energy ratio is simply a large absorption for Intel's Panther Lake processor series. Processors person improved greatly implicit the past fewer years, and this laptop is simply a cleanable illustration of that progress. Charging speeds are arsenic impressive: aft conscionable 30 minutes plugged in, the artillery climbed up to 60%.
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Laptops this bladed that location high-end hardware often tally hot. To support temperatures cool, Asus equipped its instrumentality with the ExpertCool Pro system, an precocious cooling solution that utilizes 3 aerial outlets to summation interior aerial pressure. The effect is simply a laptop that runs effortlessly cool.
ZDNET's Buying Advice
You volition person to hold a spot earlier you tin get your hands connected the ExpertBook Ultra B9. Asus told maine that the ExpertBook with the Intel Core Ultra X7 CPU is slated to motorboat successful April 2026, with pre-orders going up successful the archetypal 4th of 2026. Two colour options volition beryllium available: Morn Grey and Jet Fog (black). A 2nd exemplary moving the much almighty Intel Core Ultra X9 processor is expected to get aboriginal successful Q2 2026.
Asus hasn't confirmed pricing yet, but the institution is mounting up the ExpertBook Ultra B9 for the premium thin-and-light laptop market. The rep said that the caller exemplary volition beryllium going up against devices similar the Dell Pro 14 Premium, HP EliteBook X G1i 14, and Lenovo's 12th-Gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
Based connected existent pricing for those rivals, I deliberation it's tenable to expect the ExpertBook Ultra B9 to kand astatine astir $2,400. Final pricing volition beryllium revealed person to launch.
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