Historically, premium 13″-class ultraportable laptops have been the domain of Intel low-power chips. However, AMD fought that position fiercely with Zen 2 Ryzen 4000U and aims to continue doing so with Zen 3 Ryzen 5000U.
In this review, we have a couple of very comparable ASUS ZenBook 13” laptops and we will be using them to pit AMD’s new Ryzen 7 5800U APU against Intel’s competing Core i7-1165G7. With both chips running at relatively low power states around the 15W mark – not the 25W+ gas guzzling mode we often see in bigger gaming-type devices – this should make for an interesting comparison.
13”-class ultraportable laptops can be ideal for those who need a decent amount of processing grunt alongside excellent battery life and the ability to quickly sling the device into a backpack or handbag on the way to work or school.
We want to see just how fast AMD's new Zen 3-based Ryzen 7 5800U APU is for ultraportable configurations. And we test that by running the AMD chip inside an ASUS ZenBook 13 OLED UM325S laptop. Direct comparison for a Tiger Lake Core i7-1165G7 processors at equivalent power modes comes from the ASUS ZenBook Flip S OLED UX371 laptop.
Let's take a closer look at these two devices.