Pre-Ordered The ASUS Zenbook S 14 For Intel Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" Linux Testing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Pre-Ordered The ASUS Zenbook S 14 For Intel Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" Linux Testing

With this week's announcement of the Intel Core Ultra 200V Series "Lunar Lake" processors, I've been very eager to try out the Meteor Lake successor for Linux testing. As sadly is usually the case, for delivering Linux support details and performance benchmarks around launch-time I'm typically left buying a laptop retail for Linux testing. In this case after seeing the Lunar Lake laptops announced this week and their availability, I ended up settling on the ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA-S14.U71TB) for the initial Core Ultra 200V series Linux review...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Lunar-Lake-Linux-Zenbook

[bug77]

I thought the same thing when I looked at the lineup: 256V if you don't need much RAM, 258V if you do (though, in the thin-n-light range, you probably don't). Anything above those seems pretty pointless.

Looking forward to the review(s).

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Super cool, thanks Michael! I'll throw a few more dollars your way.

[lem79]

I thought the same thing when I looked at the lineup: 256V if you don't need much RAM, 258V if you do (though, in the thin-n-light range, you probably don't). Anything above those seems pretty pointless.

Looking forward to the review(s).

I dunno .. I surprised myself the other day. I've got a laptop with a Ryzen 5700U 15W which I guess would be considered 'thin and light'. It used to have 32Gb of RAM, but I upgraded it to 64Gb a few weeks ago as 32 didn't appear to be enough. Use case:

* Laptop connected to a dock with 2x4K displays.
* Opening 12 tabs in Firefox (with Office 365/PowerPoint running in them), and Firefox subsequently using 13Gb of VRAM alone (inspected via umr https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/tomstdenis/umr). That wasn't including the ~10Gb of system memory in use already.
* Multiple LibreOffice, Inkscape, and GIMP windows
* I had to start my Windows VM to run PowerPoint proper (because the web version doesn't have all the features), another 8Gb instantly. I would have had to close lots of things or not use 4K screens with 'only' 32Gb.
* And just when I thought I couldn't use any more RAM, I had a use case for running some LLMs via ollama on it (CPU only, but still works fast enough for me). Another 7Gb.

So there's 38Gb of RAM. Glad I could upgrade my laptop myself. Looking forward to a 64 or 128Gb Strix Halo one day for sure though.

[mi7chy]

Almost ordered the higher spec model with 258V and 32GB RAM direct from Asus but after second thought not $1600+ interesting after tax that I can put towards RTX5090. Will settle for the 14" Yoga 7, 8840HS, 16GB, 1TB for a third of the cost and though not as long has about 1.5 business day of battery life.

[qarium]

this will be a very interesting benchmark intel abolish its own factories and use TSMC factories instead

[Caine Thanatos]

Was wondering if you already received it (other websites have now (kinda meh) reviews for the Intel 258V .
No one posting like actual data regarding power usage during the benchmarks / testing.

most of them have just a regular battery usage (browsing, etc...)