AMD Ryzen 4000 Joins GeForce MX350 In New Asus Zenbook 14 Laptop

Asus ZenBook 14

Asus ZenBook 14 (Image credit: Asus)

A recent test submission spotted by database detective @_rogame shows that Asus is potentially preparing a new Zenbook 14 (UX434IQ) laptop. The device seemingly employs one of AMD's Ryzen 4000-series (codename Renoir) chips.

Given its compact and slim body, the ZenBook 14 has always favored U-series processors that operate within a 15W envelope. Asus will probably refresh its ZenBook 14 family with new processors and among the options, there will be a model that leverages the Ryzen 7 4700U.

The Ryzen 7 4700U, which is based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture and 7nm FinFET node, pushes the boundary for a U-series offering with eight cores, 16 threads and 8MB of L3 cache. The octa-core part flexes a 2 GHz base clock and 4.1 GHz boost clock.

Asus ZenBook 14

Asus ZenBook 14 (Image credit: _rogame/Twitter)

The Ryzen 7 4700U is pretty flexible when it comes to memory support. Laptop vendors can choose to pair the processor up with DDR4-3200 or LPDDR4-4266 memory. In Asus' case, the ZenBook 14 appears to come with 16GB of the latter, which discards the possibility of future expansion.

On the iGPU side, the Ryzen 7 4700U includes seven Vega Compute Units (CUs) that tick up to 1,600 MHz. Early benchmarks show that Renoir's iGPU is actually pretty decent. At any rate, Asus incorporates Nvidia's GeForce MX350 for more firepower.

The GeForce MX350 is based on the Pascal GP107 silicon. The graphics card carries 640 CUDA cores that operate with a 1,354 MHz base clock and 1,468 MHz boost clock. There's also 2GB of 7 Gbps GDDR5 memory onboard that communicates across a 64-bit memory interface for a memory bandwidth output of 56.06 GBps. Performance-wise, the GeForce MX350 is reportedly situated between the GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 960M.

Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • alextheblue
    Ugh, 2GB. There are already some games that even at low settings, chafe at that limit. Should have used a 4GB variant, or just stuck with the iGPU. They could have turned the 4800U up to 25W and used LPDDR4X 4266 and called it a day.

    Then again, maybe they have inventory they need to burn through.
    Reply
  • refillable
    Yet another dumb decision by an OEM. The 350 is barely faster than Ryzen 4000's IGP, it's just wasting space, weight, power, and cost just by being included. I'll avoid anything like this if there's a better option.
    Reply
  • Rdslw
    alextheblue said:
    Ugh, 2GB. There are already some games that even at low settings, chafe at that limit. Should have used a 4GB variant, or just stuck with the iGPU. They could have turned the 4800U up to 25W and used LPDDR4X 4266 and called it a day.

    Then again, maybe they have inventory they need to burn through.
    it have ONLY 2 gains in this config:
    dedicated ram, so gpu dont burn yours 16 GB. as a chrome user, I really love every spare MB of ram.
    dual gpu == twice the screens. If there is an option for usb-c(or TB) to hdmi. I really hope it is included.as intel versions of this have gpu & non gpu versions,you should have an option.
    I really wanted a new laptop ^ 98% like this one (swappable or faster ram+thunderbolt :( ) but all in all it's a good setup.
    as its not meant to be played, that GPU is a bit pointless, but as mentioned dock with screens might be the reason to have that gpu on board.
    I had UX32 as portable setup for ~7y now, but it decided to become 2 in 1 lately (screen is a separate component, plastic hinge snapped) and that ryzen powered one was very neat replacement I was looking for since January....
    I really hope inventory will appear next month. I had a breakdown last weekend and ALMOST ordered i7 version of it :)
    Reply
  • mitch074
    Rdslw said:
    it have ONLY 2 gains in this config:
    dedicated ram, so gpu dont burn yours 16 GB. as a chrome user, I really love every spare MB of ram.
    dual gpu == twice the screens. If there is an option for usb-c(or TB) to hdmi. I really hope it is included.as intel versions of this have gpu & non gpu versions,you should have an option.
    I really wanted a new laptop ^ 98% like this one (swappable or faster ram+thunderbolt :( ) but all in all it's a good setup.
    as its not meant to be played, that GPU is a bit pointless, but as mentioned dock with screens might be the reason to have that gpu on board.
    I had UX32 as portable setup for ~7y now, but it decided to become 2 in 1 lately (screen is a separate component, plastic hinge snapped) and that ryzen powered one was very neat replacement I was looking for since January....
    I really hope inventory will appear next month. I had a breakdown last weekend and ALMOST ordered i7 version of it :)
    Yeah, no - an iGPU driver will only allocate as much RAM as it needs, and hardware compositing makes it so that data isn't duplicated anyway.
    As for the number of screens, Windows is far too stupid to handle several screens through several adapters properly - I tried, it's crap. And AMD hardware can handle up to 6 screens since HD4xxx.
    No, the main reason why they put that meh discrete GPU is because if there's no Nvidia, then it's not a laptop for gamers, regardless of actual performance.
    Reply
  • mitch074
    Frankly, I would personally really enjoy a "pro" laptop like a HP Probook with a Ryzen APU : it's rather sturdy, you can service it quite easily, there is no discrete GPU because it's a "pro" machine - and Vega 7 on dual channel DDR4 should be plenty enough for the odd gaming session @720p Low if I don't have my gaming rig handy.
    Reply
  • Rdslw
    mitch074 said:
    Yeah, no - an iGPU driver will only allocate as much RAM as it needs, and hardware compositing makes it so that data isn't duplicated anyway.
    As for the number of screens, Windows is far too stupid to handle several screens through several adapters properly - I tried, it's crap. And AMD hardware can handle up to 6 screens since HD4xxx.
    No, the main reason why they put that meh discrete GPU is because if there's no Nvidia, then it's not a laptop for gamers, regardless of actual performance.
    I am not using Windows, its that little thing that allow me to do a lot more.
    I did not try AMD igpu yet, but intel one does over-allocate a lot. (a game that used ~1.5G vram did fill my 32GB with buffers, when OS and non gpu game stuff was using ~7GB).
    Reply
  • mitch074
    Rdslw said:
    I am not using Windows, its that little thing that allow me to do a lot more.
    I did not try AMD igpu yet, but intel one does over-allocate a lot. (a game that used ~1.5G vram did fill my 32GB with buffers, when OS and non gpu game stuff was using ~7GB).
    If that little thing has a penguin as a mascot, yeah, me too.
    The Intel driver on that is undergoing a rewrite, but to my knowledge the AMD driver is rather functional on IGPs. I only did superficial testing, though - performance was good but I didn't look deeper.
    Reply
  • mitch074
    If you want more info about Linux running on hardware, currently the refrence website is phoronix.com. The author wrote what is pretty much the only cross-platform benchmark suite in existence. There also is regularly performance reports for drivers updates, especially for Intel and AMD graphical hardware. Notably, a recent patch was announced that works around a performance problem for id games running on IGPs.
    Reply