Review of the Asus ExpertBook B9450: Lightweight, long-lasting laptop

There are two reasons to buy the ExpertBook B9450: the weight and battery life.

Take the Asus ExpertBook B9450 and you will wonder where the rest is. Asus is promoting it as the lightest 14-inch commercial laptop in the world, and it is lightweight. Carrying around, I felt like I wasn’t carrying anything. My test unit weighs 2.19 pounds, but models cost as much as 1.91 pounds.

Within the 0.6-inch chassis, however, Asus still managed to include some decent specs. The models start at $ 1,699 and the base includes 16 GB of RAM, 512 GB of storage and a Core i7-10510U with Intel UHD Graphics 620. The model I am using, which costs $ 1,799, has the same processor , but increases storage to up to two 1TB drives.

But the ExpertBook’s battery life is just as (if not more) impressive than its weight. In my tests, it lasted an average of 10 hours and 47 minutes – and that’s during multitasking with a decent load of Chrome guides and apps with 200 nits of brightness. This means that the ExpertBook is not the most durable corporate laptop I have ever tested (the $ 3,000 Dell Latitude still holds that crown), but it is certainly in the hall of fame.

This is my quick opinion about the ExpertBook. These are the two outstanding features (in addition to the storage capacity). Together, they make it a great choice for business users who need a portable device with plenty of storage, but potential buyers should be aware that the processor is best suited for basic office tasks. More on that in a moment.

One problem with laptops so thin and light is that they sometimes look fragile. The ExpertBook is surprisingly robust; it is made of several layers of a magnesium-lithium alloy material that Asus says is 17 percent less dense than the “conventional” magnesium-aluminum alloy. The company also claims that the B9450 has passed MIL-STD 810G military grade standards, which tests various factors such as door durability, spill resistance and shock resistance. I believe that. Although I felt a little flexibility on the keyboard and on the screen, it was nothing compared to what I saw on other ultra-thin units like the Vaio SX12.

Durability aside, the ExpertBook has a very high quality. There are metallic stains on the finish, which give everything a slightly heavenly appearance in a certain light.

A note with the design: like a series of Asus laptops, the ExpertBook has an ErgoLift hinge, which means that the screen folds under the keyboard deck when you open the laptop and lift it a little bit off the floor. This has a number of benefits – it is supposed to increase cooling and make typing more comfortable – but it also means that if you are using the ExpertBook on your lap, you will have a sharp hinge sinking into your legs. I know that not everyone spends as much time on the couch as I do, so your mileage may vary.

The last impressive thing is the useful port selection: you have two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, one HDMI 2.0 port, one Micro HDMI port for LAN and a 3.5 combo audio mm jack. Many manufacturers have had trouble fitting even USB-A to ultra-thin machines, so I am impressed to see a full-size HDMI here.

Other fun things: there’s a fingerprint reader below the arrow keys, the Windows Hello webcam has a physical shutter and an off switch, and the touchpad has Asus’s NumberPad 2.0 feature, which allows you to operate an LED numeric keypad at the touch of a sensor. And there are a number of business-specific features, including a TPM 2.0 chip and a preloaded package called Asus Business Manager, where you can encrypt your local drives, switch between editing the system registry and customizing various other things.

It all looks great, so what’s the catch? In fact, there is only one, but it will be important for many people. It’s the processor. The Core i7-10510U is a four-core processor with significantly less power than the chips you will see in the best laptops on the market like the Dell XPS 13. It is far from a workhorse.

Now, the ExpertBook is perfect for basic office work – emails, Google Docs, Slack, Zoom calls, that sort of thing. I never heard the fans spin during my regular Chrome multitasking, nor did I have any performance issues. If that’s what you do all day, great – the ExpertBook is for you. But if you think that someday you will need to do a lot of hard work on it, especially tasks that enhance the integrated graphics, you will want to look elsewhere.

I tried to run our traditional video export test in Adobe Premiere Pro to illustrate the difference in performance between this model and other ultraportables you can buy, but the program crashed during each test. I let Asus know about this, and she is investigating.

So, I ended up doing some light games. The ExpertBook ran Rocket League at maximum settings at 40fps (where the 11th Generation XPS 13 with Core i7 i7-1165G7 increased by 111fps, and the 10th Generation XPS 13 with Core i7-1065G7 reached 70fps). In League of Legends, had an average of 85fps (at 205fps of the 11th Generation XPS and at 160fps of the 10th Generation). It had an average of 31 fps in OverwatchUltra settings and a minimum of 10 fps Shadow of the Tomb Raider (which I ran mainly out of curiosity). These frame rates are considerably below what you would expect from both XPS models, as well as many much more affordable 14-inch models like Asus’ ZenBook 14.

To reiterate: the ExpertBook doesn’t come close to a gaming laptop. This is just to illustrate the processing power you are sacrificing for the additional portability, battery life and storage that the ExpertBook offers (and, of course, to note that if you think you will want to play even casual games, think about getting another thing).

However, I want to commend Asus for one thing: the cooling of the ExpertBook is great. During several attempts to export from Premiere and a long game session, the CPU temperature remained very consistent in the 60’s and rarely rose above 70 degrees Celsius. This is impressive, especially for such a thin device. (The XPS 13 spends a lot of time in the high 90s). On the other hand, the fans were so loud that they were audible from several rooms – people around me would be alarmed if I tried these tests in an office. This is another reason to avoid this if you need to do games or media work from time to time.

The audience for the ExpertBook B9450 is somewhat specific. But that does not mean that it is small. If you don’t care too much about processing power, but are concerned with portability, battery life and storage, this laptop is worth $ 1,799. Not only is it among the lightest you can buy in this size, but it is one of the few products in its weight class to feature dual storage slots. It will be difficult to find all three features on many other 14-inch laptops in this price range. Add good build quality and the nifty numpad feature, and I imagine this is a laptop that many employees at home and on the go will be happy to have.

Just make sure you know what you’re buying – because the low-powered processor and deafening fans are certainly not ideal for everyone.

Monica Chin / The Verge photo