Asus Expertbook P5 Review: Business basics (with a dash of AI)

The Asus Expertbook P5 doesn’t present itself as a particularly flashy Copilot+ laptop, but it’s smart enough for most business purposes.

Score: 3.5/5

In this review

Asus Expertbook P5 Specifications
Asus Expertbook P5 Design
Asus Expertbook P5 Performance
Asus Expertbook P5 Battery
Asus Expertbook P5 Conclusion

Design

The Expertbook branding represents Asus’ pitch at business laptop buyers, so it’s no real surprise that the Asus Expertbook P5 has a rather more sedate design than you’d find in, say, any of its ROG laptops or even its more flashy Zenbook or Vivobook lines.

A small rectangular badge sits on the rear of the laptop making it somewhat mimic a business card, and that’s probably not accidental.

The Asus Expertbook P5 measures in at 31.2x22.3x1.645 cm with a carrying weight of 2.29kg, so it’s not in the true superlight, super thin class of laptops – and again, that’s all part and parcel of its more general business look.

Open it up and you’re faced with a 14 inch 2560x1600 pixel 144Hz capable LCD display with slightly prominent top and bottom bezels. The top bezel does allow space for the integrated 1080p webcam with support for Windows Hello unlocking.

It features a physical sliding privacy shutter, though it’s not the most obvious unit thanks to being rather dark itself against a black background. I’ll generally favour units that use a sharper colour contrast to make it more apparent to you when you’ve got privacy enabled or disabled, though physically of course this still works just fine.

The Expertbook P5’s keyboard is well built with decent travel on each keystroke. There's a small amount of typing noise if you're the type to attack a keyboard with vigour, though nothing like the sounds you'd get out of a mechanical keyboard.

If I’ve got one complaint – and it’s a small one – it’s that the cursor keys are rather squashed together in the lower right hand corner. They also do double duty as function enabled home, end and page up/page down keys.

The Expertbook P5 follows a familiar trend in laptop design where most of the ports are clustered on the left hand side of the laptop.

That’s where you’ll find dual Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, HDMI, a single USB-A port and a combo headphone jack.

On the right hand side you just get a single lonely USB-A port and a Kensington lock port.

Performance

The Asus Expertbook P5 is a Copilot+ PC, and to date that’s a category of Windows 11 notebooks that’s been dominated by ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus processors – but they’re not the only processors playing in the Copilot+ pool any more.

The Asus Expertbook P5 loaned to me for review runs on an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. There is some variance in the range with options for 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, and either Intel’s integrated Arc 140V or Arc 130V GPUs. What I’m testing here is pretty much the top of the range for this particular model, which makes it officially the Asus Expertbook P5405CSA.

The launch of x86-based Copilot+ laptops was meant to bring with it improved performance without sacrificing too much battery life, but how does that actually stack up in real-world performance?

To compare that, I ran PC Mark 10 and 3DMark Time Spy over the Asus Expertbook P5 to see how it compares against other Copilot+ ARM-based laptops and other similar business-centric models sporting similar CPU architecture.

While those results aren’t the fastest I’ve seen across every laptop – a hardcore gaming rig will best the Expertbook P5’s GPU without even having to spin up its fans – it does point to solid performance, which is exactly what you’d want out of a business laptop.

The Asus Expertbook P5 is also Copilot+ ready for your AI needs. I’m on the record here as being more of a fan of human-produced words, but I can’t ignore that there absolutely is a business case for some level of AI integration into people’s workflows… along with some level of human interactions, because AI hallucinations are very much still a thing.

Still, you get Microsoft’s set of AI integrations to push the internal NPU for matters like live translation and image generation. Microsoft’s rather more controversial Recall feature is still in testing at the time of writing, however – but to be clear, if it were live beyond making sure it actually functioned, I would be disabling it on any work PC I happened to be using for the sake of security.

The natural advantage with having a Copilot+ PC running on x86 rather than ARM is that you get full Windows app compatibility, rather than having to rely on the Windows Prism emulator to manage those apps.

Speaking of apps, Asus goes relatively lightweight when it comes to preinstalled apps on the Asus Expertbook P5. McAfee is installed for your antivirus needs (or rapid uninstallation, depending on your viewpoint on its general utility) as well as a range of Asus business centric applications.

Battery

I’ve long grown used to the somewhat hyperbolic claims that laptop manufacturers will make around the battery capabilities of their machines – and for about the same length of time I’ve long been disappointed.
Asus makes the very high level claim of up to 28 hours of battery life for the Expertbook P5. If that pans out, it would be one of the longest lasting laptops I’ve ever tested, hands down.

Spoiler: It doesn’t, though the battery life of the Asus Expertbook P5 is quite decent.

Laptop usage will always determine overall battery life and everyone’s usage varies, which is why when I test laptops, I do so one with soft usage video test, and one synthetic hard usage benchmark test.

Specifically, the soft usage test runs a 1080p video full screen to battery exhaustion, while the synthetic test relies on PCMark 10’s Gaming Battery test. The Asus Expertbook P5 isn’t a gaming laptop of course, but this gives me a nice sustained load test for heavy usage. Your actual daily usage is likely to fall between these two extremes.

So how does the Asus Expertbook P5 stack up?

While it’s can’t compete with the best of the ARM-based Copilot+ PCs as yet – and that’s not a shock, battery life is pretty much the reason why you might want an ARM-based Windows 11 PC in the first place – the Asus Expertbook P5 does acquit itself well amongst its x86 brethren, though nowhere near that claimed 28 hour battery life figure.

There’s still quite solid scope here for good all-day business battery life, given that it did hit over 13 hours of sustained video playback, as long as you don’t need it for more processor-intensive work on a sustained basis.

Recharging the Asus Expertbook P5 is via USB-C with a small supplied 65W charger in the box. That works fine, though honestly I used a number of other PD-compliant chargers with the Asus Expertbook P5, because that’s very much the beauty of USB-PD charging!

Asus Expertbook P5: Alex’s Verdict

As a straight up Windows laptop, the Expertbook P5 isn’t exactly fancy, but that’s not what it’s for.

It’s a business-centric model with an AI focus, and if that’s what you’re after, it’s got a decent mix of power and performance along with a solid enough build for most purposes.

It doesn’t quite live up to Asus’ hefty battery life promises – but then very few laptops do – while avoiding the ARM compatibility issues of many Copilot+ laptops.

Asus Expertbook P5: Pricing and availability

The Asus Expertbook sells in Australia with pricing starting at $2,299 depending on configuration. The model tested retails at $2,799.

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