Asus ExpertBook Ultra B9406CAA Review: Light, Powerful, Pro-Ready

The Asus ExpertBook Ultra B9406CAA is a lightweight 14‑inch business laptop that delivers strong CPU, GPU, and AI performance in a 1 kg chassis, making it a serious workhorse for productivity, content creation, and even some gaming while on the move.

Design, Build, and Portability
The ExpertBook Ultra B9406CAA uses a magnesium‑aluminum alloy chassis with a nano‑ceramic 9H coating that improves resistance to scratches and fingerprints while giving the surface a slightly textured, matte feel. At around 1 kg and just 10.9 mm at its thinnest point, it is extremely portable for a 14‑inch machine, yet still meets US MIL‑STD‑810H durability standards for drops, vibration, and temperature.

In hand, the machine feels more like a slim ultrabook than a bulky business notebook, which makes it well suited to frequent travelers and hybrid workers who need to carry a laptop all day. The aesthetic is understated “Jet Fog” gray with clean lines, and an LED light bar, called ExpertLumi, along the bottom of the display adds a subtle visual flourish, though it is mostly cosmetic in the current implementation.

Keyboard, Touchpad, and Inputs
The backlit chiclet keyboard offers 1.5 mm of key travel and generally firm, comfortable feedback, which suits long typing sessions and office work. The keys have an excimer UV coating which makes the surface smoother to the touch and more resistant to smudges over time.

The 110 cm² haptic glass touchpad is wide, precise, and supports configurable feedback, emulating a mechanical click anywhere on the surface. For pointer‑heavy tasks such as spreadsheets and photo editing, the tracking itself is quite accurate.

A 1080p IR webcam with privacy shutter sits above the display and supports Windows Hello facial recognition, while a fingerprint sensor embedded in the power button offers a second biometric option. The dual‑array microphones support clear voice pickup, and the system is Microsoft Secured‑core PC certified, with a discrete TPM 2.0 and integrated Microsoft Pluton security processor for credential and firmware protection.

Display and Audio
The 14‑inch tandem OLED panel at 2880-by-1800 pixels (WQXGA+, 16:10) is one of the standout features of this machine. It supports a 30–120 Hz variable refresh rate, full DCI‑P3 and sRGB coverage, and is Pantone Validated, which makes it very well suited to color‑sensitive work such as photo editing, design, and video preview. HDR brightness can reach around 1400 nits with SDR mode peaking at about 600 nits, giving the screen plenty of headroom for bright office environments and HDR media.

Because this is tandem OLED, it achieves higher brightness and lower power draw than typical single‑stack OLEDs, which benefits both battery life and panel longevity. The panel uses a matte Corning Gorilla Glass overlay to cut reflections, which helps significantly with glare under harsh lighting. Color accuracy is excellent out of the box, with a measured ΔE ColorChecker around 1.18 (and below 1 after calibration), making it effectively “ready to work” for creative professionals.

Audio is handled by a four‑speaker Dolby Atmos system, which includes two woofers and two tweeters, delivering clear voices and a reasonable sense of spatial depth for calls, presentations, and video content. It still behaves like a thin‑and‑light system—bass is present but not room‑shaking—yet it is more than adequate for day‑to‑day media consumption and online meetings.

Performance: CPU, GPU, AI, and Thermals
At the heart of the ExpertBook Ultra B9406CAA is Intel’s Core Ultra X7 358H (Panther Lake‑H), a 16‑core / 16‑thread chip with a 1.9 GHz base and up to 4.8 GHz boost, paired with an Intel Arc B390 integrated GPU and an Intel AI Boost NPU rated up to 50 TOPS. With 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory, which is soldered, but can be configured to up to 64 GB and a fast PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, the system easily handles heavy multitasking, office suites, browsers crammed with tabs, and professional applications such as Lightroom, Photoshop, video editors, and coding.

Our benchmarking shows CPU performance roughly on par with high‑end previous‑generation Intel mobile chips like the Core Ultra 7 265H, with about a 15–10% uplift over the commonly seen Core Ultra 7 255H in multi‑threaded workloads. Where Panther Lake and this configuration really stand out is in GPU performance: the Arc B390 delivers graphics throughput in the same ballpark as an entry‑level discrete GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU at similar power levels, which is an impressive result for a 1 kg laptop that relies solely on integrated graphics.

In practical terms, this means 3D workloads such as light 3D modeling, CAD visualization, and GPU‑accelerated compositing feel snappy, as long as you stay within moderate scene complexity. In addition, modern games at 1080p with medium settings are playable, especially e‑sports titles or well‑optimized AAA games with some tweaks. You will also find GPU‑accelerated tasks in creative apps such as effects, filters, and AI‑based upscaling, benefiting from the extra compute headroom.

The integrated NPU, called Intel AI Boost, is designed to offload AI‑driven workloads such as background noise removal, live captioning, meeting transcription, and local large‑language‑model inference up to 50 TOPS, depending on precision. Asus layers its own MyExpert suite on top, providing features such as AI Meeting Minutes, on‑device summarization, translation, and Knowledge Hub, which can turn local and cloud documents into a searchable knowledge base with Q&A and summaries.

Thermally, Asus allows the platform to draw up to 50 W TDP in peak performance mode, which lets the chip stretch its legs when plugged in. Under sustained heavy loads, the fans spin up but remain within typical business‑laptop noise levels, and CPU performance stays relatively consistent. One caveat is that maximum performance is reserved for AC power: on battery, the system enforces a lower TDP ceiling, which may lead to a drop in CPU/GPU performance for intensive workloads, even though everyday tasks still feel very responsive.

Battery Life, Connectivity, and Practical Use
Powering everything is a 70 Wh 4‑cell lithium‑ion battery, which Asus rates at up to 24 hours in ideal scenarios. While real‑world runtimes vary with brightness and workload, the efficient tandem OLED panel and Panther Lake’s lower power draw allow for long stretches of office work and web browsing without a charger, and fast charging can bring the battery from empty to about 50% in roughly 30 minutes with the included 90 W USB‑C adapter.

Connectivity is strong for such a thin system: you get two Thunderbolt 4 (USB4) Type‑C ports with power delivery and display output, two USB‑A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, HDMI 2.1, and a 3.5 mm audio jack, enabling multi‑monitor setups and a mix of legacy and modern peripherals without needing a large dock. Wi‑Fi 7 with 2×2 antennas and Bluetooth (up to 5.4 with the appropriate driver) provide robust wireless performance with low latency, which is ideal for video meetings and cloud workflows.

Storage options include a single M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 slot, with up to 2TB of M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD storage available as an option. From a security and manageability perspective, the laptop supports Microsoft Secured‑core PC, NIST SP 800‑193 firmware resiliency, BIOS self‑recovery, and Absolute Persistence (Computrace), which makes it a solid choice for enterprise fleets. Asus also offers its MyASUS and ASUS Control Center tooling for diagnostics, fan profiles, and remote management, simplifying deployment and long‑term maintenance in IT environments.

Verdict
If your priority is a highly portable yet powerful business laptop that can handle intensive productivity, creative workloads, and occasional gaming without sacrificing battery life or enterprise‑grade security, the Asus ExpertBook Ultra B9406CAA is a compelling all‑rounder that leans heavily into performance and display quality without losing sight of practical usability.

Price: AED 8999 onwards