ASUS Zenbook Laptop (Open-Box Excellent): 14.5" 2.8K OLED, i7-13700H, 16GB RAM Expired

Amazing price. I paid $671 and it was a great deal. Using it for work and it's been working well. Battery life has been adequate even with the OLED. Grab an open box one before the price goes back up, for $550-570 it's a crazy deal. I can't find any 12 or 13 gen i7 laptops than even come close for the price if you don't need a dedicated GPU.

I did have to buy and return a couple laptops before I got one to keep. Worst one the space bar wasn't responding if you hit it on the right side. Everything else was brand new. The one I ended up keeping was brand new, still had all the stickers on it and very little usage on the SSD. So YMMV, but for the price it's worth taking a shot before buying a new one. Just return the open box one of its not in excellent condition.

This is about the perfect spec sheet given how cheap nvme drives are right now. I really wish RAM wasn't soldered on, but 16gb is fine for most. So glad this isn't the 8gb model.

EDIT: I had a couple delivered from this deal. I've already replaced the SSD in one with a 2GB SN850X and had no hardware problems (some driver issues, posted my solution for the SSD during Windows Install here since Asus's support and docs were wrong), and so far I'm quite happy with it! If you do crack yours open, some videos show similar cases with hidden screws under rubber feet, but this one has no hidden screws to worry about. Just take the obvious ones out and be careful not to break plastic snaps. Asus's downloadable service guide/PDF is useful in walking you through this.

Random Benchmarks:

CrystalDiskMark:
I didn't bench the stock 512GB SSD but I found somebody who did and it shows:
SEQ1M Q8T1: 4221.50/1820.33
SEQ1M Q1T1: 2165.70/1626.61
RND4K Q8T1: 441.52/492.50
RND4K Q1T1: 64.58/138.05

I benched the SN850X 2TB I upgraded my 14X to from the last deal and I see (same 5 pass/1GiB settings):
SEQ1M Q8T1: 6384.54/6102.03
SEQ1M Q1T1: 3347.59/3698.74
RND4K Q8T1: 602.47/636.08
RND4K Q1T1: 70.27/194.31

SSD was definitely worth upgrading, although I'm wondering if there's something I can do better (like drivers, which I haven't really finished installing 🤣) since some of these numbers still appear low.

GeekBench 6:
My first and only run (I'll run a few more in the next couple days, need to hit the road to travel in a minute):
Single-Core CPU: 2364 (I see posts online at ~2500)
Multi-Core CPU: 12752 (I see posts online at ~13500)
OpenCL GPU: 17000 (yeah, nice round number) - This is generally pretty high compared to online posts
Vulkan GPU: 22100 - This is generally pretty high compared to online posts

I'm getting 6hrs at best at 50% brightness 120hz locked but goes down to 60hz at 20% battery. This is just normal browsing with 20 tabs open on Opera with tab sleeping disabled. An hour of Youtube included maybe two. The upside is it charges like 50% within 30-40minutes with the included 90w charger in power effeciency or balanced mode.