Asus comes to CES 2026 with an 'Ultra' ExpertBook built for the modern worker

When it comes to naming devices, hardware vendors generally use either 'Pro' or 'Ultra' to indicate the most premium model. And it's the latter for Asus and its all-new ExpertBook Ultra, unveiled at CES 2026.

As part of a wider refresh of its main brands (Zenbook, VivoBook, ProArt, and ROG), the ExpertBook Ultra replaces the B9 as the top commercial offering from Asus. And as the name suggests, it's a laptop with all the best specs the hardware giant can offer; it's ultra durable, ultra fast, ultra cool, and ultra reliable (according to Asus, that is).

Toughness is one of the main selling points here. The Ultra is made for modern work and the wear and tear of doing your job in different places. The lid and chassis are scratch-resistant, protecting it from the kind of damage you get from repeatedly taking it in and out of a rucksack. The keys have an anti-smudge layer. The screen is protected with Gorilla Glass Victus. One gets the sense that Asus is challenging you to leave a mark on your work machine. Its confidence, no doubt, comes from the extensive US military grade testing the Ultra has been through.

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As a notebook, the ExpertBook Ultra is as beautiful, slender, and light as anything we've seen – the keyboard section almost looks like it's a piece of paper. The whole unit weighs under 1kg and is only 11mm thick. Amazingly, it still has room to fit in plenty of connection options; you have a Thunderbolt USB Type-C and USB-A on both sides of the device, plus an HDMI 2.1 and headphone jack.

The screen, which is a Samsung-made panel, is a pretty 3K tandem OLED touchscreen with up to 120Hz refresh rate. The panel can hit 1400 nits of HDR brightness, according to Asus, and has a Corning Gorilla-made Matte finish.

Asus ExpertBook Ultra: Performance

Under the hood, the ExpertBook Ultra houses an Intel Core Ultra X9 388H chip With 50 TOPS AI performance. This can be paired with up to 64GB of RAM (LPDDR5X). The X9 is a 16-core SoC that's part of the Panther Lake family, with the top model supporting Xe3 GPU cores.

With all that power inside its thin chassis, one would expect the Ultra to be both hot and noisy, but Asus has built a laptop that is neither. It uses an 'ExpertCool Pro' system to manage heat dissipation, and the build also manages to reduce noise. According to Asus, it is ultra quiet, with as little as 35 decibels in balance mode and 22 in whisper mode.

The Ultra has a 70Wh battery that can last around 24 hours, according to Asus. That would put it alongside the HP OmniBook 5 and the M5 MacBook Pro, but we won't know exactly how long it lasts until we get a review unit in. Same for the charger, which Asus suggests can go from 0% to 50% within 30 minutes.

The ExpertBook Ultra, launched at CES 2026, will be available later in the year.