ASUS ExpertBook PM3406 review – for Worry-Free Reliability

ASUS has an entire series of products within the Expert family that is aimed towards SMBs and enterprises for worry-free reliability. What we have here is the new ASUS ExpertBook P3 series of laptops. Our specific model here is the PM3406 – and it is packed full of power to go through all your processing power needs, and also offering fantastic battery life too.

Design

The ExpertBook PM3406 is available in the Misty Grey color, which is a great departure from the usual black and sleek look that enterprise laptops usually have. It also has a chamfered edge around the deck, which makes it supremely premium – and it also means that the deck is made out of metal.

Yet surprisingly, this laptop isn’t actually heavy. It weighs in at only 1.34kg while measuring at only 17.9mm thin. ASUS managed to balance between a super durable metal laptop and also portability into this laptop – which is essential as this type of laptop will be brought everywhere and have to run through lots of work.

Screen

Now, this ExpertBook PM3406 has a 14-inch IPS LCD screen with a resolution of 1920×1200 pixels. The taller 16:10 aspect ratio is definitely appreciated here as the viewport is always at 16:9 while the extra extension is where the Windows taskbar sits.

This display is actually quite okay. It can reach around 320 nits in maximum brightness, and it can reach around these stats when we tested it with our colorimeter at 100 nits:

• sRGB: 56.58%
• DCI-P3: 40.57%
• Maximum ΔE: 1.395334
• Average ΔE: 0.060333

What’s great is that the hinge can also go 180° flat. While it might not seem like it’s useful, just think of how useful it is when we’re showing something to someone across the table. Lay the screen flat, so we both can see it.

The hinge of this laptop is also super durable as the rail’s metal bases are screwed onto the laptop’s metal chassis, providing a strong and smooth hinge.

Trackpad

The humongous trackpad is great to use and it has excellent palm rejection, smooth for my fingers to glide on, and also has gestures to quickly change the volume and brightness by just swiping on either edges of the trackpad.

Keyboard

The keyboard is also amazing on this ExpertBook PM3406. It has a standard 14-inch laptop keyboard layout. The keycaps for each key are appropriately sized, and the travel distance is quite deep too. The overall typical experience is bouncy and responsive, making it a very fun typing experience on this laptop.

We also have the Copilot button here that will bring up the prompt window. We can ask it whatever we want – and even change how it responds according to our question. Say whatever you like – having another brain at the press of a button is seriously a superpower.

Specs and performance

Speaking of that, this laptop has this list of specs:

• AMD Ryzen AI 7 350
• 16GB LPDDR5 RAM at 5600MT/s
• 512GB NVMe SSD
• AMD Radeon 860M integrated graphics

The main star of the show is definitely the AMD Ryzen AI 7 350. That NPU that goes up to 50 TOPS – and it can do all the Copilot AI tasks quickly and swiftly.

Speaking of the NPU, we have the ExpertPanel suite of features built into this ExpertBook PM3406 too. These features are all done on-device, so it doesn’t matter if you have internet connection or not – and that means your data are never sent out of your device unless you chose to do so. Within the ExpertPanel, we have the AI ExpertMeet that has a few features that I want to highlight quickly.

AI Meeting Minutes where we can record an entire meeting’s audio or upload our own, then have it transcribed and then translated or summarized, or both. It’s incredibly handy and simple to use.

AI Translated Subtitles is a feature that listens to audio via the microphone or the system’s audio (take YouTube videos for example) and it will transcribe everything or translate in real-time.

Meeting new clients? Maybe put your name, title, and contact information on your video feed. Maybe even put a QR code so that other participants in the call can scan and contact you immediately.

Are you showing any confidential information? Then use the screen watermark feature. It lays a layer of semi-transparent text on the screen to deter others from recording their screen or taking screenshots and pictures of the confidential items shown.

Within the ExpertPanel, there is AI Noise Cancellation to make our voice more legible within not-so-ideal environment for video calls, and the AI camera crops, zooms, and follows us around within the frame.

Other than that, this supremely powerful chipset can also do all of our Excel and Word documents smoothly, and we can even do some video editing too. Sure, the display isn’t exactly the most color-accurate one for video editing – but we have an HDMI port to an external monitor.

This laptop’s thermal solution is designed in a way that we can close the lid without affecting the airflow – and that is amazing for privacy and also to prevent dust from falling into the keyboard.

Plus, the panel can withstand strong pressure – its so strong, it can even withstand a whole person standing on it.

The hinge is also made to withstand 50,000 open-closes cycles. That’s great!                                                              

Ports and durability

In terms of ports, there are a lot of them – as listed below:

• Left side
  • 2x USB-C (10Gb/s) with USB-PD and DisplayPort Alt Mode support
  • HDMI 2.1 TMDS
  • USB-A (5Gb/s)

• Right side
  • Kensington lock
  • RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet
  • USB-A (5Gb/s)

Moreover, the ports are supremely strong and also metal-reinforced. Usually, the ports are just soldered onto the motherboard, and when they’re used a bit more roughly a few times, the solder points will eventually break, resulting in a faulty port. What ASUS did to the ExpertBook is to reinforce the ports by securing a metal brace on it.

With this metal brace, it will have no way to break the solder points.

Let’s talk about another port – the RJ45. This Ethernet port is designed in such a way that it is in two parts. The part with all the pins are located on the motherboard side, whereby the other part holds the Ethernet cable in place. As we know, Ethernet ports are thick – but ASUS designed it in a way that folds so that the laptop can still be thin without losing the port.

Upgradability

Since we have the laptop opened to show you all these, let’s talk about upgradability. By looking at the motherboard, we can see that there are two M.2 SSD slots and two DDR5 SO-DIMM slots. For our configuration of the ExpertBook PM3406, only the M.2 2280 slot is occupied, and the other M.2 2230 slot is available for us to upgrade.