Asus Zenbook Pro 16X OLED Review

The Asus Zenbook Pro 16X OLED is part of Asus’ ProArt line for Creators. It’s not cheap, but it’s powerful and properly packed full of features. There’s also a gamer-friendly GPU in there. Can it be all things to all people?

Asus Zenbook Pro 16X OLED Specs

Features, Ergonomics & Design

Asus’ Zenbook Pro 16X OLED is an impressive-looking laptop. The all-metal chassis is classy and robust. The Asus ProArt logo is RGB-backlit on the top. Every part of it is incredibly rigid, including the lid. It looks classy to casual observers and will easily fit into a corporate environment.

Screen

Opening it up reveals the very impressive, glossy, UHD, 3,840 x 2,400 OLED screen which is surrounded by a very thin bezel which blends in with the true-blacks of the screen. Despite the thinness, the top bezel squeezes in a Full HD (with IR) webcam that’s Windows Hello compatible. Quad array microphones adorn it. The result is one of the best conferencing experiences we’ve had with great clarity, exceptional low light performance and decent audio capture in a noisy environment.

The Zenbook Pro 16X’s screen, in most regards, is excellent. The detailed, UHD 3,840 x 2,400 resolution OLED panel is everything you’d expect in terms of multimedia performance. Colours are incredibly vibrant, contrast is perfect and it gets very bright too. It also displays a crisp-and-clear Windows Desktop.

For videos, colour transitions are (with very few exceptions) smooth with zero banding. The same is true of monochromatic transitions. Details remain visible in very bright and very dark areas. While the glossy screen and dark content can still transform the screen into a black mirror, on occasion, any vibrant colourful content significantly distracts from this. We’ve seen many worse reflections, elsewhere.

This all said, turning on Windows HDR doesn’t work well: highlights get blown-out horribly and dark areas are overly lightened.

Our other issue is the refresh rate and pixel response time. The screen feels slow despite OLED’s native response time and it’s not helped by the 60Hz refresh rate. These facets mean it’s not great for fast-and-frantic gaming as fast moving motion is smeared and not displayed well. This is a shame considering that the Zenbook Pro 16X could make a great gaming laptop otherwise.

Still, the colours, contrast and general multimedia performance mean the screen superb for Creators and it’s ability to display the entire, difficult DCI-P3 colour gamut is the icing on the cake.

The screen is surrounded by a thin bezel and, at the top, is a Windows Hello-compatible, Full HD webcam with quad-microphone array which captures audio very well and makes a decent fist of cancelling out background noise.

Keyboard, configurations and lighting

Beneath the screen is the excellent, RGB-backlit (three brightness levels) keyboard. The low-travel, Scrabble-tile keys are very comfortable and accurate to type upon for extended periods. However, the arrow keys are disappointingly squished. The party piece, however, is that it raises on an incline when the laptop is open, creating a more-comfortable typing position and additional ventilation.

The keyboard’s colours can be set to suit corporate environments or be RGB-emblazoned for more-fabulous ones. The logo on the lid matches whatever you choose. In full RGB mode, the colours can bleed out of the sides of the raised keyboard to look like a fully fledged gaming laptop. We always love that.

Everything is configurable in the extensive settings of the Zenbook Pro 16X’s MyAsus app. This includes numerous configurations for the OLED screen in terms of colour performance and longevity. Keyboard colours can be set to display different patterns for different notifications (and other settings within apps). Additional settings exist for microphone and speaker output, performance mode and fan volume.

Below the keyboard is an excellent, large trackpad. It has numerous, haptic-feedback points which don’t just make the low-pressure actuation involved with clicking buttons more accurate, but also more useful. Indeed, we’d normally admonish a large(ish) laptop for not having a number pad, but pressing the calculator icon in the top-right corner, lights up a virtual number pad that actually works well thanks to the haptic sensitivity. What’s more, you can still use the trackpad as a trackpad while the numbers are activated. It works very well. In the top-left corner is another icon which can lower the brightness of the back-lit numbers by one step.

The Zenbook Pro 16X’s Asus Dial

But, that’s not all. Next to the trackpad is a touch-sensitive dial which offers Creator-app-friendly shortcuts when popular creator apps are displayed. When there’s no app functioning, it acts as a shortcut for brightness and volume adjustment, although that’s a smidge slower than using traditional keyboard shortcuts. Still, the dial is very responsive and instantly displays a responsive, on-screen, enhanced counterpart that makes selecting your (customisable) shortcuts very simple.

Meanwhile, the six speakers are among the best on the market. They get incredibly loud. They offer excellent fidelity to music all the way from the treble-top to the bassy-bottom. This also means that movies are a joy to watch.

All in all, it’s got the highest Features, Ergonomics and Handling score we’ve seen.

Performance

Inside the Zenbook Pro 16X is a 3.5–4.7GHz Intel Core i7-12700H processor with its six Performance cores and eight Efficiency cores. It’s flanked by 16GB of fast, but low-powered, LPDDR5-5200 RAM and a diminutive 512GB hard drive. The latter is a bit stingy for a Creator laptop.

Nonetheless, these combined to score an impressive 7,273 in the all-round-computing-focused PCMark 10 test which is well above average: matching the performance of top-tier, last-gen high performance laptops. It also scored 2,624 and 14,490 in the Cinebench CPU-rendering tests (R15 and R23 respectively) which underlines the 2D Performance conclusion: a solid 3.7 out of 5.

Zenbook Pro 16X’s 3D performance comes from the popular Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU with its 6GB GDDR6 RAM. It scored 7,187 in 3DMark Time Spy (average 41.3fps) and 8,147 in Fire Strike Extreme (average 36.7fps). These scores show that it can play top-tier AAA titles, but that you’ll likely have to reduce settings a little to avoid stuttering.

In the difficult ray-tracing tests, it scored 4,015 in Port Royal (18.6fps) and 1,666 (16.7fps) in Speed Way – which underlines the previous conclusion.

In the easier Night Raid test it scored 35,067 which is an average of 239.2fps. This shows it will easily play most casual and competitive games. Still, in the ancient-but-still-difficult CS:GO test it averaged 103fps overall but had a 1% Low score of 16fps (the average frame-rate of the lowest one per cent of frames for the whole benchmark). The latter means it will drop numerous frames when smoke and fire grenades start going off unless you spend time tweaking the settings.

Still, the Zenbook Pro 16X can be a competent gaming machine. It’s just a shame about the slow screen which is poor at displaying fast-and-frantic action. Not that this is what the laptop is designed for. Creators will love having the rendering grunt of the 3060 for work tasks, more than anything.

Just note that the Zenbook Pro 16X does get a little warm sometimes and this leads to a minor, constant swoosh from the fans in the background. However, the additional ventilation afforded by the raised keyboard, does appear to make a positive difference.

Connectivity and Ports

Inside there’s Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2. Few Creators will be disappointed.

Portability

The Zenbook Pro 16X weighs a significant 2.4KG but that’s not bad for a robust, feature-packed, 16-inch laptop. The power brick adds another 600g to this bulk – we’ve certainly seen worse. It’s very well-built and solid enough to survive life on the road. Even the hinges, that raise the keyboard, gave us little concern regarding their potential longevity.

Meanwhile, the Zenbook Pro 16X’s large, 96Wh battery managed to run our PCMark 10 Modern Office battery life test for 10 hours flat. That’s a full day out of the office. Just remember that performing Creator-designated tasks will significantly reduce that.

Price and Availability

While rival laptops have been having a nightmare in terms of price fluctuation and availability, Asus has impressed us. These two factors are why its laptops currently sit at Number 1 both on our Best Laptop and Best Portable Laptop lists.

The Zenbook Pro 16X isn’t too different. It can be had for $3,899 and there’s plenty of stock available (Update: the new, updated SKU is now out and it costs even less!). That’s still a significant investment, though, and there’s better value to be found elsewhere. However, you get plenty for what you pay for.

Conclusion

Asus’ Zenbook Pro 16X OLED is currently the best Creator laptop on the market. It’s even beaten many top gaming laptops to break into our Top 10 Best Laptops list. It’s got decent speed, decent portability (for a big laptop) and reasonable value. However, it’s the highest Features, Handling and Ergonomics score (on the market) which really elevates it. It’s a shame that the amazing OLED screen isn’t faster as it could add gaming to its list of superlatives. But, that aside, it’s a laptop with the lot.

Pros

Powerful
Beautiful OLED screen
Superb audio
Excellent ergonomics

Cons

Expensive
OLED screen is slow

Last Updated on 5 July 2024 by Nick Ross