Asus Zenbook S 16 Review

Asus’ Zenbooks have been knocking it out of the park for more than a year. This has even progressed to the S 14 becoming our Number 1 Best Laptop of all! However, its big brother, the Asus Zenbook S 16, is a very different beast, despite sharing many passing similarities. It’s AMD-based and promises portable performance over premium power efficiency. Which one is best? Let’s find out.

Asus Zenbook S 16 Specs

Features, Ergonomics and Design

I’m a big fan of Asus’ ‘Zumaia Grey,’ ‘Ceraluminium,’ ceramic-coated, aluminium chassis (with silver ‘Asus’ monicker and grille design on the lid). It’s almost totally rigid, very tough and very light. It’s also environmentally very sound.

Opening it up reveals a 16-inch display that feels particularly large thanks to thin bezels all the way around. The 2,880 x 1,800 resolution keeps Office documents and Windows looking crisp and clear while colours are vibrant thanks to the OLED technology. While reflections still blight the image when outdoors or viewing dark content, it’s worth noting that it’s less reflective than other laptop OLED displays.

The screen is also an excellent HDR display which gets very bright. I actually had to turn the brightness down from full, when indoors, as it hurt my eyes. But, doing so meant multimedia looked superb with details being revealed in both bright and dark areas, true blacks being displayed and both colourful and monochromatic transitions being rendered very smoothly.

It has a 120Hz refresh rate, which isn’t the fastest, but it still combines with a quick, pixel response time to produce blur-free, fast-moving images that only competitive FPS players might object to. It’s excellent.

It’s also worth noting that it’s a (responsive) touchscreen and that Asus supplies its Asus Pen 2.0 stylus. The screen doesn’t fold flat, but the robust hinge keeps it usable when prodding it.

Above the screen is an excellent Full HD webcam that captures impressively grain-free video, even in relatively low light. It can be turned off with a button on the keyboard and it also supports Windows Hello facial-recognition log-in. The microphones also do a great job of capturing crisp and clear audio, even in noisy environments.

Below the screen, the low-travel, Scrabble Tile keyboard is very comfortable and accurate to type upon for extended periods. The arrow keys are squished but they’re completely isolated at the bottom right. The large trackpad is smooth and accurate and the buttons are quiet and have a good actuation.

There are six speakers inside the S 16 and they provide loud, well-rounded fidelity with punchy bass. It’s a very good laptop to interact with.

Connectivity and Ports

Inside there’s Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. That’s an impressive complement of ports although I’d always like to see more than one USB-A.

Features, Ergonomics and Design Score: 4.5 / 5

Performance

Inside the Asus Zenbook S 16 is an AMD Ryzen Ai 9 HX 370 processor which operates from 2-5.1GHz. The ‘Zen 5’ architecture gives it 12 cores and 24 threads plus, an NPU which enables it to run Microsoft’s impressive CoPilot+ features. It also has embedded 2.9GHz Radeon 890M graphics and is flanked by 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM and a 1TB hard drive.

It’s AMD’s equivalent to Lunar Lake, so I was keen to see how it compared to the performance of the Zenbook S 14.

In our PCMark 10 benchmark, which tests the whole system at once, the S 16 scored 7,481 which is impressive for an ultraportable (the Lunar Lake-based S 14 scored 6,971). (Score: 3.5 / 5)

I wasn’t surprised to see the S 16 stretch ahead in the processor-based Cinebench rendering tests where the it scored 2,801 in the quick R15 test and 17,948 in the longer R23 test. That represents a score of 2.8 / 5 while the S 14 (with its lack of Hyperthreading) managed 1.8 / 5.

Lunar Lake has impressed us greatly with the S14’s integrated Intel Arc graphics running at 1.95GHz across eight Intel Xe cores. The S 16, by comparison, has integrated Radeon 890M graphics which have 16 cores that run at 2.9GHz. So, in theory, the Radeon should be leagues faster.

In the difficult, ray-tracing, 3DMark game tests, the Zenbook S 16 scored 542 (average 5.4fps) in Speed Way and 1,818 (average 8.4fps) in Port Royal. The S 14 averaged 9.4fps and 9.5fps respectively. Neither sets are playable framerates but it’s good to see that an AMD laptop can now complete both tests (it couldn’t before) and interesting to note that the S 14 is slightly ahead.

In the AAA-game-mimicking tests, 3DMark Time Spy and Fire Strike Extreme, the S 16 scored, 3,853 (average 21.3fps) and 4,387 (average 19.6fps) respectively. That compares to the S 14’s respective averages of 25.3fps and 19.1fps. That’s a split decision but, more importantly, these scores show that both laptops have some gaming prowess, but you’ll need to significantly reduce the details and resolution settings to keep things smooth.

In the lesser 3DMark Night Raid test, which apes casual and competitive games, the S 16 scored 28,239 which is an average of 180fps, so no issues here. The S 14, for comparison, scored 35,344 (average 222.2fps). While the Lunar Lake laptop is ahead by a smidge, in real world usage, there’s not much difference, in graphics performance, between the two.

I also ran the new Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 benchmark on the S 16 (it came out after we reviewed the S 14). At default settings, the S 16 averaged 109fps with the lowest one per cent hitting 80fps (1% Low score), so it’s certainly playable. Reducing the resolution down to Full HD and dropping all settings to minimum (like competitive CoD players would) the S 16 averaged 121fps with a 92fps 1% Low score. Interestingly, this is some way ahead of other, recent Lunar Lake laptops that I’ve tested.

Cooling

One thing I can’t get away from is the cooling prowess of the Zenbook S 16. While it remains cool and quiet when performing office tasks, the more load its under the hotter and louder it gets. It can get too hot for your lap and the noise can reach a very noticeable, robust, whoosh. Lunar Lake is cooler and quieter by comparison. That all said, there was no thermal throttling present when I ran the 30-minute long version of the Cinebench R23 test.

3D Performance Score: 1.7 / 5

Portability and Battery Life

The Zenbook S 16’s Ceraluminium chassis is incredibly strong and rigid and I’ve no worries about it surviving life on the road.

It’s only 1.2mm thick and this helps keep the wide, 16-inch body weighing relatively little at 1.51KG. The power supply is a phone-style, USB-C charger which only adds another 185g which is impressive. Just note that the latter gets very hot.

You won’t need to carry the charger around too much, though, as the 78Wh battery ran our PCMark 10 Modern Office benchmark for a decent 14 hours and 32 minutes. It also ran the UL Procyon Microsoft Office test for 15 hours and 24 minutes. That’s almost two days out of the office, but we’re now in a world where 20+ hours is what’s proving particularly impressive(!)

Portability and Battery Life Score: 3.5 / 5

Price, Value and Availability

Our review unit of the Asus Zenbook S 16 is available now and costs $3,499 which isn’t cheap but still represents good value. There aren’t any other (comparable) variants available in Australia.

Value Score: 3.7 / 5

Conclusion

Asus’ Zenbook S 16 is an impressive laptop. It’s great to interact with and offers a bit more heat-inducing oomph when it comes to tasks like rendering, compared to Intel equivalents which have swapped HyperThreading for power efficiency. I used this as a daily driver for some time and missed it when it went back. It’s another winning ultraportable from Asus and a worthy winner of an(other) Highly Recommended Portable Laptop Award.

Overall: 4.2 / 5

Last Updated on 26 April 2025 by Nick Ross