Asus Zenbook S16 review: The ultimate ultrabook

When our head of reviews first got to play with the Asus Zenbook S16 at a press launch he described it as “one of the best big, slim laptops” he’d ever seen. Now we’ve got one in and it’s time to give the tyres a good old kicking.

In the interim, we’ve seen the arrival of a slew of Windows laptops running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite ARM silicon boasting high performance and impressive battery runtimes. This has made machines running on x86 Windows feel almost obsolete but Asus is leading the counterattack with a gorgeous, high-quality laptop housing one of AMD’s new Zen 5 mobile processors.

It’s not just the CPU we need to take note of. Another first in the Zenbook S16 is AMD’s latest Radeon 890M integrated GPU, the successor to the potent 780M. The 890M promises to give Intel’s latest – and very impressive – Arc iGPUs a run for their money as the most powerful integrated GPUs on the market.

Asus Zenbook S16 review: What you need to know

The Zenbook S16 is the first x86 Windows laptop with the technical capability to qualify for Microsoft’s Copilot+ AI branding scheme, something hitherto restricted to Snapdragon X Elite devices. The Zenbook S16 isn’t an official Copilot+ model because that branding is currently restricted to Snapdragon machines. AMD reckons their laptops will get all the same features as Snapdragon by the end of the year.

Neural processing units (NPUs) in Windows machines don’t currently do much more than run the webcam effects that form Microsoft’s Windows Studio Effects and drive live subtitles. However, assuming local-running AI on laptops becomes as important as Microsoft, Intel and AMD think it will be, the Ryzen 9’s powerful NPU could come in handy down the line.

AMD’s new XDNA 2 NPU is the fastest — hitting 50 TOPS or Tera Operations Per Second — in the commercial space, beating both Qualcomm and Intel’s best offerings which claim 45 TOPS.

Putting AI to one side, the new Zenbook S16 also boasts a Samsung-made 120Hz OLED touchscreen, 1TB of storage and 32GB of RAM backed up by a 78Wh battery that Asus reckons lasts “all day”. For once, it seems as though this isn’t an idle boast by a laptop maker. All that is wrapped up in a slender, light haute couture chassis. That’s a recipe for a best-in-class laptop if ever I saw one.

Asus Zenbook S16 review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU, AMD Radeon 890M GPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 16in, 120Hz, 2,880 x 1,800 OLED touch display. Price when reviewed: £1,700 inc VAT

The Zenbook S16 is available in two flavours. The difference lies in the SoC. The £1,600 model uses a Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU and Radeon 880M iGPU while the £1,700 model uses the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU and Radeon 890M iGPU. The difference in performance between the two SoCs is not massive — between 10 and 15% — but given the small price difference the HX 370 model is the obvious choice.

Dell’s new XPS 16 is a big old bruiser next to the Zenbook S16, but then it has to make room for an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU which gives it great graphics and gaming performance. The 4K OLED touch display is sharper than the Asus but not as colour-accurate, while the borderless touchpad and capacitive function bar are features that divide opinion.

If your heart’s desire is a long battery life, you can finally have a Windows machine with MacBook-like run times thanks to the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops. The Asus Vivobook S15 and the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 are both worth consideration and we’ve compared the two to make your choice easier.

Samsung’s Galaxy Book4 Edge is also worth a look but remember these machines can’t run all Windows software due to their ARM instruction set. Most notoriously, Google’s desktop sync client Google Drive for Desktop doesn’t currently work on Windows on ARM.

Huawei’s super light MateBook X Pro is pretty much the state of Intel x86 art at the moment. Performance from the Core Ultra 9 CPU and Arc iGPU is outstanding, the 3K OLED screen is supremely accurate and the whole thing weighs less than 1kg. The Core Ultra 7 model is currently on sale for £1,699.

The doyen of stylish, omni-capable 16in laptops is Apple’s 16in MacBook Pro. You’ll need deep pockets thanks to the £2,599 starting price but you’ll be getting a laptop with a superb display and sound system and battery life that can be measured in geological time.

Asus Zenbook S16 review: Design and build quality

• Stunning looks and solid as a rock
• Good range of I/O ports for a skinny laptop
• Zero post-purchase upgrade options

No other laptop maker has its act together like Asus when it comes to laptop design. The S16 is made from something that Asus calls Ceraluminium, a substance designed to combine the strength of aluminium and the tractile pleasantries and resilience of ceramic.

Silly name aside, Ceraluminium is the business: light — the S16 weighs all of 1.34kg, 200g lighter than the lightest 16in MacBook Pro — and very solid. It also meets the US MIL-STD 810H standard for resistance to shocks, vibration and particle ingress.

For a 16in machine, the S16 is impressively petite at 353.6 x 243 x 12.9mm (WDH). If we go back to playing MacBook Pro Top Trumps, the Asus is thinner but wider and deeper. Given how thin it is, I was surprised by how little flex there is in either the body or the lid.

There are two colourways available, Scandinavian White and Zumaia Gray. My review machine looks stunning in the former as it shows off the angular design and trademark chrome strips on the lid.

The most visually interesting feature is the geometric grille above the keyboard which consists of 3,522 CNC machined cooling vents (I’m taking Asus’ word for that, I didn’t count) and the latest iteration of the Asus logo which appears to be slowly morphing into the StarFleet insignia.

Despite the slender profile, Asus has managed to fit in a decent selection of I/O ports: on the left are two Type-C USB-4 ports, an HDMI 2.1 video output and a 3.5mm audio jack, and on the right are a 10Gbits/sec USB-A port and an SD 4.0 card reader. The USB-C ports may not carry Thunderbolt 4 branding but they do the same job, shifting data at 40Gbits/sec and supplying video in DP Alt Mode.

Wireless comms are bang up to date with the MediaTek MT7925 module supporting 6GHz Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. Signal reception and transfer speeds were impressive throughout my testing.

Taking the base plate off the S16 is easy enough if you have a Torx screwdriver but once inside all you can do is upgrade the SSD and blow-clean the fans. There’s no room for a second SSD and the RAM and WLAN module are soldered in place.

READ NEXT: Best laptop for students

Asus Zenbook S16 review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

• Shallow but solid keyboard
• Large touchpad with crisp, quiet action
• Poor FullHD webcam

With the exception of the half-height arrow keys, the keyboard is a model of best-practice, clarity and solidity. The keycaps are very easy to read with or without the three-stage white backlight turned on. The keycaps themselves have a slightly rough, rubberised feel to them and are very pleasant to type on.

The large white keys don’t have the greatest amount of travel at just 1.1mm. The keyboard’s action is positive, nicely damped and very quiet, easily passing the “can you use it in a library without getting disapproving scowls from fellow patrons” test.

At 150 x 100mm, the touchpad is one of the largest you’ll encounter on any laptop bar the 16in MacBook Pro, which has a whopper at 160 x 100mm. The plastic surface is very smooth and its mechanical clicks are positive and quiet.

Asus runs some bespoke swipe gestures on the touchpad, including display brightness on the right edge, volume on the left edge and media FF/RW along the top. Given the size of the touchpad, these can be used with surprising delicacy.

The webcam is a lacklustre 1080p affair with images appearing both noisy and drab. All in all, it’s a disappointment, though it does include support for Windows Hello IR facial recognition, which is just as well as the S16 doesn’t have a fingerprint scanner.

The camera doesn’t currently support the AI special effects that make up Microsoft’s Studio Effects. Asus told me that the requisite drivers will be rolled out towards the end of August via a Windows update.

READ NEXT: Best webcam

Asus Zenbook S16 review: Display and audio

• Super-accurate Samsung-made OLED screen
• Visually stunning in SDR and HDR modes
• The sound system is not loud but is high quality

Testing the basic properties of the Samsung-made OLED displays that you find on many laptops these days has almost become a waste of time, such is the high standard.

This 120Hz 2,880 x 1,800 panel is no exception. Peak brightness levels are fine at 376cd/m2 in SDR mode and 615cd/m2 in HDR and there’s plenty of colour sloshing around with gamut volumes of 168.3% sRGB, 115.9% Adobe RGB and 119.2% DCI-P3.

Thanks to that 120Hz refresh rate and OLED per-pixel lighting, motion fidelity is superb, better than the IPS panels on the vast majority of gaming laptops. Running my usual tests there wasn’t even a hint of ghosting or smearing.

When it comes to out-of-the-box colour calibration, Asus is currently in a league of its own. With the display in Normal model, the Zenbook S16 recorded Delta E variances of 0.7 vs the DisplayP3 profile, 0.93 vs DCI-P3 and 0.69 vs sRGB. That is as close to perfection as you’ll see from a laptop.

In Vivid mode, the colour palette is deliberately over-saturated. This may be anathema to creative professionals but looks sumptuously limpid to the rest of us. The panel also carries the Vesa-certified DisplayHDR True Black 500 seal of approval so you’re getting a tip-top show in SDR and HDR.

The Harman Kardon-designed six-speaker system doesn’t boast much volume – 71dBA was the highest figure I recorded from a pink noise source at a 1m distance with a sound meter – but the sound is very well balanced, detailed and underpinned by a solid bass presence. It’s very easy on the ear no matter what you listen to.

READ NEXT: Best PC speakers

Asus Zenbook S16 review: Performance and battery life

• Towering performance
• It gets rather hot under stress
• Long battery life

Without getting bogged down in the details, AMD’s pitch for its new Zen 5 chips is that they offer much-improved performance without adding more cores or increasing clock speeds. Instead, they deliver a host of small improvements and optimisations in how they handle data throughput. The result is claimed to be better performance and efficiency and longer battery life, the ideal trifecta for a laptop.

Our standard 4K multi-media benchmark for x86 systems returned a score of 401, which is phenomenal for a laptop without a dedicated GPU. No other x86 laptop without a discrete GPU has come anywhere near — Huawei’s Matebook X with its Core Ultra 9 185H and Arc iGPU came closest at 332. Even the mighty Dell XPS16 housing an RTX 4070 only scored 460.

The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is a 12-core chip with a maximum clock speed of 5.1GHz. In the GeekBench 6 multi-core test it scored 12,893, a little shy of the Ultra 9 185H in the Huawei MateBook X Pro, which scored 13,545. Both are beaten by the three Snapdragon X Elite machines we’ve tested, which scored between 14,300 and 15,300, but in the real world we’re just comparing different degrees of “very fast”.

When it comes to graphics performance, the Zenbook S16 beats the Snapdragon opposition very handily. Compare the S16’s 34,318 in the GeekBench 6 OpenCL test with the 27,179 that the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge (the best of the Snapdragon bunch) managed. The Huawei was a little better at 36,965 but that just means that the best Arc iGPU is as big a leap forward as the new Radeon 890M is on what preceded it.

The GeekBench ML AI-performance test scored 3,297 on the CPU and 6,442 on the GPU, excellent scores that have both the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H and Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X well beaten.

To get the absolute best out of the Radeon 890M GPU you can manually assign the amount of RAM it uses in the MyAsus app to either 1, 2, 4 or 8GB rather than leaving it in Auto, which is how I tested it. In Auto, the SPECviewperf 3dsmax modelling benchmark ran at 39fs, but with the full 8GB assigned, it ran at 45fs. Not a huge difference but still discernible. Changing the GPU memory settings involves a restart but that’s a small price to pay for the performance bump.

Gaming performance for an iGPU machine is impressive. Our usual benchmark title for discrete GPUs, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, ran at 49fs at the Ultra setting, which despite the name is one of the middle settings, while Cyberpunk 2077 ran at 48fs at the Low detail settings but at 58fs with AMD’s FidelityFX upscaling set to Performance.

To be clear, all the gaming tests were run without ray tracing and at FullHD. That you can play AAA games on an integrated GPU at any settings tells you all you need to know about the step forward in iGPU performance AMD has made.

Asus makes great play of how quiet the S16’s “3D vapor-chamber cooling system” is, and rightly so, it is quiet. But it’s not hugely effective at getting rid of warm air. Under stress, the S16 gets hot: after ten minutes of running the CPU and GPU flat out, the grill above the keyboard hit 48°C while the vent on the underside hit 55°C, which is high enough to be described as uncomfortable. The heat spreads onto the keyboard too, with the T keycap registering at 45°C.

Admittedly, the fan noise never gets even close to intrusive and both the CPU and GPU happily chug along at close to 100% utilisation so the heat isn’t causing any throttling. But if you use the S16 on your lap for any amount of time you will get hot knees.

The 1TB Micron SSD performed solidly. Sequential read and write speeds of 3,815MB/s and 2,550MB/s respectively are better than any of the Snapdragon competitors can manage but the Dell XPS 16 and the Huawei MateBook X Pro both have the Zenbook S16 beaten, the former by a wide margin.

In our standard video rundown battery test, the Zenbook S16 lasted for 14hrs 6mins. That’s an outstanding achievement for an x86 laptop given that the battery is only 78Wh capacity. Even if it can’t quite match the MacBook Pro, Vivobook S15 and Surface Laptop 7, AMD’s claims that Zen 5 delivers power and efficiency are true.

Asus Zenbook S16 review: Verdict

If anyone asked me to recommend an ultrabook for under £2,000 the Zenbook S16 is what I’d point them towards. The design, performance, build, screen and speaker quality are all superb, while the battery life is outstandingly good for a Windows x86 laptop.

Of course, it’s not perfect. The webcam is pretty awful, you can’t add a second SSD and it does get too warm for comfort when being pushed hard, especially on the underside. None of those niggles bother me excessively though, and don’t in any way knock the shine off this absolutely superb general-purpose laptop.