Asus Zenbook S16 review: The ultimate ultrabook | Expert Reviews

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.

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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.