ASUS Zenbook S 16 with AMD Zen 5: Review
September 9, 2024
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ASUS Zenbook S 16 - White
Summary
Are you looking for a high-quality laptop with a large display that’s super portable? Then ASUS's new Zenbook S 16 should be at the top of your consideration list.
Table of contents:
Introduction
Say you want to work on the go, or you are sitting on the couch at home and just want a big screen laptop? The new ASUS Zenbook S 16 is a great option to consider. Its screen is large and gorgeous, its battery life is long, and it performs well. With that said, here’s how we came to these conclusions.
Display
Our Zenbook S 16s both have the same 16-inch 2880 x 1800 OLED touch screen with stylus support. It has a wide color gamut, covering 100% of sRGB and P3, and 95% of adobeRGB. This means it is perfect for professional color work. The screen goes up to 120Hz but does not support Dynamic refresh rate, so you'll have to manually set it to 60 Hz to get its best battery performance. Also, the display only reaches about 380 nits of brightness, which although common for these OLED panels, isn’t as bright as we’d like. This is especially considering it is a glossy screen. You will likely notice reflections when working near a window or a bright light. In fact, due to the coating used on the display, I noticed some colorful reflective patterns which was distracting. Their screen door effect is also quite noticeable. This means that if you are looking at white or light-colored content like a word document, you can see colored pixels peeking through. Overall, having a large 16-inch screen on such a portable laptop is great for getting real work done, and this screen is very good even if it isn't perfect.
Chassis
The Zenbook is best in class in terms of portability for a large screen laptop. It weighs only 3.3 lbs, which is the same size as the MacBook Air 15. So, big props to the Zenbook for achieving this with its larger display. Its weight is slightly less than its competitor the 16-inch Galaxy Book, and much less than machines with the same size screen and dedicated graphics like the ProArt P16 or Yoga Pro 9i.
Not only is it light but it is also super thin. You also aren’t sacrificing build quality like you are on an LG Gram for this kind of low weight. The screen is sturdy enough to use the touchscreen and there is not any obvious screen flex. Deck flex is also very minor. In fact, it’s sturdier than you would think for such a thin laptop. I also enjoyed its large, comfortable palm rests.
Keyboard & Trackpad
We found the keyboard to be low travel and the key presses to feel a bit squishy, but it gets the job done. Its backlight is a white light which makes the key characters easy to make out on the darker gray model. But, on the light-colored model, this becomes an issue. If you leave the backlight on when using that one in a bright environment, the key characters are hard to make out. There just isn’t enough contrast.
The trackpad is a standard mechanical one. It is nice and large, and tracking felt as accurate as you’d get for such a trackpad. I had no palm rejection issues like I did on the Samsung trackpads.
Ports
On the left side of the laptop, you get an HDMI 2.1 port, two USB-C 4.0 Gen 3 ports, and a headphone/microphone combo jack. On the right you get a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 and a 4.0 SD card reader. That means it provides fast UHS-II speeds which is a nice feature. You’ll notice that the USB-C ports and the HDMI port are all on one side, though, which is a bit disappointing as it means you can only charge and use external displays from one side of the laptop.
Configurations Available
We have both versions of the Zenbook S 16 here in the studio. The lower tier model comes with the 10-core 365 chip, 24GB RAM, and 1TB of SSD storage. The higher tier model instead comes with the 12-core HX 370 chip and 32GB RAM, with the same storage. It can either come in a dark gray or white color. Everything else about these laptops is identical.
Performance
So, let's talk performance. In single-core performance, which is what leads to many applications feeling snappy and responsive, the Zen 5 chips do very well rivaled only by Mac's M3. In Geekbench multi-core, which tests a variety of common performance tasks, they still have a strong showing, but their scores are a bit lower than the higher tier Qualcomm chips in both ASUS's own Vivobook and the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge 16. Both of these are also portable laptops with 16 inch screens, but they require you to use Windows on ARM which can lead to applications not running or not running well.
In Cinebench, which tests the CPU when it’s maxed out, we see a similar difference in scores and we start to see how efficient both of these Zen 5 chips are.
ASUS limits them to 33 watts of power draw in performance mode and the average wattage they are pulling even lowers to 27 watts in their standard mode. This means they end up using about 75% the power of Intel’s Core Ultra 7, for example, and still deliver stronger performance.
Graphics Performance
We don’t recommend these laptops for people who do intensive graphical tasks like 3D rendering or video editing, but these would do fine in light tasks or basic games. In Wildlife Extreme, which is a cross-platform graphics benchmark, the 890M graphics in the HX 370 have a similar showing to the Galaxy Book with Qualcomm.
If you are considering a Qualcomm laptop instead of one of these, just be aware that many applications that utilize graphics run better on Windows x86 vs Windows on ARM, which is what laptops with Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors use. So we think the AMD chips in these Zenbooks would provide you with better versatility than the Snapdragon chip in the Galaxy Book. To compare to Intel’s integrated arc GPU in the Core Ultra, we are showing performance of the Zenbook 14 as we no longer have the Samsung 16 with that chip here in the studio.
Heat & Fan Noise
One benefit of having a more efficient machine is usually lower heat and fan noise as less power is used by the processor to complete tasks. Unfortunately, due to the extremely thin chassis of the Zenbook with very limited airflow, it regularly feels warm to the touch. In light use, while I was writing this script, the warmth was noticeable and caused me to take breaks more often to move my hands off the laptop. I’m not normally sensitive to this, so I think many people will notice it. In performance tasks, it gets very warm. Especially with the more powerful processor, we noticed a high underside temperature that would be uncomfortable if you were using it on your lap.
On the flip side, the fan noise was excellent in light use. In real-world use we never heard it, but in high performance tasks it does become noticeable.
Battery Life
Next, one of the places we think these Zenbooks really shine is in their battery life. Not only do they include a 78wH battery, but the power efficiency of their AMD Zen 5 chips also helps them conserve energy quite well. In high performance tasks like Cinebench, we only see better results from the MacBook Air. But that laptop’s multi-core performance is much worse than this one.
In our video playback test, we actually see a stronger showing than the Air, especially in the HX 370 chip version which is surprising considering it has 12 cores compared to our 365 Zenbook with 10. The difference in percent remaining after 4 hours is small, so they may perform similarly in real-world use, but both still deliver impressive results.
These Zenbook S 16s are a great pick for students and those who want exceptional battery life in a Windows laptop.
Speakers
As far as the speakers go on this device, we were very impressed. The sound stage is good, they get very loud, and they sound clear. Compared to the MacBook Pro 16, which is known for having the best speakers in a laptop, these don’t sound quite as natural, and the bass is not as evident, but these are pretty close.
Conclusion
The Zenbook S 16 is a very unique device with a lot of positives. It excels in its overall build quality, powerful multi-core performance, and long battery life. Plus, as an AMD laptop, all Windows applications just work, which may be an issue on Qualcomm laptops as we've mentioned. In fact, sometimes application compatibility is still an issue on MacBooks. The Zenbook's main downside though is that it may feel a little warm in light use and is very warm when doing performance tasks. If you are not sensitive to heat, we think you will really love this laptop.
If you've decided to buy one, here is our list of Zen 5 laptops. Buying here from our website helps you support our mission to bring you unbiased laptop reviews.