Meet the Asus Zenbook S16 OLED laptop with AI comparable to a work of art… with a premium price

But before we give our impressions, here are all the specifications of the device:

Design

I hate hyperbole, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that the Asus Zenbook S16 is the most aesthetically pleasing laptop I’ve seen in years. The upper part of the chassis is made of a material called ‘Ceraluminum’, which despite a name that sounds like it’s straight out of Marvel and DC comics, refers to an alloy between a ceramic material and aluminium.

The details behind its creation are beyond my capabilities, but Asus claims that this compound allows the machine’s strength to be maintained at a fraction of the weight of other materials, allowing them to design a laptop that is just under 1.3 centimeters thick and weighs just 1.5 kilograms.despite being 35.36 x 24.30 cm in size. Now, I’ve happily never had to test the durability of the ‘Ceraluminu’, but I can at least point out that on the tactile side it is very pleasant, feeling like a pot or other high-quality pottery product. Add to this the geometric patterns that decorate the lid of the device, and you have an undeniably striking looking device.

Opening the laptop, we find more mundane materials, and outside of the lid, the rest of the chassis is made of more mundane aluminum. The keyboard is wide and ergonomic, with a good feel when pressing the keys that makes typing a pleasant activity. Also, like all new AI-focused laptops, it has a dedicated button for Copilot, the Windows AI assistant.

I also have to highlight the touchpad, which stands out for its large size – 40% larger than usual -, which makes it easy to move the cursor. Additionally, the designers of the Zenbook have programmed several functions that are activated by touching the edges of the touchpad, such as brightness (bottom), volume (left) and video playback (top).

Finally, despite its thinness, the laptop is well-equipped with ports, featuring a USB Type A port, two USB Type C ports – one of which is used as its power source -, an HDMI port, a 3.5mm audio jack and an SD card reader.

Image and sound

And speaking of appearance and image, the Asus Zenbook S16 has a 16-inch OLED screen that It comes with a resolution of 2880×1800 – the so-called 3K – and a refresh rate of 120Hz. More than adequate for daily tasks and work responsibilities, it is also excellent for watching movies, series and even playing video games, displaying vivid colors and deep blacks. Additionally, the screen is also touch-sensitive for those who prefer to use that type of interface, although in my opinion it is a crime to leave fingerprints on the surfaces of such devices, even more so if they are so beautiful.

If I can find any fault with it, it is that even though it supposedly has a maximum brightness of 400 nits, I found it still a bit dark when the machine was exposed directly to sunlight..although it is an obstacle that few monitors can easily deal with.

Continuing to build on its potential as a multimedia device, the Asus Zenbook S16 has a surprisingly solid sound system considering its thinness, featuring six Dolby Atmos-certified speakers.

Battery

The Asus Zenbook S16 has a 78Wh battery, which in our tests lasted several days It gives between 9 and 12 hours of autonomy depending on the intensity of the work performed.

Performance

Perhaps the most important feature of the laptop is its use of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, one of the first manufactured by the tech giant AMD in its Ryzen AI 300 line, which is aimed at laptops with artificial intelligence. This processor has 12 CPU cores, 24 threads, and a speed of up to 5.1 GHz. In short, it is a powerful processor comparable to the M3 in the MacBook Air, allowing you to perform multiple processes such as browsing the Internet, using word processors, and making video calls without the machine slowing down at any time.

The Asus Zenbook S16 is surprisingly competent at gaming too thanks to the Radeon 890M, a small but relatively powerful integrated graphics card that Geekbench experts say is It has a similar performance to the Nvidia GTX 1070a specialized GPU from a couple of generations ago.

We tested two games with relatively satisfactory results, and the Zenbook S16 was able to run “The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim,” a 2011 game, at around 30 fps on the highest graphics settings. Meanwhile, A more recent title like “Helldivers 2” (2024) managed to run at 30 fps in balanced graphics modewhich seeks to maintain fluidity with some of the graphic quality, although the frames per second dropped to 20 fps in the moments of greatest action.

The gaming test also made clear something that should be noted about this iteration of the Zenbook, and that is that during moments of greater load for the CPU it can reach uncomfortably high temperatures, with the MyAsus diagnostic program reaching up to 77ºC while testing “Helldivers 2″a high heat output, although still within the parameters of many processors. The problem is that due to the thinness of the machine, this heat is also felt in the chassis – particularly in the lower center of the laptop – which could lead to uncomfortable situations if one were to place the device on one’s lap. An internet search indicates that a BIOS update for the computer can fix this problem, but we were unable to test this solution before our time with it came to an end.

Artificial intelligence

And now we come to the heart of the matter, artificial intelligence. On the Asus Zenbook S16 side, the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370’s NPU features 50 TOPS or ‘Tera Operations Per Second’, a unit that quantifies the performance of an AI computing system, which surpasses its most direct competition’s offering of 45 TOPS on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processors, implying greater speed for all AI-based functions.

Unfortunately, as was the case with the Acer Swift Go 14, We didn’t find many features that used this technology in the one we tested the computer.something that happened in part because as Microsoft announced at the beginning of September, many of the Copilot+ functions will not arrive on devices with AMD or Intel processors until November.

This meant that despite updating the machine to its latest available versions, features such as Windows Studios Effects – which allows you to modify your webcam images in real time – were not enabled at the time we tested the machine, Although other options such as Live Subtitles did work quite well.

To further explore the Zenbook’s AI functionality, we looked up some of the software advertised on the machine’s promotional page. We were able to use Amuse 2.0, an AI-powered image creation program geared toward AMD processors, which allowed us to make a series of four quality images of a “pocket monster shaped like an electric yellow mouse in space” in a relatively short time of 28.5 seconds without needing an internet connection.

Also working quite well was Asus’ AiSense, a webcam feature that recognizes when the user looks away from the monitor to perform functions such as dimming the brightness for privacy and to save power.

Other programs were less successful, such as StoryCube, described as a multimedia center for organizing and finding your photos and videos. In my experience this app simply wouldn’t open despite my repeated attempts, so I wasn’t able to test it in the time I had the laptop available.

Conclusion

The Asus Zenbook S16 is one of the laptops I’ve most enjoyed testing thanks to its aesthetic qualities, its excellent OLED screen, and its ability to competently run recent games. Aside from the temperature issue, for which a solution has supposedly already been made, my main objection is its high price of S/.7,899 (or S/.7,499 on sale), equivalent to a product like a 15-inch MacBook Air. But those who can afford this premium price will have a work of art that will delight their senses. I certainly enjoyed my time with it.