Asus Zenbook A16 Review: A True AI Laptop Among Artificial Imitators

8.5 / 10

Score

Cnet Score

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Asus Zenbook A16

$1,700 at Best Buy

Pros

• Leading application and AI performance
• Thin and light, yet has a rigid design
• Huge OLED is crisp, smooth and bright
• Good sound from six-speaker array

Cons

• Lackluster 3D performance
• Meh mechanical touch pad
• No room for internal expansion
• Beige = boring

Laptop manufacturers have thrown around the term «AI laptop» for the past couple of years with great frequency, hoping to cash in on the buzzword (buzz-acronym?), grab attention and boost sales. According to CNET’s laptop survey from last summer, however, AI is way down the list of motivating factors — only 1 in 10 laptop buyers is choosing a laptop based on its AI capabilities. If you’re among this minority, then the Asus Zenbook A16 is the laptop for you. It’s not marketing fluff to call the Zenbook A16 an AI laptop — and a great one, at that. Based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme processor that has a neural processing unit with 80 trillion operations per second, this laptop offers unrivaled on-device AI performance.

For the other 90% of laptop shoppers who care more about general performance, battery life, screen quality and the size and weight of the system, the Asus Zenbook A16 has a lot going for it in each of those areas, too. It’s fast with non-AI tasks, offers good battery life, has a beautiful 3K OLED display and is the lightest 16-inch laptop I’ve ever tested. (It weighs less than 3 pounds!) And Asus’s unique Ceraluminum material allows the laptop to be incredibly thin and light while also extremely rigid.

While the Snapdragon X2-based Zenbook A16 outpaced competing Intel Panther Lake laptops in AI and application performance, Qualcomm’s Adreno graphics chips can’t match Intel’s integrated GPU in 3D performance. The Zenbook A16 model I tested costs $1,700, which is pricey for a laptop with little to no gaming capacity. Helping to justify the high price is the Zenbook A16’s whopping 48GB of memory, which certainly adds to the bill in the Great Global RAM Shortage Era.

Keep reading to see why the Zenbook A16 is a rightful successor to last year’s excellent Zenbook A14 and one of the best 16-inch laptops you can buy.

Asus sells two versions of the Zenbook A16 (model UX3607OA), and only two differences separate them: operating system and system weight.

I reviewed the $1,700 model available at Best Buy. It has the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2-E94-100 48GB of RAM, integrated Qualcomm Adreno graphics, a 1TB SSD and a 16-inch OLED display with a 3K resolution (2,880 by 1,800 pixels), variable 120Hz refresh rate and touch support.

Asus has a model listed for $2,000 on its site that will start shipping later this spring. It has the same specs, but it trades Windows 11 Home for Pro and is even lighter because it lacks the glossy, glass display cover found on my test system. Asus lists a system weight of just 2.7 pounds for this model, compared with 2.9 pounds for the model I have. (It was slightly heavier in my measurement, but still less than 3 pounds, which is remarkable for a 16-inch laptop.)

The Asus Zenbook A16 costs 2,099 in the UK and AU$4,299 in Australia.

Asus Zenbook A16 performance

The Asus Zenbook A16 is based on a processor from Qualcomm’s second-generation Snapdragon X2 series. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2-E94-100 has an 18-core CPU and an NPU capable of 80 TOPS, and it comes with 48GB of speedy 9,600MHz onboard memory. The laptop has a 1TB SSD in the system’s lone M.2 slot.

I’m not surprised that the laptop has soldered-on memory that you can’t upgrade — that’s the norm these days. But I was hoping that on a laptop this size, it would have a second M.2 slot to expand the internal storage.

In lab testing, the Zenbook A16 traded blows with the M5 MacBook Pro 14 for supremacy on our Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 tests. Its 18-core Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme allowed it to outpace the MacBook Pro and its 10-core M5 processor on the multicore version of each of these benchmarks, while the MacBook Pro took top honors on the single-core tests. And both of these systems had higher multi- and single-core scores than those of Intel Panther Lake laptops, such as the Acer Swift 16 AI, Dell XPS 14 and MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus.

The Zenbook A16 was unable to run PCMark 10, which highlights potential Windows-on-Arm compatibility issues. Before purchasing the Zenbook A16 or another laptop powered by a Snapdragon X series processor, be sure to check that the applications you use are compatible with Arm.

The Zenbook A16 basically lapped the competition with AI performance. Its score of 85,328 on the Geekbench AI test, which measures the on-device AI performance of a laptop’s neural processor, was miles ahead of competing laptops. The next-closest on this test was the M5 MacBook Pro with a score of 57,528, with Intel Panther Lake laptops coming in slightly behind the MacBook Pro.

Where Panther Lake laptops have the edge is 3D performance. Intel’s Arc B390 GPU with 12 Xe cores delivers playable frame rates on demanding games and is by far the most powerful Windows integrated laptop GPU. Qualcomm’s integrated Adreno X2-90 graphics isn’t on the same level. On our Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark that we run at 1080p with highest quality settings, it averaged only 29 frames per second. That’s half the frame rate of the Acer Swift 16 AI that I just tested. And the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus at 64fps was even better. When I tried running our Guardians of the Galaxy test, the Zenbook A16 was unable to run it.

The Zenbook A16 ran for nearly 14.5 hours on our YouTube streaming battery drain test. That’s enough battery life to get you through most days and an excellent result for a big-screen, high-resolution OLED laptop, but that’s nearly 10 hours less than last year’s smaller Zenbook A14 and 8.5 hours less than the 14-inch MacBook Pro lasted on the test.

Large but lightweight

I applaud the material engineers who came up with Ceraluminum. Instead of the standard anodized aluminum found on most laptops, Ceraluminum is an aluminum alloy with a ceramic-like finish that’s lighter and more rigid than aluminum. I first encountered this material in the Zenbook A14, and its benefits are even greater on the larger Zenbook A16. On many thin 16-inch laptops, the large, uninterrupted expanses of aluminum on the top and bottom panels are prone to flexing. The Zenbook A16 has none of that squishy feeling. It has a very firm feel to it while also managing to be extremely lightweight.

The Zenbook A16 is the first 16-inch laptop I’ve encountered that weighs less than 3 pounds. It’s just slightly less at 2.9 pounds, but it’s appreciably lighter than the smaller 15-inch MacBook Air that weighs 3.3 pounds. And it’s in a different weight class entirely compared to the 16-inch MacBook Pro, which weighs 4.7 pounds.

The only complaints I have about the design are Asus choosing beige for the color and outfitting the laptop with a mechanical touch pad instead of one with haptic feedback. I appreciate the effort to go with a color other than a shade of gray, but I’m not sure beige is the answer. I find it pretty uninspiring, but perhaps you’ll like the desert sand vibe.

As for the touch pad, I think it’s fair to expect a haptic one at this price instead of a mechanical one. The Zenbook A16’s mechanical touch pad is fine, but its click response starts to feel too firm the higher up on its surface you go. I would much prefer a haptic touch pad that delivers a consistent click response across its entire surface and also one that’s a little livelier and customizable.

On the other hand, I have no complaints about the display. It’s a beautiful 16-inch, 3K OLED panel that’s bright and crisp with vivid colors. It reached a peak brightness of 479 nits on my tests with a Spyder X colorimeter, which is quite high for an OLED that typically isn’t as bright as an IPS LCD panel. The nearly 500 nits of brightness, combined with effective zero-nit black levels, result in fantastic contrast and a dynamic picture. Color looked rich and vivid, and color accuracy was strong in testing. It covered 100% of the sRGB and P3 gamut and 93% of AdobeRGB.

One advantage the Zenbook A16 has over the smaller A14 is the room for more than two speakers. The Zenbook A16 features a six-speaker array, and its sound is much fuller than the A14’s. The bass response is still weak, but at least there’s a hint of it, which is something I couldn’t say about last year’s Zenbook A14.

Above the display sits a standard 1080p webcam. It produces a sharp enough image, but a 1440p cam would be better and not out of the question on a laptop at this price. The webcam has an IR sensor so you can use it for Windows Hello logins, but that’s your only biometric option because the Zenbook A16 lacks a fingerprint reader.

With a pair of USB4 ports, a USB-A port and an HDMI port, the Zenbook A16 has the usual selection of external connections with no obvious omissions. The surprise is the inclusion of a full-size SD card slot, which will appeal to creators looking to make use of the Zenbook A16’s large, color-accurate OLED and strong 2D graphics performance.

Is the Asus Zenbook A16 a good laptop?

With its stellar application and AI performance, the Zenbook A16 is a modern laptop well equipped for today’s demands and those of tomorrow. Because even if you aren’t using your laptop to perform AI tasks now, you might next week, next month or next year. And the laptop’s huge display and unbelievably thin-and-light-yet-rigid design puts it in the nexus of productivity and portability. The 16-inch OLED provides a wonderful work surface, and the sub-three-pound weight makes the Zenbook A16 an easy travel companion.