Asus is known for its unique laptop designs. It was the first to use an angled hinge to raise the keyboard deck for easier typing and improved airflow. It was also the first to include an LED in the touchpad to add functionality.
With a flip-up keyboard, an Asus Dial for application control, and a haptic touchpad, the ZenBook Pro 16X doubles down on innovation. We were given the opportunity to examine a pre-release ZenBook Pro 16X, which means we can only offer subjective judgment without any official benchmarks, but it’s enough to give you a flavor of this new feature-packed machine.
However, it is not a cheap laptop. Our fully configured review unit, which includes a Core i9-12900H processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, will cost $3,000. That’s a lot of money, but you’re getting a laptop with superb performance and several novel features that make it both easy to use and productive.
Asus Zenbook Pro 16X Design
When closed, the ZenBook Pro 16X resembles other ZenBooks in appearance, with the traditional Asus concentric swirl on the lid coming from a stylized logo. It has an all-black color scheme and almost no sparkle, yet it has some style thanks to the beautiful angles along the sides and bottom of the lid. It has an appealing but not gaudy design.
When you open it up, though, things get intriguing. The keyboard rises to a seven-degree angle using a new AAS Ultra mechanism, making it more comfortable to type and exposing additional vents beneath that Asus claims provide 30% more airflow and reduce surface temperature by up to 7 degrees Celsius. For improved audio performance, the tilted keyboard directs the tweeters on each side directly at the user. The ZenBook Pro 16X has a very modern and high-tech look, thanks to the huge haptic touchpad and Asus Dial.
The hinge is smooth, allowing the lid to open and the keyboard to be raised with one hand, no doubt facilitated by the laptop’s weight of 5.29 pounds. During the testing, we noticed that the lid was a little shaky, but not enough to worry about. The chassis is made entirely of CNC-machined aluminum and is extremely strong, with no bending, flexing, or twisting in the lid, keyboard deck, or chassis bottom. It’s on par with the best laptops on the market. It’s also relatively thin at 0.67 inches, which is impressive given the technology inside. Although its weight makes it appear in a bag, it is no thicker than the usual luxury 16-inch laptop.
With one USB-A 3.2 port, two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 support, a full-size HDMI port, a 3.5mm audio socket, and a full-size SD card reader, connectivity is powerful. With Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2, wireless communication is totally up to date.
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Asus Zenbook Pro 16X Battery life
The ZenBook Pro 16X comes with a 96-watt-hour battery that is well-sized for the components and 16-inch OLED display. We were unable to test the laptop, so we must rely on Asus’ estimate of up to 10 hours of battery life. Obviously, this will be dependent on workflow and CPU/GPU utilization, but if you can achieve 10 hours of regular productivity use, that would be fantastic.
Asus Zenbook Pro 16X Performance
In performance mode, Asus advertises its IceCool Pro cooling system, which uses twin IceBlade fans with 97 3D-curve blades and a 5mm heat pipe to allow the CPU and GPU to run at up to 140 watts combined without throttling. Standard mode slows things down and operates at a low volume of 40 dB or less.
All of this will come in handy because the ZenBook Pro 16X can be configured with an Intel 12th-generation Core i9-12900H, a 14-core (six Performance and eight Efficient), 20-thread CPU that runs at 45 watts. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 isn’t the quickest GPU you can put in a laptop, but it’s strong enough to cause its own problems with heat. The ability to operate the CPU and GPU at full power should be useful. During testing, we found the laptop to be responsive, albeit we couldn’t run any benchmarks due to the prerelease condition.
Most likely, the ZenBook Pro 16X will be a highly powerful laptop for the most demanding work tasks, as well as creative apps. Although Asus equips the ZenBook Pro 16X with Nvidia Studio drivers that are optimized for stable application support rather than gaming performance, midrange 1080p gaming is also possible.
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Display and Audio
The ZenBook Pro 16X has a 16-inch 16:10 4K+ (3,840 x 2,400) OLED display with thin bezels on the top and sides. It’s a touch screen with 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity and support for the Asus active pen.
We would have wanted to run the display through my colorimeter, but it was not permitted. According to Asus, the display should be bright enough at 550 nits, with a 100% DCI-P3 color gamut and a 0.2ms reaction time. Pantone validation guarantees high color accuracy. And, as an OLED display, the contrast will be off the charts.
The display, like all fantastic OLED panels, blew me away subjectively. It was vibrant and colorful without being oversaturated, and the inky blacks worked well with writing on white backgrounds. It also supports Dolby Vision high dynamic range (HDR). When you turn it on, the colors on the screen pop, and the HDR footage is amazing. This is a display that will appeal to both productivity users and artists, as well as media viewers.
Other than the two tweeters next to the keyboards, we are not sure of the speaker design, although we think there are some subwoofers on the bottom of the chassis. The audio was quite loud, with more bass than normal, and the mids and highs were clear. This is an audio system for watching Netflix with a group and listening to music without using headphones.
Asus Zenbook Pro 16X Keyboard and Mouse
The keyboard has White RGB backlighting and sidebar lights that provide varying levels of feedback. For example, if the power is low, the lights will turn red, and different colors can be activated when a USB drive is plugged in or an email is received, among other things. There is also support for animated ambient lighting options, which adds a fun touch.
The key caps are huge and have plenty of space, and the mechanism is tight and has a good click to the bottoming motion. It has a precision keyboard that is as good as that found on most Windows machines, and the fact that it is tilted up at an inclination makes for incredibly comfortable typing sessions.
Swiping on the haptic touchpad is responsive and expansive. We found the haptic system to provide reliable feedback, but it did occasionally register clicks incorrectly. Hopefully, that will be addressed in the drivers before the laptop hits the market. You may toggle the LED numeric keypad on and off by touching the switch in the upper right-hand corner of the touchpad. That’s a smart balance, allowing for easier number entry for people who require it while freeing up more room for a normal keyboard by omitting a physical numeric keypad.
Finally, the Asus Dial, which is located to the left of the touchpad, allows rotary control for any installed app. A control is activated by pressing the button in the center, and scrolling around the dial provides a convenient technique for operating apps. Asus supports a range of programs, including Adobe’s Creative Suite, and the dial can be set for any other application using the configurable Asus ProArt Creator Hub.
An infrared camera and facial recognition allow passwordless login for Windows 11 Hello. During my hands-on testing, everything operated swiftly and consistently.
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Pricing and Configurations
The ZenBook Pro 16X will cost $2,600 when it’s officially hit the market (there’s no official date yet other than “soon”) with a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. Our $3,000 review configuration represents the high end, with a Core i9, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD. All configurations are equipped with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU.
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