At first glance, the new Asus Zenbook Pro 16X is immediately different from many laptops you see. The new Asus logo is introduced to this laptop line while retaining the faint concentric circles etched into the cover, giving the same professional-looking vibes as its predecessors.
Open the cover, and the keyboard is automatically raised at an angle. This mechanism has a dual purpose – to help heat dissipation and provide a much more comfortable typing experience with the already well-designed keyboard. The speakers are also propped up to face the user for a better audio experience.
The only drawback to this design is the increased height of the laptop to around 26mm tall, and weighs in at 2.5KG, which is not an ultrathin and light laptop but does not take up that much in the bag either despite having a massive 16-inch screen.
Like the other Creator-centric laptops, the touch-enabled screen has a 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut and is PANTONE Validated to show the most accurate colours when colour grading. The downside is the glossy display that may cause too much reflection in a bright environment.
The inclusion of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 3060 Laptop GPU is also not the top-of-the-line graphics card but should be enough for creators to encode 4K 30 fps videos with not much of an issue. Playing some First-Person Shooter in lower visual settings should suffice too.
With 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900H running at 2.50 GHz, 32GB of RAM and 2TB M.2 NVMe, it performs well with synthetic tests coming in at 9991 for Cinebench R23’s multi-processor score. Not blazing fast but is reasonably speedy for FullHD video resolution encoding while on the move.
Another new feature is the Dialpad. It is a tool on the left side of the trackpad that gives access and allows changes to settings. It can quickly change tools and adjustments inside Adobe apps such as Lightroom, Photoshop and Illustrator. I do wish there is a way to switch the Dialpad off as there are accidental brushes when resting my palm to type.
There is another innovation in the form of the number pad that most laptops would not have to save some keyboard space. Just touch the corner of the touch pad and the number pad lits up to be used. Do note that there is no haptic feedback so there will be times when the number is keyed in wrongly.
In terms of connections, there are full-size HDMI ports to connect to a TV or Monitor and a built-in SD card reader to transfer images and videos into the laptop quickly. A full-sized SD card reader is handy for imaging professionals to transfer files.
Two Thunderbolt Type-C and two USB-A ports are on both sides of the computer to connect to your mouse and other accessories.
Because of the Thunderbolt Type-C port, 100W GaN charger (battery or plugged in) can charge the laptop’s 96Wh battery, so you do not need to bring along the charging brick while on the road.
The laptop is now available at $4999.
