Review Verdict: The ZenBook Pro 16X OLED has all the bells and whistles to make it the best laptop for content creators. Its high asking price is justifiable when you compare it side-by-side with Apple’s 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Pros
-Stable thermals
-Stellar display
-Decent battery life (for a Core i9)
Cons
-Heavy and thick
-Expensive
ASUS’ ZenBook Pro are pro-grade laptops made for serious content creators. The ZenBook Pro 16X OLED is the top-end model and is packed with the best possible internals to date while utilizing ASUS’ new Supernova (System-on-Module) design for a more compact motherboard and better overall performance. Is the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED a dream workhorse for content creators as ASUS promises?
ZenBook Pro 16X OLED Review: Design
While it has the same design language you’d expect on 2023 ZenBooks, the Pro 16X OLED is significantly thicker to accommodate the beefy hardware, necessary components to keep thermals stable, and ASUS’ Active Aerodynamic System (AAS). For those not familiar, AAS lifts the keyboard when you open the laptop, allowing for a more comfortable typing angle and better cooling when running resource-intensive apps.
Underneath the AAS system are LED strips on both sides, which you can program to emit different colors depending on what you are doing with the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED.
Because of the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED’s beefy internals, you get a barrel plug charging port for its huge 280w charging brick. Should you want something more compact, both of the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED’s Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports support USB-PD charging. You also get a USB-A port as well for connecting other devices like flash drives and wireless dongles.
Being a laptop geared towards content creators, you also get a full-sized HDMI port, a headphone jack, and an SD card slot.
The ZenBook Pro 16X OLED is heavy with its all-aluminum build, tipping the scales at over 5 pounds. While its 16-inch footprint will fit several backpacks, you should take into consideration its weight when lugging around the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED.
ZenBook Pro 16X OLED Review: Display and speakers
ASUS knows its stuff when it comes to displays, and the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED has the best one in its class: it’s a 16-inch 120hz OLED panel with a 3.2k resolution, touchscreen support, and very accurate colors.
As expected with ASUS’ premium offerings, the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED has one of the best displays in the market, and its color accuracy makes it a joy to use when editing photos in Lightroom. The ZenBook Pro 16X OLED wide color gamut range ensures that all of the photos that we edited and exported through Lightroom are just what we imagined, making our editing workflow efficient.
We mentioned that the display has touchscreen support, and you get an ASUS Pen with the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED, making it also a great laptop for those who are into illustration and graphic design.
Beyond the excellent display, the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED also has a great set of reasonably loud stereo speakers. We usually kept the volume around the 30% range for casual use, and pushing the volume to 100% makes the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED’s speakers loud enough to fill up a small room. Aside from being loud,
ZenBook Pro 16X OLED Review: Keyboard and trackpad
The ZenBook Pro 16X OLED uses the same keyboard layout you’d find on most ZenBooks, with the keys having a soft, matte finish. Aside from its tilting design with the AAS mechanism, what makes the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED’s keyboard unique is its per-key RGB lighting that you can customize according to your preferences. While that may sound like a gimmick, having the ability to use different colors per key can be useful for content creators when mapping controls to their multimedia apps.
Speaking of controls, the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED gets the DialPad that you’d normally see on ASUS’ professional ProArt notebooks. This dial can do several things and has native support for select Adobe apps to make the workflows of content creators more efficient. You still get the ScreenPad on the trackpad, which is useful when crunching numbers or dealing with Excel spreadsheets.
ZenBook Pro 16X OLED Review: Internals and battery life
The ZenBook Pro 16X OLED has the best set of internals any content creator can dream of: Core i9-13905H, 32GB LPDDR5 RAM, 2TB PCIe 4.0 storage, and an RTX 4080 discrete GPU. Without any questions, the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED can handle any heavy task with ease, so editing 4K videos and large RAW images is not an issue with this laptop.
With all those beefy internals being cooled by ASUS’ complex AAS system, thermals are well managed with the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED. Using the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED for editing several photos (for both the site and personal purposes), the whole laptop barely ran warm and the fans were not spinning at their highest speed.
While it’s not seen on the outside, the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED utilizes ASUS’ Supernova System-on-Module (SoM) design for the motherboard. This approach has a more compact motherboard, where the distance between. the CPU and the RAM are closer compared to conventional laptop motherboard designs. This allows the already-powerful ZenBook Pro 16X OLED to be more efficient in handling multiple tasks at a time. Aside from that, the compact motherboard design also allowed ASUS to fit in an RTX 4080 GPU and a bigger battery inside the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED while maintaining its 16.9mm slim profile.
Despite the Core i9 being a power-hungry processor and 120hz refresh rate enabled for the display, we were surprised to see the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED have a battery life of a little over 5 hours in our video loop test. That’s a good figure for a laptop with a 96wHr battery and a processor that has a 45w TDP. While we got this figure using the Core i9-13905H’s Iris Xe processor, the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED proved to be efficient enough to do serious multimedia editing on the go without worrying about battery life.
ZenBook Pro 16X OLED Review: Wrap-up and Conclusions
Being fully decked out with its choice of internal components that include a Core i9 H-series processor, the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED impressed us with how it makes good use of its battery. Pair that with a best-in-class OLED display and additional controls that have native support with popular editing apps, the Php 250k asking price of the ZenBook Pro 16X OLED ticks everything that a content creator dreams of on a laptop.
ZenBook Pro 16X OLED Review: Price
The ZenBook Pro 16X OLED is priced at Php 249,995.
