ASUS Zenbook Pro 16X OLED review: I have a new favourite laptop now

Move over, every single other laptop, for the mightiest Zenbook of all is arriving for its coronation.

5 Star Rating
A black ASUS Zenbook Pro 16X OLED laptop on a grey table
(Image: © Future / Erlingur Einarsson)

Our Verdict

The ASUS Zenbook Pro 16X OLED is not just good. It combines everything you want and need in the ultimate creator laptop. It offers fantastic performance for heavy-duty creative tasks, it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best gaming laptops I've ever used, it looks fantastic, the ergonomics are great, and it's a delight to use. Any creative pro, regardless of discipline, looking for their dream machine, should put this big but very portable Zenbook at the top of a very short list.

For

  • Fantastic touchscreen
  • Inventive, comfortable ergonomics
  • Amazing performance

Against

  • Battery life is pedestrian

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Note this name down: ASUS Zenbook Pro 16X OLED. With so many Windows PCs fighting for attention among creative hobbyists and pros, especially when adding the formidable competition from Apple MacBooks, often hailed as the ultimate laptops for creatives, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. But ASUS may just have happened upon a winner here.

With its 40-series NVIDIA graphics card, big 16:10 OLED touchscreen and powerful internals backing up the visual specs, I was intrigued to test this top-end model among the company's Zenbook range, so got to borrow a unit for a period of almost a month, to not just run raw benchmark tests, but live and work with it in a real-life setting, to see how it stacks up against the best laptops for graphic design or the best laptops for Photoshop.

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CPU:Intel Core i9-12900H, i9-13900 or i9-13905H
GPU:NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, 4070 or 4080
Operating systemWindows 11 Home
Display:16.0-inch AMOLED touchscreen, either 3.2K or 4K
RAM:32 or 64GB
Storage:512GB - 2TB
Connectivity:2x Thunderbolt 4, 1x USB 3.2 Type-A, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x 3.5mm Combo Audio Jack, 1x DC-in, 1x SD Express card reader
Wireless:Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
Keyboard:Backlit Chiclet Keyboard Per-Key RGBW with N-key Rollover
Webcam:Front FHD IR Camera with Windows Hello
Dimensions:135.50 x 25.10 x 1.69 ~ 1.78 cm
Weight:2.4kg
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ASUS Zenbook Pro 16X OLED review (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080): Benchmark scoring
Cinebench R23:Single-core: 1,701
Row 1 - Cell 0 Multi-core: 13,119
Geekbench 6 CPU:Single-core: 2,200
Row 3 - Cell 0 Multi-core: 12,078
Geekbench 6 GPU:110,825
PCMark 10:Total: 6,921
Row 6 - Cell 0 Essentials: 9,049
Row 7 - Cell 0 Productivity: 9,748
Row 8 - Cell 0 Digital Content Creation: 10,197 (Render and Visualisation: 14,065)
Handbrake render test:4m07s at 59.1fps
Streaming video battery test:4h32m
The Verdict
10

out of 10

ASUS Zenbook Pro 16X OLED

The ASUS Zenbook Pro 16X OLED is not just good. It combines everything you want and need in the ultimate creator laptop. It offers fantastic performance for heavy-duty creative tasks, it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best gaming laptops I've ever used, it looks fantastic, the ergonomics are great, and it's a delight to use. Any creative pro, regardless of discipline, looking for their dream machine, should put this big but very portable Zenbook at the top of a very short list.

Erlingur Einarsson
Tech Reviews Editor

Erlingur is the Tech Reviews Editor on Creative Bloq. Having worked on magazines devoted to Photoshop, films, history, and science for over 15 years, as well as working on Digital Camera World and Top Ten Reviews in more recent times, Erlingur has developed a passion for finding tech that helps people do their job, whatever it may be. He loves putting things to the test and seeing if they're all hyped up to be, to make sure people are getting what they're promised. Still can't get his wifi-only printer to connect to his computer. 

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