Design
Made from an aluminum body, it’s lightweight, but feels solid and durable, with no creaking or flexing under normal use. Its black finish is attractive and fingerprint resistant. It doesn’t feel metallic and feels comfortable on the skin, soft and silky smooth. The status lights are curiously found on the back of the laptop and hidden by the hinge when the display is folded open. It only seems to be useful while the laptop isn’t in use. The keyboard is backlit with 3 levels of brightness and the option to turn the backlight off. However, I found the minimum setting for the backlight to be too bright. The backlight also doesn’t illuminate the Shift function labels on the keys. The keyboard itself has considerably more travel than other ultra slim laptops, while still being silent. There is no numpad, but this allows for front-firing speakers on the sides of the keyboard as well as the touchpad in a centered position, to prevent accidental input while typing while looking straight on to the screen. The P16 comes with an infrared camera compatible with Windows Hello for facial recognition login, which works in the dark, and more convenient than fingerprint login.
Display
The display is a glossy touch screen OLED with slim bezels and measures 15.8” diagonally. It’s pretty reflective, so it’s not ideal for use opposite a window or light source. Its native resolution is 3840x2400, which is a 16:10 aspect ratio. It’ll produce black bars for 16:9 presentations, but the extra vertical space makes it better for content creation, giving you a larger workspace. Because it’s a 4k display against a 16” display, you won’t spot individual pixels (or at all) at 150% scale or higher. The display has a refresh rate of 60 Hz which is acceptable for content creation, which is what the laptop was designed for. However, I find it a very curious decision that ASUS chose a touch panel over 120 Hz since it doesn’t really leverage touch input very well, while at the same time, proves to be very capable of 120 Hz for gaming. Feels like a misstep to me. I don’t have a protractor, but if I had to guess, the hinge looks like it only goes as far back as 30°. There’s also some wobble when the display is touched. It also does not come with a stylus although it supports the ASUS stylus. When I tried using my Samsung phone’s S-pen, it wouldn’t work. I found the touch display best for making quick selections in editing programs with buttons like Photoshop, and keep the touchpad in my editing workspace. Since the hinge doesn’t fold flat to 180° or 360°, the P16 doesn’t work well for drawing with touch input. I didn’t notice any text fringing. The display is Dolby Vision certified, and is able to play Dolby Vision content. For a model aimed at content creators, I was surprised that its default color profile was oversaturated. Creators looking for accurate colors will want to switch to a different profile such as sRGB, which is great for web content, or Display P3, which is great for graphics and video editing.
Inputs
Left side:
-proprietary 200W power port
-full sized HDMI 2.1 port
-USB 4 Type-C port
-USB 3.2 Type-A port
-3.5mm audio jack
Right side:
-USB 3.2 Type-C port
-USB 3.2 Type-A port
-full sized SD card slot
Charging is done from the left side of the laptop, and the only way to take advantage of the P16 at full power is using the stock 200W power adapter. The USB 4 port only charges at up to 100W, which will cap the CPU and GPU. The cap isn’t as bad as it sounds because it’s still a powerful laptop even with the cap. You just won’t be able to take full advantage of the hardware’s capability. Due to this being a Ryzen laptop, one of its USB-C ports is only USB 4 and not a Thunderbolt port. ASUS also skimps out compared to the competition by making its other USB-C port 3.2. This USB 3.2 Type-C port on the right side has power delivery, but isn’t capable of charging the laptop.
Connectivity
It comes with WiFi 7 but unfortunately maxes out at 2882MB/s up&down. I've seen others do 5000MB/s. It also has Bluetooth 5.4, which is the latest version.
Performance
When set to Performance mode, which can only be run while plugged in using the stock 200W charger, the P16 is impressively powerful, but the fans blare non-stop, making it a pretty noisy laptop. It’s not a high-pitched sound or anything offensive, but it’s a noticeably aggressive sound of fans spinning. The laptop doesn’t get too hot as long as the vents on the bottom of the laptop aren’t blocked. It’s best used on a flat desk and not recommended on a bed while in Performance mode.
While in Performance mode, I was able to play Shadow of the Tomb Raider in max Custom settings, which is more demanding than its preset Ultra settings in native 3840x2400 resolution and get a stable 60fps. In 1080p with those same maxed out settings, I could get 144fps. Sadly, the display is only a 60 Hz panel. But since the P16 was designed for content creation, 60 Hz is more than fine. The Nvidia GPU can be leveraged by connecting the P16 to an external gaming monitor.
When running on battery, the P16 caps its CPU, and the discrete GPU (if it's being used). The P16 will use the integrated Radeon 890M. I never experienced any thermal throttling.
Other than Performance mode, the laptop runs cool and very silent, especially in Whisper mode, where the fan never seems to go off. Through the MyASUS app, your hardware configuration is customizable. You can run on the integrated graphics card exclusively for longer battery life. It’s also nice that the integrated graphics is a Radeon variant (890M), while the discrete GPU is a GeForce RTX 5070, particularly for software that has benefits for one type over the other.
The SSD is speedy with a 5279 MB/s sequential read, 4831 MB/s sequential write. It has a random read of 56 MB/s and random write of 146 MB/s and a capacity of 2TB. There is also a spare m.2 slot for additional SSD storage.
Battery
Using the 200W stock power adapter, it takes 1 hour and 45 minutes to charge from 0% to 100%, though it hits around the 90% mark after around 1 hour. Using a 100W USB-C charger, took about 4 hours to charge from 0% to 100% but hit around 90% after around 1 hour and 30 minutes. The battery life itself varies greatly depending on the mode you use and what you’re doing but otherwise excellent when you need it to be without the laptop feeling sluggish. When streaming video non-stop at 76% brightness and 50% volume I got about 9 hours of battery life. When gaming in 4K using the discrete GPU with HDR on and no caps (Windows mode; Best Performance power plan) it lasted only 1 hour and 47 minutes.
Sound
The sound out of the box sounded terrible to me. It sounded too isolated. But this was the sound profile for its “Music” setting. When I switched it to “Dynamic”, the sound was amazing. It utilizes Dolby Atmos, which gives the audio depth without sacrificing detail. The speakers also get very loud without any distortion. The microphone on the other hand isn’t very impressive. My recorded voice sounds too processed and unnatural. It does do a good job with noise cancellation though, eliminating sounds like an air conditioner.
Touchpad
The touchpad is very responsive but unfortunately lacks haptic feedback. Taps can be done anywhere on the touchpad, but physical button clicks can only be done on the bottom portion. The touchpad is very responsive and feels smooth to touch. It has a unique DialPad touch feature built in to the top-left portion of the touchpad that needs to activated via a simple drag from the top-right corner of the touchpad gesture. I have never accidentally triggered this gesture personally, although perhaps your mileage may vary. When the DialPad is turned on, it gives you a touch dial that comes with preset functions for specific apps like Photoshop and Word, while also allowing you to customize the dial with functions and apps that you assign on your own. This gives your shortcut access to commonly used functions via the DialPad.
Bundled Software
ASUS includes StoryCube and MuseTree with the P16.
StoryCube appears to be a AI-assisted media hub. It automatically organizes your media with AI, such as sorting photos by people with AI recognizing similar faces; sorting photos by scenes that AI will come up categories for such as "Diving & Snorkeling", "Pets". My issues is, it has proven to be very inaccurate for me, and makes things more of a mess and irritating. A picture of a woman taking a selfie in a normal car was labeled under "Off-road Racing". You're supposed to able to search your media contextually, but StoryCube does a poor job. When I search "tennis" it shows one result despite the many tennis photos and videos I had. When I search "blue", I get no results.
I do like how you're able to trim and even crop videos in StoryCube.
But StoryCube only works with the folders you add to it manually, so it can be cumbersome.
MuseTree is a Generative AI image content board. You start with an idea and MuseTree will generate images from it. Then you can add more AI generated images to your content board. You can take those other images and stack them on an existing image to have AI generate an image that combines the 2.
My issue with MuseTree is that the default AI image model it uses, dreamshaper, isn't a style I like. It looks obviously AI, which is to say, bad and soft-looking. It's got a cheap Made in China vibe.
You can change the AI image model by downloading a different one from Civitai but I haven't found any good ones for my needs. On top of that, it won't produce any copyright content.
ASUS came out with the ProArt P16 last year with the RTX 4060 last year, but this model has the RTX 5070, which is more battery efficient when running on the discrete GPU. It also generates AI images slightly quicker. But the improvements for gaming are marginal. It can game but its best use is for media editing and creation.