He plays at home, and obviously wants to make a good impression. Asus presents itself at Computex in Taipei with a range of solutions that embrace all sectors, from the super laptop designed for business use to the gaming PC so elegant that it doesn’t even look like a gaming PC, up to the ProArt series, created for those he wants a workstation capable of expressing and reflecting his creativity.
The assortment of solutions presented today by the Taipei company is decidedly vast, but compared to what we are used to with PC manufacturers who catalog dozens of very similar models from Asus, the ranges are well delineated and there is no overlap between product lines.
There is a silver lining, and that is the presence of a new generation AMD Ryzen AI processor on practically every model. Last year, at Computex, almost all the products announced by Asus had Intel processors while this year we only find Intel on some business notebooks. To see other products we will have to wait for the second part of the year, when Lunar Lake arrives.
If we look at the models coming out between July, August and September AMD is practically the only choice, with Qualcomm only present on two models, one of which however will only arrive at the end of 2024 while the other is a 15″, take it or leave it .
In the past few years it was very difficult to find products with an AMD processor on board, this year it seems that the situation is totally different and we hope that this abundance is also reflected in the availability at the point of sale, because the new Ryzen APUs seem truly exceptional. We used the notebooks with a gun to our heads, every benchmark attempt was nipped in the bud, but some performance and consumption curves that appeared online, if truthful, suggest that AMD’s new Ryzen AI could even surpass Qualcomm in what it had to do be, thanks to the ARM architecture, its workhorse, i.e. the consumption / performance ratio.
Asus has made a “Surface Pro” that resists water and dust
We open this review of news with the series that is closest to our hearts, that of ProArt laptops, portable workstations designed for content creators, 3D artists and musicians.
The top model, a direct competitor of the 16″ MacBook Pro, is the new ProArt P16, only 14.9 mm thick and with a weight that tips the scales at 1.85 kg.
The black aluminum body, the result of extensive research into materials, hides an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor which is operated at 45 Watts, combined with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 GPU as a dedicated card.
Asus has completely revised the dissipation, to be able to keep the thickness under 15 mm and according to the benchmarks shown during the presentation the company ensures that it has done a far faster laptop than the M3 Proeven if the testing ground are apps where NVIDIA with its APIs make the difference (Blender for example).
We are faced with a PC which however falls within the RTX AI PC family, therefore a computer where the NVIDIA GPU is squeezed rather than the AMD NPU, which alone can manage LMM models which today are unapproachable for an NPU. “RTX GPUs speed up video editing tasks with DaVinci Resolve by 2.5x. Adobe Premiere Pro’s AI Speech Enhance runs 4.5 times faster. 3D is accelerated up to 6 times in Autodesk Arnold. ProArt P16 has access to exclusive NVIDIA AI software such as NVIDIA Broadcast, RTX Video and ChatRTX” explains Asus, but we know the RTX 4070 well and know what it can do.
Also interesting in the ProArt field is the 13-inch PX13, a convertible weighing 1.38 kg with a 360° hinge that allows you to switch seamlessly from laptop to tablet mode.
Built around a 3K OLED it also relies on AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and a GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU and manages to offer the performance of the larger model in a decidedly smaller body.
There is WiFi 7, two 40 Gbps USB4 with obviously support for external displays, an HDMI 2.1 output and a UHS-II MicroSD card reader intended for those who need to transfer photos and videos in the field.
The real novelty in this segment, however, is the ProArt PZ13: we are faced with the version made by Asus of the Surface Proweighs only 0.85 kg and thanks to the Snapdragon processor it can be considered a Copilot+ PC.
The screen is the same Asus Lumina OLED 3K as the PX13 but the form factor changes, where instead of a convertible with an articulated hinge there is a full-size keyboard that attaches to the device magnetically. Without the keyboard ProArt PZ13 is a tablet in all respects that can also be used with a pen, with the “cover” keyboard it is a laptop.
The keyboard, like the body itself, has been designed to resist water and dust with an IP52 protection rating. The long-lasting 70Wh battery is perhaps the largest ever put in a Snapdragon laptop, and should give this device the battery life record in the segment. From the photo we took, below, let’s assume that it is Snapdragon X Plus even though it was never officially mentioned during the presentation.
We do not rule out that it could be an even less powerful version that does not use fans, a sort of Snapdragon X with only 8 cores. We will see.
ProArt P16 starts at 1,899 dollars, so we believe that in Italy it can reach around 2299 euros, ProArt PX13 starts at 1,699 dollars while we don’t know the price of ProArt PZ13, it will only arrive in the second part of the year.
ASUS Zenbook S 16, when the 16″ becomes portable
A thickness of just 1.1 cm and a weight of 1.5 kg would be a classic business card for a notebook if it weren’t for the fact that the notebook in question is a 16″. With the Zenbook S16, Asus has created a small masterpiece of engineering and miniaturization, working on what is ultimately the only truly critical aspect when it comes to designing an ultra slim notebook, heat dissipation.
Thanks to 3522 particularly shaped holes, obtained in the keyboard area with a numerical control machine, Asus claims to have managed to increase the air flow by reducing not only the internal temperature by 7 degrees but also the noise generated by the fans which is brought to less than 25 dB.
If you look at it with a magnifying glass, the processing of each single hole is reminiscent of the front grill of the Mac Pro, the “grater” one, with Asus playing precisely on the type of duct to accelerate the air flow by creating a peak Venturi effect on each of the openings.
The resistance, also structural, is due to the construction which features a completely aluminum recess where, on the external cover, a new material called Ceraluminum is used which is very reminiscent of ceramic to the touch, it is warmer and less metallic.
Also based on the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, this time operated at 28 Watts, the Zenbook S 16 has a 78 Wh battery, two USB4 ports, one USB 3.2 Type-A, an audio jack and an SD card reader .
Despite the record thickness there is also room for an HDMI, and we must admit that seeing the product live it is really difficult to understand how Asus managed to insert it.
Storage sees the use of PCIe 4.0 x4 disks of up to 2 TB while LPDDR5x RAM reaches 32 GB. The panel is 16″ like on the ProArt, but on the former a 4K screen is used while on the latter the OLED is a 3K 16:10 at 120 Hz with practically invisible frames.
ASUS Vivobook S, after the 15″ with Qualcomm SoC, three AMD models arrive
In recent days Asus launched the Vivobook S15 with Snapdragon X Elite. 15.6 inches, with 1.47 cm thickness and a weight of 1.42 kg it was the company’s first Copilot+ PCand it will also be the laptop we will use for the first review of the Snapdragon expected on June 18, when the embargo we signed expires.
In the same body, three other models are now being presented at Computex which also adopt the AMD Ryzen 9 HX 370 processor. There is the small 14-inch Vivobook S14, the 15.6-inch identical to the Qualcomm but with an x86 processor and the Asus 16-inch Vivobook S for those who want a larger screen.
When AI meets gaming: TUF Gaming A14 and A16
The roundup of new features concludes with gaming laptops, to be precise the TUF series. The two models announced in Taiwan are the 14-inch A14 and the 16-inch TUF Gaming A16also characterized by improved portability and the presence of AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processors combined with NVIDIA GPUs.
Since these are notebooks designed for gaming, Asus has obviously revised the consumption parameters, bringing the platform of the two models to 45 Watts and 80 Watts respectively, with the possibility of reaching even 170 Watts if an external charger and the NVIDIA card are used.
The 14″ model is configured with the RTX 4060 boosted up to 100 Watts, has a 14″ 2.5K IPS screen (no OLED) and can have up to 32 GB of LPDDR5X RAM at 7500 MHz and up to 2 terabytes of storage on M.2 2280 socket.
The 16″ model in its most advanced configuration adopts the RTX 4070 at 140 Watt, but together with the battery (90 Wh instead of 74 Wh) it is the only difference, because the IPS screen resolution, RAM and storage are identical.
The Zephyrus G16 is nothing new: we had already seen it at CES in the version with Intel Core Ultra 9 185H and now the configurations with AMD are also arriving at Computex. Despite being a gaming PC, the Zephyrus G16 can very well be mistaken for a “pro” workstation: in the light color it is really beautiful.
