Ben Madilynn
Many were skeptical when the first creator-class laptops launched, including this writer. But the Asus ProArt P16 (starts at $1,699.99, $2,699.99 as tested) comes to the yard with a captivating 4K OLED display, powerful speakers, and a host of AI-assisted features designed to enhance security, video calls, and creative output. Plus, the virtual Asus DialPad enables finer edits and quicker access to shortcuts. Best of all, this ProArt P16 configuration satisfies that never-ending desire for excessive power, with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor raring to go and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics chip that’s just as game. This laptop can handle all your content creation needs, whether photo or video editing or graphic design—you could even score a movie on this thing. While it gets hot and loud when the workload gets heavy, the Asus ProArt P16 is an Editors’ Choice-award-winning option for content creators and anyone looking for a high-end laptop that’s durable and powerful.
Configurations & Design: A Minimalist Throughout
Our specific ProArt P16 configuration is known as the H7606 model, which has a 2GHz AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor with an AMD XDNA neural processor (NPU), 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, a 2TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 solid-state drive, an integrated AMD Radeon 890M processor, a discrete Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU with 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, and, last, a 16-inch, 3,840-by-2,400 OLED touch screen. You can snag this P16 from Asus or Best Buy for $2,699.
Asus also sells more-affordable configurations starting at $1,699.99 with the same CPU and RAM but instead packing a lower-power RTX 4060 and half as much SSD space as the above arrangement.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Compared with other Asus notebook lines, the ProArt is somewhat understated. Instead of gentle concentric circles, gleaming finishes, or a mesmerizing light show, the ProArt P16 meets us with inky blackness. Save for a shiny silver logo next to equally glossy, raised lettering that spells out “Asus ProArt,” the rest of the laptop’s lid is blank obsidian. That’s not to say you won’t find embellishments: Look closer at the logo, and you’ll see a cleverly carved “Pro” within the little emblem.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
That matte black finish comes from the company’s proprietary anodizing process, creating “a nano-microporous structure” that cuts down on reflections. That’s cool and all, but its damn-near smudge-proof surface is even cooler. Even my oily fingers left only a whisper of a print.
The laptop’s interior reminds me of older Razer Blade laptops with chunky speakers sandwiching a full-size, membrane-style keyboard. Despite a massive touchpad with its curious wheel in the top-right corner (more on that later), you’ll still find plenty of space to rest your palms. The power button sits above the F12 key, keeping its lonely vigil.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
This is the port lineup I expect to see on a creator laptop. Asus gives you two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, along with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, an HDMI 2.1 FRL port, an SD Express 7.0 card reader, a headset jack, and a proprietary DC-in port. The only thing missing is an Ethernet port, but that’s a minor quibble.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Flip the laptop over, and you’ll see that Asus is determined to ensure the components stay as cool as possible. The P16’s undercarriage is more vent than anything else, taking up about 65% of the plate. You’ll find a pair of rubber feet and slits toward the front for added lift from your desk.
Asus’ designers put a lot of thought into who would use this notebook. Despite its size, Asus is targeting on-the-go creatives, which is why the laptop has MIL-STD 810H-certified durability. That certification means the P16 can withstand extreme temperatures, shock, vibration, sand, dust, and humidity. And, of course, it can take a drop or two, within reason.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The ProArt P16 weighs 4.1 pounds, putting it on the scale’s lighter end, and measures between 0.59 and 0.68 inch thick, with a footprint of 13.9 by 9.7 inches. How does that size up against its competition? That’s much slimmer overall than the Alienware m16 R2 (0.93 by 14.33 by 9.81 inches; 5.75 pounds) gaming laptop. Likewise, the Dell Precision 5490 (0.75 by 12.2 by 8.3 inches; 3.29 pounds) workstation is much thicker and heavier. Only our comparable portable creator laptops, the Lenovo Slim Pro 9i (0.71 by 14.27 by 9.64 inches; 4.92 pounds) and the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 (0.48 by 13.99 by 9.85 inches; 3.41 pounds), come close to or surpass the ProArt’s portability.
Using the Asus ProArt P16: Top-Notch Audiovisuals With AI Everywhere
When you want the most vivid color with the deepest blacks and sharpest contrast, it’s OLED, baby—accept no substitutes. Whether I’m editing photos for an article, video for my YouTube channel, or playing Black Myth: Wukong (because this thing has an RTX 4070, goshdarnit), the ProArt P16’s display serves up some gorgeous views.
And while the glossy panel is highly susceptible to glare, in ideal conditions, it’ll be hard to pry your eyes away from the P16’s 4K, 16:10 goodness. If there are any complaints, the gamer in me wants a higher refresh rate than 60Hz. (Yes, I know I should check out Asus’ Zephyrus or even TUF lines for that, but my heart wants what it wants.) I also want skinnier bezels, especially along the bottom. Last: Don’t include a touch screen without bundling a pen, especially with a screen that supports one with 4,096 levels of pressure.
The P16 has a 1080p webcam, and I wouldn’t expect anything less when looking at a laptop for creators. Called the Asus AiSense camera, it captures lovely stills that are rich in color, with sharp detail. Image quality was just as high during video calls. The AiSense cam provides a layer of security with the Adaptive Dimming feature, which automatically dims the screen when you look away to deter prying eyes. It can also lock the computer completely when you walk away and unlock it when you return, similar to Windows Hello. You also get some AI assistance from the noise-cancelling mic and the audio tools in the MyAsus app.
The six-speaker system is decently full and loud, thanks in no small part to its mostly up-firing arrangement. Coupled with Dolby Access software, Lonr and H.E.R.’s lovely duet on “Make The Most” puts an immediate smile on my face with its weighty percussion, clean synthesized keyboard, and dreamy vocals through these speakers.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The P16’s island-style keyboard presents large keycaps, bright backlighting, and an overall comfy experience. I quickly hit my usual 70-word-per-minute average on the MonkeyType test. As big as most of the keycaps are, the Backspace, Left Shift, and Enter keys are smaller than expected. One key that escaped shrinkage is the Microsoft Copilot button, found on every PC nowadays.
As a regular touchpad, the P16 performs as expected with agile, accurate response and strong palm rejection. The cursor never jumped into an unexpected place when typing, and using multitouch gesture inputs was a smooth experience. The bottom corners perform left and right mouse button functionality with a soft click. Typically, that’s all you’d get from a touchpad. But this is Asus’ ProArt line, so you’ll find something extra baked into the input device via the Asus DialPad. A circular depression in the top-left corner of the touchpad, think of it as one of those flashy dials some professional multimedia creators use to make magic.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The third-generation conceit works with most content creation apps, including the Adobe suite, where you can map up to 15 functions per app. The feature also works with the Microsoft 365 suite. In Microsoft Office, for instance, you can control font size or zoom in and out in Excel. The embedded dial also works with CapCut, Spotify, and DaVinci Resolve. I used it in Adobe Premiere to get more precise video edits. It’s a handy tool once you get the hang of it.
Although the DialPad is cool, Asus added more AI-laden apps to enhance your creative process. You’ll find StoryCube, which aggregates and organizes all your media, using AI to search via facial recognition instead of you meticulously going through every file to find that picture of your bestie from five years ago.
ProArt Creator Hub acts as a system-diagnostics monitor similar to what MyAsus does, but where the latter handles most of the system settings, the former focuses on creation as you can set the display’s color temperature, quickly access Asus’ other creative apps, and create custom color palettes by clicking on a color you like on the screen. And finally, you have MuseTree, an AI-powered image generator where you can enter text or draw a rough sketch of an idea and let AI flesh out the details. For the TikTokers out there, Asus has teamed with CapCut, giving consumers a six-month free membership.
Testing the Asus ProArt P16: Firing on All Cylinders
The Asus ProArt P16 is the first laptop with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor we’ve tested. The chip comes from AMD’s Strix Point line powered by Zen 5 and Zen 5c microarchitecture cores, which looks on par with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 185H CPU. Its obligatory NPU can crunch up to 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS), relieving the CPU and GPU of the load when using Copilot or any other AI-involved task. The system has an integrated AMD Radeon 890M processor for lighter visual functions like video streaming, while the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU can contribute to heavy AI lifting and demanding graphics apps like video editors and games.
We pitted the P16 against four high-end 16-inch laptops, each representing at least one of the individual areas in which the ProArt P16 competes. This includes gaming and content creation tasks, so the Alienware m16 R2 ($1,849.99 as tested) made sense. Because the P16’s processor is comparable with the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H CPU, we included one of the few we’ve tested with that chip so far, the Dell Precision 5490 ($3,897 as tested) workstation. Finally, we have the Lenovo Slim Pro 9i ($2,149.99 as tested) and Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 ($1,749.99 as tested), which are both creator-class “prosumer” laptops. The former has a high-end 13th Gen Intel, while the latter runs on one of Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X Elite Arm-based chips.
Something I noticed during real-world use and benchmarking is that despite the ProArt’s exclusive thermal design with its trio of fans, five heat pipes, and up to 120W of power, the ProArt can get hot under the collar. Using a thermal sensor, the center of the laptop’s undercarriage reached a high of 132 degrees Fahrenheit. The fans were also loud, so much so that my boyfriend commented on them when he came into the room.
Productivity & Content Creation Tests
We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.
The following benchmarks stress the CPU, using all available cores and threads to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. These tests are also comparative across x86, Arm64, and Mac M-series processors. Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses the company’s Redshift engine to render a complex image using the CPU or GPU. We run the multi-core CPU benchmark—the more powerful the chip, the higher the score—and its single-core variant.
Geekbench 6.3 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. We record its Multi-Core and Single-Core scores; higher numbers are better. Our last CPU stress test is the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.8.0, which converts a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution; lower times are better.
Finally, we run one cross-platform content creation benchmark on all systems: Adobe Photoshop 2024 using the 1.2.20 version of PugetBench for Creators by Puget Systems. This test rates a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes various general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The P16 delivered a leading performance in the main PCMark 10 benchmark but not quite on storage. We saw a zippy, first-place time on the HandBrake test, and the P16 kept up its lead with its top Cinebench multi-core result. As for the creative tests, the ProArt P16 gave a show-stopping performance on all aspects of the Puget Photoshop test. In summary, the notebook hit every mark we expected for a laptop of this price point and caliber and then some—this is the performance you want from a creator-class notebook, hands down.
Graphics & Gaming Tests
We test the graphics inside all laptops and desktops with three cross-platform gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Steel Nomad (and its Light variant), Wild Life (and its Extreme variant), and Solar Bay.
The Steel Nomad tests use the DirectX 12, Vulkan, or Metal graphics APIs, depending on the processor in play. Both are non-ray-traced benchmarks. Steel Nomad is built for high-end gaming systems and runs at 4K resolution, while the Light version runs at 1440p with less detail.
Wild Life and Wild Life Extreme are less demanding than Steel Nomad, though the two run at 1440p and 4K resolution, respectively. This test compares midrange Windows and macOS systems, tablets, and smartphones.
We turn to Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment. This benchmark works with Vulkan 1.1 for Windows and Android and Metal for Apple devices, subjecting 3D scenes to increasingly intense ray-traced workloads at 1440p.
Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system’s full HD (1080p or 1200p native) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. If the screen is capable of a higher resolution, we rerun the tests at the QHD equivalent of 1440p or 1600p. Each game runs at two sets of graphics settings per resolution for up to four runs total on each game.
We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Minimum graphics preset—aimed at maximizing frame rates to test display refresh rates—and again at the Extreme preset. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs fully, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again at the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies. (Because the ProArt P16 was the only laptop in this comparison set on which we ran F1 2024, we omitted its results from the below charts.)
First things first, the graphics tests. While an RTX 4070 GPU sits in the middle of Nvidia’s lineup, it reliably delivered results that placed it at second in every synthetic graphics test. Each variety of the 3DMark benchmarks (Steel Nomad, Wild Life, and Solar Bay) saw the P16 land at varying distances behind the Alienware laptop. Then, in the real gaming tests, the ProArt posted playable frame rates that proved to be competitive with the Alienware, particularly in its leading Cyberpunk 2077 scores.
Although the display has only a 60Hz refresh rate, it’d be a shame not to get a little gaming in. When it’s game time, you can rest assured that you’ll get steady high frame rates more often than not. The caveat exists because the frame rates take a severe hit at the P16’s native 4K resolution. During the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark, one of the more graphically taxing games, the ProArt P16 hit an unplayable 10 frames per second (fps) at 2400p. F1 2024 gave a similar result of 16fps at the same resolution, while COD: MW was more forgiving, with 34fps at 2400p.
Of course, no one should expect an RTX 4070 in a creator-grade laptop to push much further at 4K resolution, but it’s helpful to know the laptop’s limitations, which clearly aren’t exceedingly restrictive.
Creator & Workstation System Tests
For systems dedicated to content creation and workstation-grade tasks, we run additional tests using high-end software used by professionals to produce video content and other high-fidelity projects. First up is Adobe Premiere Pro 24 via the PugetBench for Creators benchmark, which tests real-world tasks like live playback, file export, and encoding at 4K and 8K resolutions with different codecs, processing and decoding different types of source media, and applying common GPU-accelerated special effects. Higher scores are better here.
In addition to two other tests that wouldn’t run on this machine, we employ SPECviewperf 2020 (version 3.1), a widely recognized testing suite that measures graphics performance for professional applications. The software renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models using viewsets from popular independent software vendor (ISV) applications. Results are delivered in frames per second, and higher numbers are better.
Among this group, the ProArt 16 posted the leading score in Premiere and all but one top score in SPECviewperf, demonstrating its prowess in high-intensity computing tasks. This shows that you don’t necessarily need workstation-grade hardware to power content-creation tasks, whereas a consumer-grade Nvidia GeForce GPU is better tailored for those projects. (Plus, the Lenovo laptop tackled Premiere with a GPU that’s two ranks beneath the one inside the ProArt 16.)
Battery & Display Tests
We test each laptop and tablet’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
With such heavy-duty specs, we were pleasantly surprised to see the ProArt P16 lasted just shy of 13 hours on our battery test. The time is in line for a high-powered desktop replacement, but it isn’t on par with smaller systems or those with less power-hungry components, like the Samsung laptop with its nearly all-day Snapdragon processor and battery. The Lumina OLED panel matched Asus’ claims with 100% DCI-P3 color coverage. However, it was a little short of the 500 nits the company put forth, instead only reaching 448 nits. Of course, it’s still plenty for all sorts of tasks.
Verdict: A Portable Powerhouse
Asus’ ProArt P16 is an impressive piece of machinery packed with goodies for its primary target audience of content creators. Despite its bounteous proportions, the ProArt P16 is light enough to stow in a bookbag and go on an impromptu photoshoot. Plus, with top-end components inside, the P16 will crush everything you throw at it short of 4K gaming. Creative professionals looking for a capable, high-power Windows laptop should check out the ProArt P16, our latest Editors’ Choice award winner for content-creator laptops at the high end.
Pros
The Bottom Line Powered by AMD’s latest mobile AI processor and hearty Nvidia graphics, the Asus ProArt P16 is an unrivaled content-creator laptop that’s also ready for anything short of 4K gaming.
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About Sherri L. Smith
