Asus Zenbook S16 Review: A Well-Rounded Premium 16-inch Laptop That Delivers

• Slim and lightweight for a 16-inch laptop
• Gorgeous 3K OLED display with 120Hz refresh rate
• Strong everyday performance with Ryzen AI

The Asus Zenbook S16 is a premium laptop that focuses on getting the fundamentals right. It combines a sleek, easy-to-carry design with one of the best displays in its class, making it great for both work and entertainment. Performance is solid for a thin-and-light machine, handling multitasking and even light creative workloads like Photoshop and basic video edits without much trouble, and the port selection means you won't need a dongle. That said, battery life in real-world use is average, and while performance is good, it's not built for sustained heavy workloads. It's also priced on the higher side, but if you're looking for a well-rounded Windows laptop that balances design, display, and performance, the Zenbook S16 makes a lot of sense.

I have to admit, the Zenbook S16 looks quite royal in the Scandinavian White variant. It's not exactly white either; it leans more towards a cream shade, which actually adds to the premium feel. The texture on the lid feels great to the touch, and Asus' Ceraluminum, a mix of ceramic and aluminium, does make it stand out a bit. And, overall, the design is as subtle as it gets, since there are no flashy elements here like RGB.

But there's a downside to this colour. Dust. It picks up dust very easily, and it just sticks. After using it for a month, carrying it around in my backpack and using it in cafes, it has picked up dirt that doesn't come off that easily. But hey, it doesn't pick up fingerprint smudges as easily, so that's a win, I guess?

The Zenbook S16 weighs around 1.5 kg, so it's not painful at all to carry this around in your bag, considering it's a 16-inch laptop. The build quality is also good, and so is the hinge. The lid can be opened with a single finger.

You get a wide variety of ports here. On the left, there's a full-size HDMI, 2x USB 4.0 Gen 3 Type-C ports that support PD and display out, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a small LED that lights up when the laptop is charging. The right side has a full-size SD card reader and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port. So, there's really no need to carry a dongle with this laptop since it covers everything necessary.

Asus has a winner on its hands with the display on this laptop. The 16-inch 3K OLED panel is drop-dead gorgeous. It's an excellent display to watch movies and TV shows on, since the colours pop well and the visuals are sharp. In shows with a lot of low-lit scenes like Breaking Bad, the display manages the blacks quite well. The display also covers 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, making it a good option for editing videos as well as colour grading them.

It's a 120Hz refresh-rate panel, so the UI also feels pretty smooth when scrolling. Moreover, it's a touchscreen, which I appreciate since it fits well into my workflow. However, the display does not have any coating that prevents fingerprint smudges, so it does tend to pick up a few marks, but nothing that's distracting.

The Zenbook S16 also has a few OLED Care features built into it that can be enabled from the MyASUS app. This includes Pixel Refresh, which launches a screensaver after the display has been idle for 30 minutes. There's also an option to automatically hide the Windows taskbar in desktop mode. These are great additions to avoid the classic OLED burn-in.

The keyboard is colour-coded and matches the shade of the lid. There's proper spacing between each key to avoid mistypes. The keys have good travel and are not loud at all, even if you furiously type on them. In fact, half of this review was written on the Zenbook S16's keyboard, and it never left me wanting more. It's also a backlit keyboard, with a white light shining underneath. You can adjust the brightness levels from the function row.

The function row also has a button to enable or disable the webcam, so there's no physical shutter here. The F11 key is used to disable the webcam, and the F10 key is used to disable the microphone, and both have a small LED so that it's not a guessing game. My only gripe here is the missing number pad. Given this form factor, it could have been included. This is something I'm particularly used to, so it did affect my workflow when using Excel a bit.

The trackpad is huge, and Asus clearly took advantage of the larger chassis here. It's also an excellent trackpad with enough room to perform gestures. The click is quite soft as well. There are also smart gestures on either side of the trackpad, so swiping up from the left side increases the volume, and swiping up from the right increases the brightness levels of the display. These are very minor but definitely practical additions that I found useful.

AMD’s recent line of mobile processors has been quite excellent, especially the higher-end ones like the Ryzen A9 365+ and HX 370. The Zenbook S16 gets the AMD Ryzen AI 9 465, and this processor also lives up to its name. It’s a 10-core chip with a maximum boost clock of 5GHz and a TDP of 28W. For the iGPU, it uses the Radeon 880M.

The Zenbook S16 flies through everyday tasks, including having over 15 Chrome tabs open while Adobe Photoshop is running in the foreground. I mean, this isn’t something surprising; it’s what you would expect from a laptop that costs this much money. In synthetic benchmarks like Cinebench 2024, the Ryzen AI 9 465 pulls ahead of most of the laptops here, but falls behind the HP Omnibook Ultra with the Core Ultra 7 258V. That said, the multi-core performance on the AMD is much better than all of the laptops listed below.

In Geekbench 6, it scored 2772 in single-core and 13,138 in multi-core, which puts it ahead of the Dell Pro 14 by a noticeable margin, especially in multi-core workloads. It also edges past the Dell XPS 13 in multi-core performance, while staying on par in single-core.

On the iGPU side, the Zenbook S16 with the Radeon 880M takes a clear lead with a score of 30,459, outperforming all the laptops in this comparison. It comfortably beats the Dell Pro 14 by a huge margin, and even edges past the Dell XPS 13, HP Omnibook Ultra, and the Zenbook S14 OLED. The gap isn’t massive against the XPS 13 and Omnibook Ultra, but it’s enough to position the S16 as the more capable machine for GPU-accelerated tasks and light gaming.

In PCMark 10, the Zenbook S16 scores 6630, putting it slightly ahead of the HP Omnibook Ultra and comfortably ahead of the Galaxy Book5 Pro. The difference isn’t massive, but it does indicate that the S16 holds a small edge in everyday productivity tasks like web browsing, office work, and general system responsiveness. In real-world usage, though, all three laptops feel fairly similar, with no drastic gaps in daily performance

The Zenbook S16 packs an 83Wh battery, and while the synthetic numbers look promising, the real-world results tell a slightly different story. In the PCMark battery test, it lasted 11 hours and 46 minutes, which is respectable on paper.

But in daily use, with a mix of Chrome, some Photoshop work, and Netflix, it averaged closer to 5 hours. That's usable, but not particularly impressive for a premium thin-and-light, especially at this price point where expectations around battery life are naturally higher.

On the charging side of things, you get a 68W USB-C charger in the box, but it isn't the easiest to carry around, so I just used a 120W PD charger, which was much easier and more compact to carry while charging the laptop.

The Zenbook S16 is a no-frills laptop, and that's exactly where it makes sense. It focuses on the essentials, offering a slim design, a great OLED display, and reliable performance in a package that works well for both productivity and entertainment.

The performance is genuinely good for a machine this thin, and even creators can manage edits in Premiere Pro, while Photoshop runs smoothly. The display only strengthens that use case. However, it's still not meant for sustained heavy workloads, and battery life, while decent, isn't the best in this segment.

It's also not cheap, especially in a category where the MacBook Pro sets a high benchmark. But if staying on Windows matters, the Zenbook S16 still makes a lot of sense as a well-rounded premium laptop that largely justifies its price.

If you're looking for a premium Windows laptop that balances design, display, and performance, the Zenbook S16 is an easy recommendation. It gets most things right, from its slim build to its excellent OLED screen and reliable day-to-day performance, making it a strong all-rounder for both work and entertainment. It's not the cheapest option, and battery life could be better, but for what it offers, it largely justifies its price in this segment.