Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024)

Verdict

The Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) is a worthy successor to Asus’ previous ultrabooks with a fantastically stylish design and lightweight construction, as well as lots of power against the competition, a marvellous OLED panel and decent battery life. If you’re in the market for a premium Windows ultrabook, this is the one to go for.

Introduction

The Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) sees a moderate refresh from last year’s model which proved to be one of our favourite laptops of 2023 with a funky design, class-leading display and ample power for productivity workloads.

For 2024, the Zenbook S has moved up to using a 16-inch 3K OLED 120Hz display, while also packing in some grunt with one of AMD’s new Strix Point laptop chips – specifically, it’s the AMD Ryzen 9 AI HX 370, complete with the goodness of Copilot+.

You also get a Radeon 890M iGPU bundled in with the chip, as well as 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and one of the most gorgeous, lightweight chassis I’ve experienced, largely thanks to its use of an interesting material.

All of this Zenbook goodness is going to run you £1699.99/$1699.99, which puts it firmly in the frame against some of the best ultrabooks we’ve tested, including the Dell XPS 14 (2024) the new Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, and naturally the Apple MacBook Air M3.

Design and Keyboard

• Lightweight, stylish frame
• Solid port selection
• Comfortable keyboard and massive trackpad

The Zenbook S 16 (2024) looks utterly gorgeous with its slender grey and white frame. Ultrabooks tended to hit a bit of a wall with their design in recent years, but Asus’ contender continues to push forward both with its level of style and modernity with both its colour choice and super-thin bezels, as well as its employment of innovative materials.

The top casing of the new Zenbook S 16 is made of what Asus calls ‘ceraluminum’. In other words, that’s a blend of ceramic and aluminium which allows for a lightweight but hard-wearing material – perhaps the ideal blend for an ultrabook at this price.

The use of ‘ceraluminum’ on the lid and machined aluminium elsewhere keeps this laptop light. At 1.5kg, it’s remarkably portable for a 16-inch machine, and is one of the most portable laptops I’ve used. Combine this with a thickness of 11mm, and you’ve got one of the slickest looking laptops available.

However, as much as the Zenbook S 16 is only 11mm thick, it packs in a fantastic selection of ports. The left side houses an HDMI 2.1 port, as well as a pair of USB 4-capable USB-C ports and an audio combo jack. On the right side, you’ll find a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port for legacy connections and a full-size microSD.

The 65 percent keyboard is especially comfortable, and matches some of the best offerings I’ve seen, such as those on the best MacBooks.

The key travel is reasonable, while also being quiet. What’s more, the white backlighting is crisp and vibrant and can also get reasonably bright. There are also a helpful amount of function keys for changing everything from volume to screen brightness and the level of keyboard backlighting, as well as those for mic mute, emojis, and shortcut keys for bothMyAsus software and Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant.

Compared to the previous model, Asus also says the Zenbook S 16’s trackpad for this year is 40 percent larger. I don’t have any reason to doubt that claim as the trackpad here is the biggest I’ve seen on a laptop of this size. It’s tactile and responsive, while also supporting gestures for everything from changing system volume to handling video playback depending on where on the trackpad you move your fingers.

On the point of sustainability, the Zenbook S 16 is packaged in a cardboard box, while there are no plastics wrapped around the laptop or inside. The small charging brick has some plastic wrap around it, but this is otherwise plastic-free.

Display and Sound

• Large, responsive display
• Fantastic colours and deep blacks
• Decent speakers

Asus has also gone the whole hog when it comes to the Zenbook S 16’s display. This is a larger 16-inch screen complete with a 3K or 2880 x 1800 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate that provides a detailed and responsive experience for basic productivity and more intense, creative workloads.

This is also one of Asus’ Lumina OLED panels meaning we’re getting deep blacks and sublime colours and contrast. This was backed up in my testing where my trusty colorimeter measured a virtually perfect 0.03 black level and superb colour accuracy for both mainstream colours with 100% sRGB accuracy, and for more colour sensitive workloads with 100% DCI-P3 and 94% Adobe RGB. In addition, the 6500K colour temperature at max brightness is also bang on, and its 12810:1 contrast ratio at max brightness is truly excellent.

The only area where this OLED panel falls down is with its peak brightness. My testing measured it to be just 338.1 nits, which is passable for both indoor and outdoor usage. However, this is more of a wider trope of OLEDs against their Mini LED counterparts, for instance, more so than an issue with the Zenbook S 16’s specific panel. On a brighter note, this 16-inch panel is also a touchscreen, which is accurate and responsive

The speakers on the Zenbook S 16 are downwards-firing, meaning placing the laptop on a softer surface such as a bed or sofa can impact performance. They are nonetheless decent, offering solid clarity and body with an okay amount of low-end.

Performance

• Immense processing power
• Ample graphical oomph from iGPU
• Solid speeds from SSD

Inside, the Zenbook S 16 opts to go with one of AMD’s new Strix Point APUs. Specifically, it’s the beefy Ryzen 9 AI HX 370, complete with 12 cores and 24 threads, as well as a Radeon 890M iGPU.

The HX 370 provided some fantastic results in CPU benchmarks such as Cinebench R23 and Geekbench 6 with outstanding single and multi-core scores that beat off the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H-powered Dell XPS 14 (2024) and even go toe to toe with the Apple MacBook Air (M3), where it’s neck and neck at times.

AMD’s new Ryzen 9 AI HX 370 is also on top against the Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite Windows ultrabooks we’re seeing from both Microsoft and Samsung, and in the immediacy at least, it continues AMD’s dominance of the CPU space where they’ve been untouchable with desktop chips in the past couple of years.

The Radeon 890M iGPU offers a respectable score in the 3D Mark Time Spy benchmark which means the Zenbook S 16 is capable of some graphically intensive work, although it’s on this point where other ultrabooks with discrete GPUs perform a lot better.

The 32GB of headroom here is ideal for more intensive workloads, or simply opening a load of Chrome tabs at once, while the 1TB SSD offers a decent capacity. It is also a reasonably quick SSD with 5059.92MB/s reads and 3685.65MB/s writes, meaning you’ll be able to access your data rather briskly.

Even under load, the Zenbook S 16 also remained especially quiet. There was a small amount of fan noise under load and the laptop did get slightly warm, but in day-to-day usage, it didn’t spin up at all.

Software

• Reasonably clean Windows 11 install
• Some pre-installed Asus apps
• Also comes with Copilot AI features

The Zenbook S 16 comes with Windows 11 and a reasonably clean install, too. There isn’t much in the way of bloatware with regards to an unwanted anti-virus or similar, although there are some pieces of software courtesy of Asus that come pre-installed.

There is MyAsus, which comes as part of the taskbar when you first open the Zenbook S 16. This is where you can check on everything from battery level and enabling battery care modes to choosing which type of workload the Zenbook S 16’s network connection prioritises.

In addition, there is also GlideX, which is where you can manage tasks such as casting or mirroring the Zenbook S 16’s screen to other devices wirelessly, or transfer files across the same network. You can also enable remote access to a mobile device, too. The Storybook app is designed as another means of organising photos and videos, using AI to recognise faces and file your photos for you, which is handy.

As well as offering those apps, as a Copilot+ laptop, the Zenbook S 16 also benefits from Microsoft’s AI functionality. The main thing here is the addition of its Copilot key, which acts as a wake button for Microsoft’s AI assistant. It brings up a window where you can ask the AI all manner of things, such as to write some text, or you can ask it a range of information.

You also get the benefit of generative AI in Windows system apps such as Photos, where you can add filters or an interesting background. The Photos app on a Copilot+ PC also has an Image Creator function, where you can give the system a prompt and it’ll generate an image for you with reasonable accuracy. Microsoft Paint also has similar smarts, where AI can help you add detail to images using the CoCreator tab where it can turn your image into everything from pixel art to an oil painting.

The Zenbook S 16’s webcam also benefits from Windows Studio webcam effects to keep you in frame, as well as to offer convenient features such as background blur, which works a treat for conference calls. There are also useful extras including a way of adding live captions to videos directly within Windows, which is handy.

Microsoft’s Recall feature is still missing however. This would have taken screenshots every few seconds of use so you could look back and remember things you’ve looked at, even if you didn’t manually bookmark them in a browser or take a manual screenshot using the Snipping Tool. It will be available, although only for Windows Insiders.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 13 hours 18 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting between one and two working days

For such a powerful ultrabook, the Zenbook S 16 impressed with its battery life. In my testing where the brightness is dropped to 150 nits and the PC Mark battery test is run until the laptop enters its hibernation state due to low battery, Asus’ latest contender with its large 78Whr battery lasted for 13 hours 18 minutes, which is pretty solid.

Against the Dell XPS 14 (2024), the Zenbook S 16 impresses, considering Dell’s choice lasted for just shy of 8 hours, while the MSI Prestige 14 AI Evo CM mustered up 12 and three quarter hours. For a modern ultrabook, the Zenbook S 16 is fantastic.

Its recharge time is also brisk too, with it going from flat to fully charged in 100 minutes, or 1 hour and 40 minutes with its 65W USB-C charger. Dell’s latest XPS laptop took 20 minutes longer. Zero to 50% took 45 minutes though, which is behind the beefy 100W charger in MSI’s choice that only too half an hour to recharge half charge.

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