ASUS Zenbook S 16 Review - Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 With Radeon 890M Model
so finally embargos have lifted on the ASUS Zenbook S16 with that new AMD chip and that's probably why you're watching this video you want to know about the performance of the new chip how much better is it so do I so I'll be going to a bit of depth and taking a look at some gaming benchmarks so it is the ryzen AI now the 9 hx 370 it does promise a lot because it's gone from 8 cores to 12 cores now 24 threads 5.1 GHz maximum turbo but the graph this is integrated Graphics that is the top spec version now so it's the Radeon 890m and that's gone from 12 cores to 16 cores with the graphics and that means the performance should be a lot better right and it's also got a higher turbo at 2.9 GHz versus the old 2.7 and paired up with some fast Ram we got 1 tbte SSD of storage Windows 11 home 78w battery super nice build to it it's only 1.5 k I'll be going over it in detail so you know all what is to know about the new zok s16 and the new chipset from AMD so they have this sir aluminum or sir aluminium to it now it's a combination between ceramic and alloy and it looks fantastic does it pick up fingerprints well a few little areas here it's supposed to also be very resistant to water very robust and great to have on the top of it and I love these lines that they did put on there with the Zen book now now you can easily open this lid up with just one hand that is not a problem at all as you can see there and what about the weight of it so 1.5 kilos is our weight and I'm going to measure that here just very quickly with my scales just to confirm that and I can see that uh yes but what about the total travel weight add now the power supply that's what you get in the Box as our little power supply there and it's very small 65 Watts the weight of it now is 1.7 to 9 kilos so that's a very good weight for
a 16in laptop you can see in this light just how that sir aluminium sir aluminum does look it's a very nice feel to it it's like a matte almost almost like a a paper kind of feel to the top of it really do like it very little Flex now when I press down on the lid so look at this touch pad it is just huge the gestures on it it does support uh ones down the side here so you do have if you use this you've got a brightness control which is on on the right hand you got volume and you get used to that using that is also just as at the top there's a lot of things you can customize with the software but this touchpad is now 40% larger I really do like it and I don't feel the need to plug in a mouse definitely not with this huge massive usable area we get and a very nice smooth finish to it it is a great touchpad one of those gestur that I just forgot to is video playback at the top you can use that and it's good it's handy because it's so large they've made just extra features gestures from that touchpad now the keyboard 1.1 mm of travel it is a little bit shallower than what I'm used to typically you see 1.4 1.5 um but it is not bad when you're typing on this keyboard and using it there is a very small amount of flex there that's me pushing down ridiculously hard so when you're typing normally you're not going to notice any Flex or bounce with that you do probably see that I have a layout that's a completely different from your typical an English or ISO English us style layout this is the Spanish keyboard so we have that accented in there and there's a few other little things that are different power button is right here it does have a little bit more resistance to the print screen button and the delete that we have next to it I haven't hit it by mistake I do kind of wish it was separated away and notice that we have this area either side there's a bit of a gap there so they decided not to go with a number keyboard with this which may be a problem for some people it's made out of alloy and very nice build quality so the whole thing is full metal built with this and it's CNC machined the keyboard is backlit we do have three different backlit levels so you've got a very bright one than it's on at the moment and you can dim it right down and note the little holes at the top these are CNC machined now there is exactly 3,52 of those little holes there on the top and it's not just for Aesthetics it does look really nice but this is also to help dissipate heat and that is some passive cooling it has there at the top when you look at the Zenbook S6 side on you can see just how thin it is with that 1.1 CM so on the right we get a USB type a 3.2 Gen 2 and a fullsize SD card reader unfortunately it's
not Ultra highspeed this one now I did test out that SD card slot you can see that when you put the cards in they don't go right in and click in not that style unfortunately so they stick out about half of the card transfer speeds okay around 90 to 100 mbes per second so it's not the super fast quick ones that can do like 300 mb per second on the left HDMI 2.02 USB 4.0 ports so these do support 40 GBS per second power delivery with those video out you can run three displays and you have a 3.5 mm headphone jack with mic support along the back there is this strip you can see here now this is for our wireless antennas and it does have Wi-Fi 7 on board now to gain access to the internals is not difficult there's just all these T5 torque screws you need to remove there are two different sizes and there's no headend torque screw under the rubber feet like some brands do that that you need to lift this up and it's a bit of a pain but not here so I would rate it as been about a seven no an8 out of 10 and just being nice and easy to get into it now the first thing you'll notice is on the back here they've got these dust filters they're super fine so that means the dust will just sit on the other end here and you'll be able to wipe that off with a microfiber cloth so it's quite clever of them to do that it's going to stop the dust getting into those fans as much maybe eventually a little bit might but it shouldn't really be an issue 78w hour battery now typically with light use 30% brightness I am seeing 8 to 9 hours out of the 78w hour battery which is good demanding work like editing a video in the performance mode not the full speed but performance around 4 to 5 hours speakers here on the side with some large chamber is there that's why it does have a bit of Base to it we've got a vapor chamber here the two coolers and this is our PC e 4.0 SSD so sadly no room for another SSD slot which is quite disappointing would have liked to have seen that it means we could throw in another Drive easily upgrade so you'd have to take this drive out and then put a 2 tbte 4 or 8 tbte you say you for SSD and that to really get an upgrade a very good layout to things though I do like the CNC Machining here how everything fits in very snug there's an internal frame here screwed into place and that is keeping everything secure in place well screwed in well laid out everything very good build quality Ram is right here you can see some of it and there we have our Wi-Fi card so no upgrade ability really just the SSD that's it with this laptop being so thin and light it's sadly normal for them so did the Zenbook get a great screen or just an average screen well it is very good good there's so many things about it I really do like which I'll cover now but one of the complaints from me is that it's a glass screen so very glossy yet they didn't give it touch support I was really baffled by this when I was at computex uh in Taipei with a Zeus and yet no touch support with a glass screen seems a bit odd now don't know their reasoning behind us maybe it was cost maybe they just didn't want to fit in a touch digitizer to this panel and that's just the way it is unfortunately but the color gamut coverage of this panel which which by the way is a 3K screen it's 2880 by 1800 the resolution 16x 10 aspect ratio and 16 Ines so P3 was 100% color gamut there coverage 97% of adobe RGB fantastic ntsc no surprises at 95% and srgb 100% coverage of that it's a really good screen up to 120 HZ and it is to reinand reinand iare certified and and it does have uh 5002 blacks from Visa that's certified too as well and 550 nits is the maximum brightness but for some reason I measure with power plugged in only 352 Nets which is fine it's a very nice looking panel I just wish it was closer to their claim I don't know why I'm not getting the 550 nits webcam sample of the Zenbook s16 so it is a full HD webcam it does also have another camera that is infrared for Windows hello so you can just log in when it scans and sees your face which is very handy to have now microphones do sound good you've got a lot of AI features so you can have it in a directional mode 360 mode with the mics you can also blue the background and do all those other things too as well that you get with Windows and some of the AI features Windows co-pilot of course is there I haven't really gone over that in detail in this video because I've covered it many times before so I like the webcam quality I think it is good going to be great for conference calls and good audio quality too with the zenok s16 all right so here we are now in Windows 11 it's Windows 11 home that it comes with not pro from isus and you'll see here that the speed of the ram so 7500 MHz it's listed as and we'll make a transfers it's very quick that's going to Aid our integrated Graphics the Radeon 890m that I talked about there in the intro so finally a complete you know new chipset new architecture everything a bit of an upgrade uh NDA 3.5 so it's gone from 12 cores to 16 now and turbos at 9 point Sorry 2.9 up from 2.7 so quite a bit faster there under the device manager there are a few little interesting things I wanted to show you here so you'll see that uh the network adapter this one's from mediatech so Wi-Fi 7 that's great to have on board so future proofing this laptop although probably no one at the time of me publishing this video actually has Wi-Fi 7 I don't even have it myself yet because I still find them just a little bit too expensive to justify me getting it uh the disc drive this is a oh well you can see there now that one's my external drive here but this is I don't know who makes that I'm not going to read out all of that model name but speeds are okay it is PCI 4.0 the reads are a little bit faster than PCI 3.0 but the rights are
pretty much Max that so not an impressive SSD now there is room to add another one you could upgrade this and put in faster Drive I don't know why a lot of these Brands don't put in slightly quicker drives and one terab of storage is fine but I think especially 2024 that really should be 2 terabytes so we do have uh Windows hello for our login with the cameras so you got their full HD camera and the infrared camera there and the will you will see the processor here listed 24 times because it's 24 threads 12 calls however so this is the change they've gone from 8 to 12 and it's still the same 5.1 GHz turbo if you compare that to their previous generation of chipsets there so if you wanted to change our dedicated memory to the integrated Graphics you have to go not through the zus software myus but this and that is to bring up the AMD settings for radi on Graphics you want to go to the performance Tab and I'll show you this because I think it's a very interesting uh setting that a lot of people probably want to tweak and experiment with and here we have our varable Graphics memory now I've kept this on the default which is minimum you can go along here and put it to high or custom this is probably what most people would do and you can see this from being just half a gigabyte all the way up to 24 which is kind of crazy for integrated Graphics my recommendation if you game a lot and or you do a lot of 3D work probably put this one on eight 4 to8 is is a good kind of area there now that will increase the average of your 1 percentile lows if you do dedicate a bit more but I'm going to leave it as is I'm not going to make any changes here all the benchmarks I have run uh out of the the Box settings here that's how I test things with uh my particular process here let's take a look at that graphics performance jump up that we're getting so time spy here remember that this is running 28 Watts only so the chip is a lot more efficient but it is a bit I feel it's limited it's definitely power limited it could do a lot better at 4 5 wats or 54 especially but they have it set to 28 Watts here even in the performance mode it doesn't seem to want to go over that so the time spy score now is a bit of a bump typically with the 780m I would normally see 2800 for the graphic scores you can see we've gone up there about 600 points that's say a welcome boost now I have seen higher with arc graphics with the ultra 91858 uh scores of about 4,000 we're getting there now the CPU score could be a bit high again I think it's the power limit uh there's a bit of a battle going on a bit of a struggle between the graphics the Radeon and those 12 cores for power especially when they're both being taxed at the same time uh but still good score there now you see with geekbench this is where we get a big Improvement now I would see normally around 2200 for single core score with the 78 48 chess or say the8 845 HS the older chipsets with the eight cores still the same 5.1 turbo would perform quite a bit less here so there's a big jump up and the single core score now multicore depending on what wattage you did run on those previous chips from AMD could get a similar score here but again it's at 28 Watts limiting it here I believe it can do a lot more this particular chip and I'd love to see this in many PCs or in gaming laptops where it can really just stretch its legs so I did a bit of a comparison here compared to um my older an HP laptop that I I do have and you'll see that this is the 78 4hs running at 45 watts and here is our new chip uh running at only 28 Watts but it still is 14% faster single core score and 16 multie score so that is impressive this is a big leap up and just factoring that power limit how this is using less power but performing a lot better so that is that is impressive this is the I think this is the kind of leap that we did need and I can't wait to see this chipset and gaming handhelds and and a lot of other Tech out there and there's a little bit of information on what I was testing out before previous chips you can see that the Hawk Point and what was it before now we're um STS point I'm getting confused now but there isn't really much of a change those the ryzen 8000 series is the same as a 7,000 really and that's why I use that as a comparison even though that's the 7,000 series they're really the same 7 8,000 series are really really similar but massive boost in performance so a welcome change there really good to see another Benchmark to show you is our syy bench R23 and the single core score impressive that is really good nearing 2,000 points that's a big leap compared to the previous generation as I was talking about with geekbench and the multicore score there of 15,000 just over is good um but that's not a huge leap here again and I've said it probably about five times it's the power limits that's kind of holding it back a little bit so we love to see this chip running at 35 wats 45 at least later on I should with the art I believe the pro art 16 that I will also be getting will be running uh a higher power limit because it's a bit of a thicker laptop it's got the dedicated graphics in it too so 4K video editing is possible and I have some files here that are 4K 100 megab per second with my son a6400 that I recorded quite a few years back and Playback and just the timeline everything for simple basic 4K editing nothing crazy with grading and Transitions and whatnot is very very good it's really smooth as you can see as I jump ahead with the timeline I don't notice any drop frames and it seems to me that adobe have finally given us the support we need for integraded graphics and any kind of radio on GPU too um as a matter of fact because it seems to work just so much better and you'll see it using the GPU so editing 4k on these laptops you don't need a dedicated graphics card notice this with the art graphics with Intel and also now AMD so this is a great change here export time so I'm going to use the YouTube preset and we'll take a look at this because it's so much faster than what it used to be because of the hardware but because also the uh support we now have from Adobe adding uh the GPU and using the GPU and not just basically being CPU only encoding it's now using both this is one minute of footage at the YouTube preset and look at how crazy quick this is and see that it's using 80% of our GPU integrated GPU and about 28% 30% of the CPU this is why it's steaming ahead this is great to see this update in how much better the performance is so this should take around under 30 seconds and once that disappears it's done okay so there we go factor in my delay 29 seconds that's fantastic bp9 decoding this is using Chrome and I'm playing back a YouTube video and you can see here with the stats enabled that it's fantastic I've been playing it now for almost 2 minutes zero drop frames this is something that I don't normally see there'd always be a few but it's dropped absolutely nothing so amd's done a really good job with this the driv is to decoding this VPN 9 4K video streaming it Flawless so this is great exactly what we want to see all right so onto gaming I think this is what most people are going to be interested in the most of course because now we have the upgraded GPU so the radon 890m with it 16 cores now 2.9 GHz maximum turbo so this is shadow of the Tomb raadar I want to run some in-game benchmarks first and the reasoning behind this is is that you can run this uh on your own system to see what kind of performance you get because it's a fixed Benchmark it makes sense so I haven't got any of the fluid motion frames enabled there's no super resolution so none of those little tricks to boost the performance I've got all that disabled so this is the raw performance we're going to look at so 1080p High preset 43 average frames per second that is very good for integrated Graphics now I ran this exact same test with my mbook X pro from Huawei and that has the Ultra 91 185h from Intel and at their last or latest chipset here and they got 32 frames per second average so we get 11 frames per second average more with the Radeon 890m and I tested it out on the 708m so this is the previous generation of integrated Graphics from AMD and it has the 12 cores but this chip set in this laptop runs at 45 wats we got an average of 40 frames per second which is very good uh so pretty incredible that the chip the new one running at 28 wats can still beat out the previous generation running at 45 that's a big difference but that is why I say that it's the power limit it's definitely holding up that radon 890m Assassin's Creed Valhalla this is with the high preset at 1080P and we have an average of 38 frames per second I was expecting better out of this is in fact worse than the previous gen and probably because of that limited power limit in the 780m last gen it managed 39 average frames per second with a minimum of 12 and note that yes I do have half the dedicated Ram so that is another Factor there but I can't increase it with this laptop so cyberpunk running at 1080p at the low preset here with frame generation on we're getting 90 frames per second and even just with a bit of a battle here with somean that the overall frame rate playability and the frame time not bad at all considering this is integrated Graphics so I'm in a bit of trouble here up against these uh police officers but y yeah that's playable okay dips down to 40 43 frames per second occasionally as I move about you can see that's when the frame generation there the AMD fluid motion frames or whatever they call it struggles to keep up with things but it's playable it's good and really good frame rate considering its integrated Graphics this is this is impressive with this game okay so what about thermals then it was just running that 28 wat power limit and it did reach 94.1 de maximum and all the time I have been using the full speed mode so if you
hold function and then you tap if you've got performance mode standard mode whisper mode and then full speed mode now in whisper mode it is super quiet it does restrict the performance most of the time it's very quiet it's just benchmarks or gaming export boting video you do hear the fan now above the keyboard I have noticed to get up to and with my thermal imaging camera I did capture 49° C so it gets hot a little bit toasty just above the keyboard there uh and fan noise well I'll give you a sample at worst case scenario running a benchmark and this is when you do hear the fans but it's not that loud it's not actually bad at all I'm I'm impressed with the fans on the zenok s16 I know I did say I wouldn't show the BIOS but here it is you've got a little bit of basic information right there permissions and whatnot firmware updates you can do from here too although I don't recommend it just do it from the myzus app you can go into the advanced settings and this is where you can find things like your boot order or to disable secure boot under security Advanced you can own tweak this which is the frame buffer size you have up to 8 GB here through the BIOS but if you use the AMD adrenaline settings go through that then you can set higher amounts now if you did want to run Linux you are going to run into a few driver problems because this chipset is so new and especially the mediatech wireless card Wi-Fi 7 it doesn't recognize it at all this is Linux manaro with the latest update and I use the open source drive as too but it's just far too new for that so you can see right there so there is no network connectivity nothing and Bluetooth it's not going to pick that up either but the touchpad is working sound does seem to be working so we do have audio so some things will work the issue is going to be drivers for that Wi-Fi 7 card for Linux okay so first up the laptop let me talk about that so build quality excellent I love that sir aluminum sir aluminium top on there with the the mix that they've managed to come up with ceramic and alloy feels great really high quality finish to it and the rest of it they're all alloy build the CNC machine body the hols at the top touchpad 40% larger than the previous model very good to use the gestures are great keyboard with the 1.1 mm of travel now may seem too shallow on paper I was a bit worried about that but having used it it is very nice the way those keys Just Bounce and spring back once you press them so a noisy keyboard either I really love the feel of it what they've done with it it's an excellent keyboard and then ports okay we have a decent selection SD card readers about 90 to 100 mbes per second transfers it's not the fastest out there which is a little bit of a shame I would have liked to have seen perhaps a dedicated charging port and not having to give up the type-c port for the charger but the charger is very small 65 wats a decent output to it battery life from the 78w hour battery very good around 8 hours of light use and then demanding work around 4 to five like editing video so it's okay it's not phenomenal but it should make it through a full day for most people webcam quality microphon speakers all check out but what don't I like about it uh the screen it's glass but why is it not touch I feel that's a missed opportunity you really should have touch support with it I think it would have been good and the brightness I get three 352 nits but it's supposed to be able to do 550 for some reason I'm not able to measure that with my spider X pro so hm yeah I don't know what why that is the reason behind that the other is upgrade ability so there's no spare SSD slot there's of course no upgradeability with the ram I did expect this being sold it on but it caps out at 32 GB no 64 GB option that I know of uh and then the wireless chip Wi-Fi 7 can't upgrade it can't swap it out and Linux drivers for now because it's a new chip and then the new chipset are going to be um a bit of an issue until that's incorporated into the drivers of the latest dros and whatnot I did test out Linux mangaro the latest one but it didn't seem to cater for it just yet okay onto that chipset so the ryzen AI 97 sorry 370 oh the HX is in there as well sorry it's such a mouthful uh ryen 9 HX 370 there we go I'm finally getting that so up the core count we now have much better graphics well in theory because it's R DNA 3.5 so four more cores clocks 200 MHz higher in the Boost but what is restricting it so far in this configuration in a thin and light laptop is it's configured to 28 wats ltdp it can't stretch its legs especially the GPU it can't turbo as high as it could and maintain and give us better frames per second I'm seeing now now it is a bump up in performance as I've seen especially with some of the games that I tested out and showed you very good like The Witcher 3 excellent and then when you look at the wattage running 28 Watts but having that kind of power uh it really puts Intel to shame because Intel will be running say 55 watts to achieve similar geekbench scores geek bench six with their Ultra 9 185h and then the art Graphics was not very good at Assassin's Creed Valhalla but when I tested Assassin's Creed Valhalla against the 780m the previous generation you saw that was actually performing better better low frames per second to as well which was odd but bear in mind that was running at 45 Watts this is 28 watts and then when you look at the previous genin on just the CPU side of things not comparing the graphics it is up 14% in my testing single core and then 16% multicore score so that is a really good bump up in performance it's a huge increase there and that is great to see there so that is the full story of the Zenbook s16 a long review I know but I wanted to cover some things in a bit more detail and I hope to get hold of this chipset but in a beefier thicker laptop that can push hopefully 40 25 watts or maybe 54 watts to see what that rdna 3.5 can really do when it's got a lot more head room for power and not being restricted as it is in this laptop a little bit especially when it comes to that gaming so I hope to see you in the arc sorry the pro art 16 review bye for now
2024-08-02 11:48
