• The Zenbook S 16 is a Copilot+ AI PC from ASUS powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, featuring a dedicated Copilot button.

• It features a dedicated NPU with 50 TOPS AI performance and a total system (CPU+GPU+NPU) offering 80 TOPS.

• ASUS added AI apps like OMNI Assistant, enabling on-device GenAI use cases like text and document summarization, voice to text transcription and more.

The global PC market grew 2.6% YoY in 2024 with PC vendors shipping 253 million units, according to Counterpoint's preliminary data. Over 25% of laptops shipped in 2024 were GenAI-capable. During the year, the first wave of Copilot+ AI PCs boasting GenAI capabilities and more than 45 TOPS of AI performance were launched. Counterpoint tested one of these laptops – the ASUS Zenbook S 16, which an AI-capable, Copilot+ laptop PC powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 300-series x86 processor and a 50 TOPS NPU.

So, what are the AI features that users can experience on the Zenbook S16? And while ARM-based laptops have proven to be powerful and efficient, can x86 add that crown of being super-efficient as well? We answer that in our ASUS Zenbook 16 review with detailed insights below.

Thinnest and lightest 16-inch laptop

The Zenbook S 16 is incredibly thin for a 16-inch laptop, with a measurement of just 1.1cm. It is also lightweight, weighing just 1.5kg. In comparison, a MacBook Pro 16 has a thickness of 1.24cm and weighs around 2.14kg.

For a more premium look and feel, ASUS uses a new material called Ceraluminum on the display lid. It is a blend of ceramic and aluminium, which provides a premium look, and the matte finish feels good to the touch. Together with glossy shiny lines across the lid “A” logo, the design stands out. Kudos to ASUS for its efforts in trying out a new, bold design.

Despite the slim body, the laptop does not compromise on ports. You get a full HDMI port, two USB 4.0 Gen 3 Type-C/Thunderbolt ports and a 3.5mm audio jack on the left. Along the right side, you get a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port and an SD card slot.

The Zenbook S 16 is a remarkably thin (1.1cm) and light (1.5kg) 16-inch laptop with a premium Ceraluminum design and a good array of ports.

Gorgeous 3K OLED display

The Zenbook S 16 has a 16-inch, 3K OLED display with a resolution of 2880x1800 pixels, 16:10 aspect ratio, 500 nits of peak brightness and a refresh rate of 120Hz. The display is PANTONE-validated meaning you can be assured of seeing Pantone Matching System (PMS) colours and accurate skin tones.

The screen is also Dolby Vision-certified, allowing the viewer to enjoy bright whites, deep blacks and punchy colours. So, whether you are surfing the internet on the web browser, playing games, watching OTT content, editing videos or just working, the screen is versatile enough to let you enjoy all types of content. It is also touchscreen with a responsive touch response, making it easy to use with your fingers for quick tasks like closing apps, dragging and dropping, and multitasking.

The Zenbook S 16 boasts a vibrant 3K OLED touchscreen with a 120Hz refresh rate for stunning visuals.

Ryzen AI 300-series processor: Powerful, yet efficient

Under the hood is a powerful AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor codenamed AI 300 Strix Point. Made on TSMC’s 4nm FinFET process, the HX 370 has 12 cores and 24 threads. The new CPU architecture features four Zen 5 cores with a base clock speed of 2GHz and a maximum boost speed of up to 5.1GHz. There are also eight Zen 5c efficiency cores with a base clock speed of 2GHz and a maximum clock speed of 3.3GHz. This is paired with 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM clocked at 7500MHz and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 MVMe M.2 SSD.

While most ultrabooks generally have a TDP of 15W, the Zenbook S 16 supports a maximum 28W TDP that the processor offers, thanks to ASUS’ engineering with the ultra slim vapor chamber and advanced cooling system to keep thermals low.

Commenting on the growth of AI PCs and outlook, Senior Analyst William Li said, “AI PCs remain in the spotlight as we enter 2025, and now we believe it will become more popular with the support of AI technology advancements. Those cost-efficient training models launched by DeepSeek impressed the whole technology community, which could also lead to the acceleration of AI PC penetration if more practical use cases could be introduced to convince consumers to upgrade their devices. AMD's latest Ryzen AI 300 series are ready to take off with powerful 50 TOPS NPU and TSMC's 4 nm process node to extend battery life. We are not too far from enjoying convenience and assistance from on-laptop AI, and we believe AMD will take advantage of its diverse product offerings (some of them launched in CES 2025) to solidify its share in the PC market.”

The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 competes with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X-series chipsets and Intel’s Core 200V processors. While we did not have the Intel-powered laptop to test, we did have the Snapdragon X Elite powered Surface Laptop 7, and we ran some synthetic benchmarks on both to see how they compete.

As you can see from the benchmarks, the Ryzen AI 300-series processor performed well in terms of multi-core performance compared to the competition. Now, while the benchmarks are simulated tests, it is the real-world usage performance that matters, and almost everyone uses their laptops in different ways. During our usage, it mostly included daily office work – checking emails, browsing the internet, and Teams running in the background with a few voice/video calls within the team, and using Microsoft Word to write blogs and other content. We did not encounter any issues, and the performance was smooth as butter, even with a few apps running in the background.

The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 offers closer to and in some cases better multi-core performance than most competitors.

On the graphics side, there is an AMD iGPU with RDNA 3.5-based Radeon 890M featuring 16 cores and a frequency of 2900MHz. It is capable of tasks like video rendering and casual gaming without needing any discrete GPU. We tested the gaming performance using three games – Cyberpunk 2077, GTA V and Rocket League.

At maximum resolution and 120Hz refresh rate, Rocket League consistently offered 48-51fps and was playable, whereas Cyberpunk 2077 offered between 19-22fps, making it barely playable.

Switching the resolution to FHD (1080p), Rocket League offered around 112fps, whereas GTA v and Cyberpunk 2077 offered 56-60fps, making the games playable. However, we did notice the area above the keyboard getting extremely warm and unbearable to touch in just a few minutes. While it did not affect the gameplay in any way, we did restrict our gaming session to about 15 minutes to be on the safer side.

The iGPU is also good enough for tasks like video editing. We used Adobe’s Premiere Pro to edit a full smartphone review video shot in 4K. With about 10 minutes of length with some motion graphics and b-rolls, it took about 12 minutes to render, which is not bad considering the Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptop took 23 minutes to render the same video. And navigating through the timeline and adding supers and templates was smooth without any lag. This makes the ASUS Zenbook S 16 a good and trustworthy Ultrabook for content creators on the go. However, the battery drained by 22% while rendering the video, and we were running the laptop on the best performance mode.

The Zenbook S 16 with a Ryzen AI processor offers good frame rates at FHD (1080p) resolution, making most games playable.

AMD’s XDNA 2.0 NPU Shines with On-device AI and GenAI Features

Being a Copilot+ PC, the highlight of the laptop is its processor, which comes with XDNA 2 NPU boasting up to 50 TOPS of performance. Combined with CPU + GPU + NPU, it can offer up to 80 TOPS performance. We ran Procyon’s AI Image Generation Benchmark that uses Stable Diffusion 1.5 to evaluate the performance and logged a score of 189 points.

When Microsoft introduced the new Windows 11 OS update for Copilot PCs, it added four key features – Windows Studio Effects for the camera, Cocreate in MS Paint, Live Captions for videos and the controversial Recall feature, which is yet to see the official release.

Sadly, Cocreate and Live Captions did not work for us in the ASUS review unit. We tried to reset it a couple of times and tried changing the region to the US and language to US English, but it did not work. However, we were able to use these features on the Snapdragon X Elite powered Surface Laptop with the same account and settings.

Moving on, we were able to use the on-device AI-based background remover feature in the paint app. It works well in detecting the subject and removing the background in a couple of seconds.

When on a video call on apps like MS Teams or Zoom, Windows Studio Effects lets you add standard or portrait blur, keeping you in focus and hiding the background. There is also an auto-framing feature that crops and keeps you in the frame even if you move around a bit. These features work well where the NPU takes the load, thus also offering a better battery life on the laptop.

ASUS has also added two-way AI Noise Cancellation for the speaker and mic. We tested this by simulating an ambient and busy street with car honking noise, and the AI was able to largely minimize the ambient noise while keeping the vocals in focus. It is a neat little feature for hybrid working, especially when taking calls from airports and cafes.

ASUS has also added a presence detection feature that uses the camera and IR sensor to detect if the user is within a certain distance of about four feet. The laptop's screen dims when you look away and brightens when you look back. It also automatically locks when you walk away and unlocks with Windows Hello facial recognition when you return.

Leveraging AI, the Zenbook S 16 includes features like image background removal, video call enhancements, noise cancellation, and presence detection.

ASUS AI – Improve productivity with on-device OMNI assistant

ASUS has also included its ROG Virtual Assistant called OMNI. Powered by Meta Llama 3, it can perform certain GenAI tasks, like drafting emails, summarizing documents, transcribing audio and more. In the chat box, we asked the assistant to write an email asking for a leave and a cover letter for visa, and it quickly produced the template where we just had to input our name.

Next, we clicked on the document summarization tool and uploaded two files – a smartphone market PR blog in Word format and an ASUS Zenbook S 16 specification sheet, which was a PDF file. In just a few seconds, the OMNI assistant was able to summarize both documents in a short and crisp format. Furthermore, you can also ask questions. We asked the OMNI assistant Apple and Samsung’s market shares, and it answered correctly. We also asked for the laptop’s processor specifications, and it answered that, too.

Lastly, we also recorded a small audio in English, and the OMNI assistant was able to transcribe and summarize it on-device, without internet connection. However, we wish it had an option to upload an audio file, too, and then transcribe. Right now, it is only restricted to internal recording within the app.

The ROG Virtual Assistant, powered by Meta Llama 3, performs on-device genAI tasks like email writing, document summarization (including Q&A), and audio transcription.

AMD’s Amuse AI support for on-device stable diffusion

Towards the end of 2024, AMD introduced an updated version of Amuse 2.2 Beta, with support for Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium (2.5B parameter) to generate images based on text prompts. It also brings support for AMD Ryzen AI image quality using XDNA (NPU) Super Resolution to generate high-quality, realistic images. Using Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium model, we were able to generate images with prompt in EZ Mode giving an output of 1024x1024 resolution.

There is also AI Filter mode, where you can add popular filters to your photos. We tried a Cyberpunk filter, and the filter mode did a pretty decent job.

Lastly, there is a design option that uses Dreamshaper v8, allowing you to draw an outline and click on generate – it will try to turn your imagination into a creative photo. We tried with a rough sketch of a rocket and Mickey Mouse, and they both turned out to be accurate.

AMD's Amuse 2.2 Beta uses AI for image generation with Stable Diffusion 3.5, AI-powered photo filters, and creative image generation from sketches.

CoPilot: Your go-to assistant for most tasks

Being a Copilot+ PC, the laptop comes with a dedicated button to invoke Microsoft’s Copilot assistant. You can use it for drafting emails, creating travel itineraries, writing scripts, writing blog outlines, generating images and much more.

The Copilot assistant can also answer general knowledge questions, scrape through websites to bring information to your fingertips and much more. But there is nothing special here; you can have all these experiences on any Windows 11-powered laptop, even on those without a dedicated Copilot button. However, it would have been better if Microsoft had added some offline functionality too.

Audio, battery life and more

The ASUS Zenbook S 16 has a few other aspects about that we would like to highlight. The Ultrabook comes with a six-speaker system certified by Harmon Kardon, which delivers loud output and does not distort even at full volume. It also adds Dolby Atmos support offering better surround sound, despite the speakers’ tiny size.

Under MyASUS settings, there is also an option for audio boost, which uses a software-based smart amplifier. ASUS says it boosts the audio output by 3.5x. We tried the same, and it worked well. It comes in handy when watching TV shows and movies with hushed dialogues.

Lastly, with the Ryzen AI HX 370, AMD has delivered an efficient x86 processor. The four-cell, 78Wh battery takes two hours to fully charge using the bundled 65W Type-C adapter. With normal usage, it lasted us anywhere between seven to nine hours. With a bit of gaming and content creation (video editing), the battery still lasted nearly five hours. We also ran Procyon’s one-hour battery life test running a video on loop. With 50% brightness and volume, the battery dropped by 9% in one hour.

The laptop features impressive Harman Kardon speakers with Dolby Atmos, an audio boost option and good battery life.

Closing thoughts and key takeaways:

• The Zenbook S 16 is remarkably thin and light for a 16-inch laptop, featuring a premium Ceraluminum design and a good selection of ports.

• The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor provides strong multi-core performance and efficient operation, suitable for demanding workloads, content creation and casual gaming at 1080p.

• It leverages AI for practical features like background removal, video call enhancements, noise cancellation, presence detection, and an on-device AI assistant (OMNI) for productivity tasks.

• Overall, the laptop offers a great combination of portability, performance, a beautiful display, and useful AI features, making it a compelling choice for professionals and content creators.