Asus ProArt P16 review: the MacBook Pro rival I’ve wanted

From the all-black chassis and lid to the keyboard nestled between two large speaker grilles to the large touchpad taking up all available space on the palm rest, the ProArt P16 resembles the MacBook Pro 16 more than any other laptop. It’s not a perfect match — the MacBook is blockier and doesn’t have the same angles and lines as the ProArt P16.

But it’s obvious which laptop the ProArt P16 is trying to emulate, and that even includes a coating on the black colorway to give it a sheen similar to the MacBook’s Space Black version. The Dell XPS 16 looks a lot more modern, especially when you open the lid, but there are similarities there, too.

They’re very close to the same size in width, height, and thickness, with similar display bezels, but the MacBook Pro 16 is considerably heavier and so feels a lot denser. The XPS 16 is slightly thicker and as heavy as the MacBook. It, too, feels more dense. The ProArt P16 therefore seems a little easier to lug around, but none of these machines is highly portable. The Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 is worth mentioning here as well, and it’s slightly larger and thicker than the ProArt P16 while being slightly lighter than the MacBook Pro 16 and XPS 16.

Another thing that each machine shares is a quality build. You’re spending some serious money for each one, and so that’s exactly what you should expect. Out of this group, though, the ProArt P16 comes in last place. While its bottom lid and keyboard deck are rigid enough, the lid is a bit flexible. Usually, Asus laptops are among the most solid, so I found that a little disappointing. It’s not egregiously bad or anything. It’s just that once you handle the MacBook Pro 16 and XPS 16 in particular, the Asus feels a little flimsier.

The ProArt P16’s keyboard is a lot like that of the MacBook Pro 16 and XPS 16, a standard layout without a numeric keypad (found on some larger machines) nestled in between large speaker grilles. It’s a good enough keyboard with large keycaps and sufficient spacing, as well as switches that are snappy and precise. I do like the MacBook’s Magic Keyboard a bit better, but most users will find the Asus keyboard to be more than good enough. The XPS 16’s zero-lattice keyboard takes more getting used to. I’d rate the Yoga Pro 9i 16’s keyboard as roughly equivalent to the ProArt P16’s.

The large mechanic touchpad is just OK. Its button clicks are confident and quiet, and it’s responsive enough. But the MacBook’s Force Touch haptic touchpad is a lot better, with more configurability and the ability to “click” anywhere on its very large surface. The XPS 16 has a good haptic touchpad that suffers a bit from being hidden, and the Yoga Pro 9i 16 again matches the ProArt 16 with its own mechanical touchpad. Note to Asus here: premium laptops deserve good haptic touchpads.

Where the Asus differs most is in the DialPad that’s basically a circular indentation in the touchpad with an embedded button. It works with a variety of apps to add another way to interact. I’d say it’s just a gimmick, except Asus includes the ProArt Creator Hub utility that enables a bunch of useful functionality. Users can control the laptop’s colors to an unusual degree, including adjusting Pantone values to highly customizable color performance. Other tools enable efficient creative work, like the Work Smart function, various performance optimization tools, and several Asus creative apps. It’s obvious that Asus has gone to great lengths to make the ProArt P16 more than just a generic creator’s laptop.

I reviewed the same AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chipset in the Asus ProArt PX13, a 13-inch laptop that aims to provide excellent performance in a highly portable package. The ProArt PX13 succeeds in that effort, while raising the question of what Asus could do with the same chipset in a much larger chassis with a lot more room for better thermals. The ProArt P16’s design certainly qualifies, with three fans, Liquid Metal, a dust filter, and a few other elements that promise faster performance. Of course, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 does its part as well, with 12 cores and 24 threads running at up to 5.1GHz with a default thermal design power (TDP) of 28 watts and a TDP range of 15 watts to 54 watts.

In our suite of benchmarks, the ProArt P16 does very well. It’s competitive with laptops running Intel’s 45W Core Ultra 9 185H with 16 cores and 22 threads running at up to the same 5.1GHz. And it’s faster than laptops running the 28-watt Core Ultra 7 155H with the same number of cores and running at up to 4.8GHz. Those are the most popular Intel chipsets in today’s 16-inch laptops, and looking exclusively at CPU-intensive benchmarks like Geekbench 6, Handbrake, and the CPU portion of Cinebench R24, the new AMD chipset is slightly faster.

Notably, the ProArt P16 scored the fastest results we’ve seen in the PCMark 10 Complete benchmark that measures productivity and creativity performance, at 7,757. The next closest laptop was the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 with an older Ryzen 9 8945HS chip at 7,623, and close behind that was the ProArt PX13 at 7,540 with the same AMD chipset as the P16. Most laptops we’ve tested recently score between 5,500 and 7,000 on the test. That makes the ProArt P16 an incredibly fast laptop for general uses.

The ProArt P16 makes good use of its Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070, more so than the Dell XPS 16 and the Alienware m16 R2. That shows up in the GPU portion of Cinebench R24 and the PugetBench for Premiere Pro benchmark that runs in a live version of Adobe Premiere Pro. That application uses the GPU in Windows laptops to speed up various video-editing tasks. Here, the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 does well with its RTX 4060 that should be a little slower. Interestingly, the smaller ProArt PX13 with an RTX 4050 does very well against the ProArt P16 — I don’t know if that’s serious kudos to the PX13 or a slight knock against the P16.

The Apple MacBook Pro 16 running the M3 Max chipset with 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores is much faster across the board. The M3 chipsets have CPU optimizations that are even faster at video encoding and decoding, which impacts the PugetBench benchmark. But the M3 Max GPU is still a lot faster than the RTX 4070s in the comparison group.

Ultimately, the ProArt P16 is a very fast 16-inch laptop that does well against its primary competition. The MacBook Pro 16 with the M3 Max chipset is considerably faster, but it’s also a lot more expensive; the M3 Pro version will be closer in both price and performance.

If you buy a laptop with an RTX 4070, chances are you’ll want to run some games. The ProArt P16 uses Nvidia’s Studio Drivers, which are optimized for creative and other applications and not so much for gaming, but they can be swapped out for the Game Ready drivers if desired.

I ran both the 3DMark Time Spy test and the in-game benchmarks of a few titles. Across the board, the ProArt P16 did well enough to play reasonably modern games at 1600p and high graphics. The most contemporary titles might slow down a bit unless you turn the graphics down or run at 1080p, but overall, the ProArt P16 is a reasonably strong gaming laptop.

Therefore, if you want a fast creative machine that can occasionally play the latest games, then the ProArt P16 is a very good option.

As I’ve noted in all of my recent reviews of laptops touting superior AI performance, it’s pretty much impossible to evaluate any of the various claims. As noted above, the AMD chipset literally has “AI” in the name, and indeed, its NPU runs at a leading 50 tera operations per second (TOPS). That compares to the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Arm chipset’s 45 TOPS, Intel’s Core Ultra at 10 TOPS, and the Apple M3 Neural Engine at 18 TOPS. The upcoming M4, currently only available in the latest iPad Pro, will bring Apple’s number to 38 TOPS.

But those numbers pale in comparison to a discrete GPU’s performance at running AI tasks, such as the RTX 4070 that Nvidia rates at 466 TOPS. The NPUs are meant for speeding up on-device AI while using less energy. They’re all about efficiency, not performance.

So, which laptops are faster at AI? We just don’t know. And we don’t know because there are no benchmarks that allow us to directly — and objectively — compare them. The only thing we can say is that Intel Core Ultra laptops will likely be the slowest, AMD Ryzen AI laptops will be the fastest (but not by much), with Apple’s M4 and Qualcomm chipsets coming in between. And Qualcomm laptops are the only ones currently supporting Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC initiative that touts AI features, but actually doesn’t offer much to write home about. In fact, there are almost no current AI features that we can point directly to as being sped up by either an NPU, a GPU, or both.

The ProArt P16 has a 90 watt-hour battery, a fast chipset, and a power-hungry 4K+ OLED display. Few 16-inch laptops get decent battery life, and I wasn’t really expecting much from the Asus.

As it turns out, the ProArt P16 did fairly well. It managed around 8.5 hours in our web-browsing test and 11 hours in our video-looping test. That’s roughly equivalent to average battery life across all the laptops we’ve tested, and it’s better than many 16-inch machines. For example, the XPS 16 did much worse at just 5.5 hours in both tests, and the Yoga Pro 9i 16 went for 6 hours and 9.5 hours, respectively. The MacBook Pro 16, on the other hand, is one of the most efficient laptops you can buy today at a massive 19.5 hours and 27 hours, respectively.

That makes the ProArt P16 a reasonably long-lasting creators’ workstation. It won’t last very long when working hard, though. For example, it shut down in just 1.5 hours when running Cinebench 2024 (and it slows down considerably when on battery power). But that’s common across all laptops.

The ProArt P16 has one display option, a 4K+ (3840 x 2400) OLED display running at 60Hz. It’s incredibly sharp and looks spectacular out of the box, with OLED’s usual dynamic colors and inky blacks. The refresh rate is a bit behind the curve, where more and more mainstream displays are running at 120Hz.

According to my colorimeter, this is an excellent display for creators. It’s bright enough at 359 nits, which isn’t as bright as some other recent displays that are closer to 400 nits or more. But it’s still brighter than our aging baseline of 300 nits, and it will be great unless you’re working in bright sunlight. Its colors are incredibly wide at 100% of sRGB, 98% of AdobeRGB, and 100% of DCI-P3, which is one of the best combination of scores I’ve seen. Color accuracy is excellent at a DeltaE of 1.0 (that result and lower is indistinguishable to the human eye). And contrast is incredibly high at 25,110:1 with near-perfect blacks.

Simply put, you’ll love this display. It’s one of the best you’ll find today on a 16-inch creator’s laptop. Only gamers might be a bit disappointed with the refresh rate.

Like the MacBook Pro 16, the ProArt P16 has a six-speaker sound system, with two tweeters and four woofers. The audio is Harmon Kardon certified and offers Dolby Atmos support. Asus talks a lot about the “5.25X louder sound” and “zero distortion” afforded by the smart amplifier. The MacBook Pro 16 has arguably the best audio in a laptop today, so I was hoping that Asus managed to offer something similar in a Windows laptop.

I can confidently say that the ProArt P16’s audio gets as loud as the MacBook’s, and like the MacBook, it has a lot more bass than most laptops. Mids and highs are nice and clear as well. However, when pushed to the limit, there was considerable distortion — belying Asus’s claims in this regard.

I could get rid of it by turning down the volume, but then it wasn’t quite as impressive. Overall, I’d say the ProArt P16 has some of the best audio in a Windows laptop, but the MacBook Pro 16 retains its top spot.

I like the ProArt P16, a lot. It’s fast, reasonably well-built, and has a drop-dead gorgeous OLED display. Probably the only other Windows laptop I’ve reviewed that comes close is the Yoga Pro 9i 16, and I would be hard-pressed to choose between these two given their overall value and performance. At the very least, I will say that the ProArt P16’s OLED display is better than the Lenovo’s mini-LED panel.

The MacBook Pro 16 can be configured to be a lot faster, and it’s better built. But you’ll have to spend considerably more to get a better laptop than the ProArt 16. For Windows creators, the ProArt 16 is very easy to recommend. And the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 is a very fast chipset that competes well against the best that Intel has to offer.