PC makers are serving up more content-creator laptops than ever, targeting creative professionals who need speedy components and some specialized features. The latest of these peppy not-quite-workstations is the Asus Vivobook Pro 16X OLED (starts at $1,449.99; $1,649.99 as tested), which offers an appealing combination of AMD Ryzen processing power, a brilliant OLED display, and a useful LED touchpad dial tool for controlling creative applications. Add plenty of storage, impressive battery life, and attractive pricing, and the Vivobook Pro makes a strong case to be your go-to notebook.
The Design: Ready to Get Creative?
The Vivobook Pro’s design is much like that of its stablemate the ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED, but more streamlined. It’s a slick all-black slab that generally looks sharp, even if it probably won’t win any design competitions. Despite sharing the Studiobook’s 16-inch OLED screen, it’s fractionally slimmer and trimmer, measuring 0.74 by 14.2 by 10.2 inches (HWD) versus 0.77 by 14.3 by 10.4 inches. More important, at 4.19 pounds, the Vivobook Pro is more than a pound lighter than its beefy counterpart. While there are plenty of similarities, this system is better suited to general use and travel, while the ProArt Studiobook puts professional performance first.
The system feels high-quality, with an all-metal build befitting its price and intended audience. The lid does have some flex, so I’d be a little careful about treating it roughly, but it’s nothing that should disrupt normal use.
What really pops is the display. As we’ve come to expect with OLED panels, the Vivobook Pro X16’s is super-vibrant, with colors seeming to burst off the screen and the truest blacks you can achieve. If you’ve never seen this technology in person, it’s simply stunning (and still enjoyable even if you’re used to it).
The display also offers 4K resolution (3,840 by 2,400 pixels given its 16:10 aspect ratio). Text and images are extremely sharp, adding up to a brilliant view that’s a great fit for creative apps. You can see the results of our brightness and color spectrum testing below, but the spoiler alert is that the panel delivers very broad, vivid color coverage with plenty of brightness.
A Hidden Digital Dial
Moving to the rest of the build, the keyboard is pretty unremarkable, yielding a serviceable typing experience but not much more. There’s a slim numeric keypad on the right for users who can’t do without one. For a bit of fun, the keys are not one uniform color—most are black, but some of the command keys are gray and the Escape key is bright red. The power button houses a fingerprint sensor for Windows Hello logins.
The touchpad looks fairly run of the mill, but has more than meets the eye—a digital counterpart to the ProArt Studiobook’s physical dial, which you can turn to lower or raise brightness and volume, quickly move through tools in the Adobe Creative Suite and other apps, select brush sizes, and more.
In the top right corner of the Vivobook Pro’s touchpad sits a small circular icon. Swipe down from it, and an LED circle appears on the left side of the pad. This works just like the Studiobook’s dial, letting you swipe and press to spin through and select options. It offers different contextual menus depending on which application you’re using, and alerts you if you stray too far from the digital circle on the touchpad.
It’s a little more finicky than the physical dial, but only in the same way any touch technology is. Though a bit less precise, it was consistent in tracking my swipes and taps while flipping through tools in Photoshop—perhaps a bit less satisfying to use than the dial, but it delivers the same functionality.
Finally, and just as important for creative pros, is the connectivity. Video and photo editors and designers need an above-average number of external monitors and other peripherals and often extra media storage. The Asus’ left edge holds two USB 2.0 ports and a headphone jack, while the right side has USB 3.2 Type-A and Type-C ports, an HDMI video output, and a microSD card reader. Since the Vivobook Pro is an AMD rather than Intel system, the USB-C port doesn’t support Thunderbolt, which is a miss for a content creation system.
Up top, a 720p webcam offers the usual, minimal picture quality; it’d be nicer if laptop webcams uniformly upgraded to full HD resolution, but at least the Asus’ does offer a physical privacy shutter. Other supporting features include Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth, background noise canceling (via a ClearVoice feature in the MyAsus app) for the microphone, and Harman Kardon speakers. The latter can get pretty loud at full volume, and are positioned toward the front to be more audible, though their sound lacks some richness and bass.
Components and Performance Testing: Ryzen 9 Delivers
The $1,449.99 base model of the Vivobook Pro 16X has an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor, 16GB memory, a 1TB solid-state, and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU. While that’s north of entry-level laptop pricing, it’s a fair deal for what you’re getting. The eight-core Ryzen 7 should be more than enough for moderate workloads, and the inclusion of a decent discrete GPU will make a big difference for graphics tasks.
Of course, we can only testify to the performance of the $1,649.99 model M7600QE-XB99 reviewed here. It steps up to an eight-core, 3.3GHz (4.6GHz boost) Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU and 32GB of memory, with the same 1TB SSD and Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti graphics. The jump in CPU power and memory capacity will be noticeable, but enough speculation—let’s see how our model performed on our benchmark tests.
For our benchmark charts, we compared the Vivobook Pro to its ProArt Studiobook sibling and the Acer, Dell, and Microsoft content creator laptops listed below. The quintet offers a range of components, but all emphasize creative apps and include a mid-tier discrete GPU.
Productivity Tests
The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop’s boot drive.
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
It’s no surprise for a Ryzen 9 system, but the Vivobook Pro delivered some top scores in these productivity and media tests. There was no clear winner across every benchmark, but the Vivobook was at or near the front of every result in this well-equipped field, including some considerably more costly laptops. If you’re looking for the maximum performance for your dollar, particularly on the processing front, this Asus is a great option.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
The GPUs in these laptops are all within the same tier, excepting the more powerful GeForce RTX 3070 in the ProArt Studiobook. The others employ RTX 3050 Ti and RTX 3060 GPUs, and you can see that their performance is pretty close to each other. The Vivobook Pro led the way in Night Raid, showing good raw power, while the RTX 3060 and RTX 3070 systems flexed their muscle in the more demanding Time Spy subtest.
If you have a workload that’s very 3D-dependent or plan on serious gaming after hours, you probably want a laptop with a beefier GPU than the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, most likely an RTX 3070 or better. For most users who only need some GPU acceleration or are only moderate gamers, the Vivobook Pro’s graphics chops should suffice.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) at Windows’ 50% and peak screen settings.
The battery life of the Vivobook Pro 16X OLED is a big plus, longer than any of the competitors here. It’s also above average for a general-use laptop, making this a worthy option for day-to-day off-the-charger use.
The display test results are also good news. Creative pros demand a display fit for editing and color-matching, and the laptop came close to 100% coverage of all three color gamuts. The OLED screen not only looks gorgeous but delivers splendid color, and its brightness comes in strong at just under 400 nits peak.
Pro-Grade Features at a Nice Price
Creative-focused systems are much more common than they used to be, and the Vivobook Pro 16X OLED is a fine addition to the top options. Its price is very reasonable for its feature set and performance level, putting most of its cost into the brilliant display and potent processor.
The Asus delivers a quality build, too, and the touchpad dial is a unique feature that comes close to the usefulness of the physical dial of the ProArt Studiobook. A few creative laptops offer more GPU power or peripheral connectivity, and mobile workstations boast ISV certifications for computer-aided design (CAD) and other specialized apps, but Asus left few real faults here; the Vivobook Pro 16X OLED is a great laptop at a fair price.
