The ZenBook S16 Oled that Asus has made available to us features the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370 processor. The latter hosts 12 multi-threaded Zen5 cores, 16 RDNA3.5 cores, and an XDNA2 NPU that develops 55 TOPS. It comes with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.
With this setup, the ZenBook S16 Oled gets a score of 174. It is therefore 15% more efficient than its predecessor, the Ryzen 9 8945HS, in a very similar chassis since we measured its performance in the VivoBook S16 (157). Note that the Core Ultra 9 185H, the direct competitor of the Ryzen 9 AI HX 370, got a score of 181 in the HP Omen 14 with a 45 thermal envelope, while the Ryzen integrated in the ZenBook is satisfied with 33 watts. So Ryzen allows AMD to get a good start, while waiting for the release of Intel Lunar Lake in September.
The processor part isn't the only new feature in the Ryzen AI 300 (Strix Point). Thus, the graphics part now has 16 RDNA3.5 GPU cores compared to 12 GPU cores in the previous generation.
So, while we wait for a dedicated article on the renders we get, we bring you some in-game results. So, at 1080p with low settings in games, the Radeon 890M graphics chip gets a solid 99 FPS. Forza Horizon 576 fps shadow of the tomb raider47 fps cyberpunk 207752 FPS on Steam Deck setup and 61 FPS on Steam Deck setup assassin's creed valhallaWe even allowed ourselves to run the 3DMark TimeSpy benchmark, where the Radeon 890M got a very encouraging score of 3813 points, roughly on par with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2050 at 30W. It's simply the best graphics component we've ever had on a laptop. We'll have the chance to return to this in a detailed article about the Intel Arc of the MSI Prestige 16 Ai Evo.
We had mentioned the 55 TOPS of the NPU, but no AI function is currently working in Windows 11, despite the 24H2 release. Even the effects of Windows Studio (blur effect, auto-framing, eye tracking in the webcam) are absent, although they were present in the previous generation. An absence that can be explained by the fact that Microsoft reserves – for now – all the AI functions (Copilot +) for laptops equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor. If Microsoft wanted to democratize Copilot +, it failed.
The ZenBook S16 Oled SSD offers comfortable read speeds of 5GB/s and write speeds of 3.6GB/s. It will contribute to the overall responsiveness of the system and its speeds should reduce file transfer times.
