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With the release of the new AMD Strix Point – a.k.a. the Ryzen AI chip, we’re seeing a slew of new laptops equipped with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. This new ASUS Zenbook S 16 UM5606W is also equipped with said chip.
And not only that – it also comes with a new chassis, bigger screen, super thin body, and actually magnificent performance. Let’s take a look at what this laptop has to offer.
So, let’s now talk about the design. This new Zenbook S 16 UM5606W comes with the new Ceraluminum, which is basically ceramic aluminium. It’s highly-polished and it looks beautiful as it is available in Zumaia Gray and Scandinavian White colors – we have the latter on here – and it is also very, very lightweight.
This laptop only weighs 1.5kg and has a thinness of 1.2cm at its thinnest point. Yeah, this laptop is really sleek. But sleekness aside – when we open up the laptop, we’re presented with a magnificently big, bright, and brilliant OLED screen.
As the name implies, it’s a 16-inch OLED panel with a resolution of 2880×1800 – that means it’s a 16:10 aspect ratio, it can also go up to 120Hz refresh rate. As expected, the screen quality of this OLED screen is fantastic.
We can get 100% of both sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamut coverage and the maximum brightness is at around 400 nits for our unit. Very typical for an ASUS laptop with OLED screen nowadays – which actually sets a very high bar for other laptop manufacturers to compete.
Oh – this is also a touchscreen, by the way. I know it looks impossible since it’s so thin – but yes, it is a touch screen. And we also have the ASUS Pen 2.0 included in the box – so we can draw or write on the screen with that pen directly.
Then comes the keyboard. Now, because this laptop is so thin, the keyboard key’s travel distance is affected Yeah, it definitely feels weird as the keys almost immediately bottom out when I type on it. It’s quite a big departure from the last generation of Zenbook’s keyboard.
Still, the keys are very responsive as it is springy.
The trackpad is huge and responsive as well, and ASUS added two new gestures – swiping up and down on the left edge will change the volume, and the right edge changes the screen’s brightness. It’s a very neat feature but I think the palm rejection for this gesture isn’t particularly good as it changed the brightness sometimes when I was typing.
There’s also another gesture to seek the video by swiping at the top edge as well. I personally find it a bit difficult to control and I prefer spamming the arrow keys anyway.
Before we talk about the performance, this laptop comes with this list of specs:
- AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip
- AMD Radeon 890M integrated GPU
- 32GB of RAM at 7500MT/s, half of it is allocated as the iGPU’s VRAM
- 1TB of NVMe SSD
Now, if we compare the performance of this ASUS Zenbook S 16 UM5606W with the ASUS Vivobook S 16 M5606W that we reviewed not too long ago which also has the same specs, the performance isn’t particularly that much different but it definitely feels smoother on the Zenbook.
If we use the Black Myth Wukong benchmark, then the difference is amplified – and we can see that this Zenbook has a much better, more consistent frame rate. Yes, the Windows build number and AMD GPU driver are different – but I don’t believe those two differences yield such a performance gap.
And let’s not forget that this Zenbook, despite it being thinner, also has a quieter fan. I really have no idea what magic they did here – and I’m loving it.
The battery life of the Zenbook S 16 UM5606W is in line with what we had before. It has a 78Wh battery and for my particular use case of around 60% brightness while browsing the web with some YouTube Music and videos in the mix, we can get nearly 7 hours.
Now, one thing that I want to celebrate with all of you is this. This is the charger included with the laptop. Yes, this tiny charger can supply 90W to the laptop. After so many years, ASUS finally hopped onto the GaN bandwagon. I’m just happy that they’re doing this.
Oh – the ports available on this laptop are very good as well. We have these. I still hope that one of the USB 4 ports is placed on the other side – but I understand that the USB 4 controller chip is located only on one side of the motherboard.
Oh speaking of the motherboard, this laptop’s motherboard is rather small. A majority of the space is taken up by the battery, which I find it to be interesting. Only the SSD can be swapped out though, as the RAM and WiFi card are soldered onto the motherboard.
Should you buy the ASUS Zenbook S 16 UM5606W?
As for the price – this laptop is at RM7,299 which is definitely a premium price to pay for, but considering what this laptop can do, I think it’s worth the price. It’s portable, has a magnificent OLED touch screen, a rather long battery life, lots of useful ports, and it’s also powerful enough to play lots of games. Yet the fans don’t sound like they’re about to take off. Now this is an impressive feat of engineering.
If you’re wondering how the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 will perform, here’s our gaming test video. Honestly, I’m impressed.
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