Review Asus Zenbook S16 review: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 tested

[Admin]

The Asus Zenbook S16 is a take on an AMD AI system with a beautiful design and strong performance, though the display could be a little brighter.

Asus Zenbook S16 review: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 tested : Read more

 

[abufrejoval]

Could you clarify if the laptop was actually maintaining/respecting the 17Watt "TDP" setting?

Can you choose the higher 28 Watt setting via the BIOS or a power profile?

Are 32GB the physical top capacity with LPDDR5? I sure would prefer 64GB...

Any idea if the M.2 slot would also fit dual sided NVMe drives (now that WD has 8TB units 😉

Any idea if 10Gbit TB3 NICs would work on those "USB4" ports?

Any BIOS option to disable the NPU?

Did I overlook remarks on fan noise or are they just pretty much never on except on synthetic loads?

I heard some rumours about an ASUS exclusive on Strix Point: is that true? Any idea how long?

I'd love to have this as a real convertible. I am using a 14" convertible Vivobook to write this and it's pulling double duty as a tablet on the breakfast table, which I'd even like on a 16" variant. And even in laptop mode I've come to really enjoy the ultra-precise scrolling possible with the touch screen, while I'm mostly a mouse guy and will usually turn off the touch pad because it's more often activated by mistake than actually used.

(found another review which claimed the display is actually touch & pen, just won't fold back then... why?)

I just wish vendors could resist the temptation to create their specific artwork for laptop covers: I really don't want to act as a billboard for their wares! And whatever they put there, I'm sure I'll grow tired of it rather sooner than later (another type of forced obsolescence?)

I'd have liked some gaming numbers, but I guess those will trickle out sooner or later.

 

[TheSecondPower]

Usually there is no tech news on Sunday, so when I came here at 0956 to find this article that was published at 0900, I expected it to be the first article. It was the 8th article. This is a CPU launch review. The first article is just an ordinary laptop review about a laptop with an 8000-series CPU which "is about to be outdated".

 

[zsydeepsky]

by doing the AI benchmark, maybe you can also test running some 7-8B scale LLM locally in LM Studio and see how it performs. If the NPU can run llama-3 8B with a decent token generation speed (like maybe 10-20 tokens/second with a short initial wait time), then it could be proven useful for some privacy-sensitive users.

AMD claimed that Ryzen AI supports LM Studio:
How to run a Large Language Model (LLM) on your AMD Ryzen™ AI PC or Radeon Graphics Card

 

[Ksec]

The number for MBA M3's GB6 are wrong. It is very likely to be 3093, not 2093.

 

[bit_user]

If anyone is interested in seeing in-depth benchmarking of this laptop on Linux developer & compute workloads, Phoronix has their review up:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-ai-9-hx-370
​

 

[-Fran-]

I'm actually suprised with this thing.

Leaving AMD's stupid naming sense, this new SoC looks very promising. I'd like to see it in a 45W+ capable chassis, as I strongly suspect "this is not his final form".

Regards 😛

 

[Notton]

78Whr battery: yae
only a single NVMe slot: boo
that's an unnecessary sacrifice to shave off 1mm of thickness.

 

[bit_user]

I find it misleading, because the methodology is flawed. Said review compares only laptops, not CPUs, as mobile CPU performance is by and large dictated by imposed power limits and heat dissipation, which vary greatly per laptop.

That's just how it is. Reviewers often try to account for differences between laptop implementations by trying to compare laptops with different CPUs using laptops from the same manufacturer and model lineup, under the hope that the TDP configurations and thermal solutions will be nearly identical.

Looking at the variety of laptops Phoronix used in the compare, it's a gross mischaracterization. The laptops cover a wide range, from 13/14" ultraportables (ie w/ restricted power limits and low cooling) to 16" desktop-replacements.

Phoronix is a small operation. If you want to see testing between models that are more comparable, try NotebookCheck. However, they mostly focus on Windows, from what I've seen.

They tested the same model, because that's apparently what AMD has provided to reviewers:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-...en-5-inside-a-1-3-cm-thick-case.868219.0.html
​

Expect to see them test more models, in the coming days & weeks.

 

[Karl_Schwarzschild]

Why no word about graphics performance? I see that it's not the main selling point of this laptop, but it's a nice addition and I would be interested to see how the 890M delivers in casual gaming scenarios!

 

[-Fran-]

THW can be informative for certain things. Laptop reviews aren't one of them. Just hit YouTube, https://youtube.com/results?search_query=zenbook+s16+review

Re: Zenbook S16 iGPU (both 890M & 880M in separate SKUs) - TL/DR is they underperform, being equivalent to 8840HS (780M) in 3DMark tests, and worse than MTL's ARC iGPU. This was reported in a couple of reviews; one is below.

View: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RiI9UGO3Ta0&t=620s

The main takeaway I get from Ryzen 365/370 is good power efficiency, which makes it best suited for ultraportables and thin&lights.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyZgHSv9C2k

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpfceLUZqQI


And even Linus say these are just amazing.

You know why? Because they're 28W and beating everything above their weight.

Regards.

 

[bit_user]

The main takeaway I get from Ryzen 365/370 is good power efficiency, which makes it best suited for ultraportables and thin&lights.

But it also has 12 cores, which really makes me wonder how well its performance scales to 45W and above. Yes, 8 of those are Zen 5C cores, but they still have similar IPC to Zen 5 cores and I doubt they're reaching peak clocks at just 28 W.

Ryzen AI will get its 15mins of fame, before Lunar/Arrow Lake shows up.

Lunar Lake only goes up to 4P + 4E and loses hyperthreading. I expect AMD could retain the crown for multithreaded performance, at least. That could make it the developer laptop of choice (for non-Mac folks, at least).

Arrow Lake won't hit the laptop market until the end of this year or early next.

 

[amdintelnvidia]

I currently have a Vivobook 16x with the Ryzen 5800H and throttling on battery is massive. The system feels extremely sluggish as soon as I unplug, and there's really no way to easy way to override this without a utility like Ryzen Controller.

I wonder if this new CPU is the same. All the reviews I've found test performance while plugged in, then do a battery life test, but none are testing performance on battery. Anyone seen any performance testing on battery?