YOU MAY HAVE HEARD of the phrase ‘a bad
workman blames his tools’, and we all
know the struggles of using an inefficient
laptop to complete intensive tasks.
Essentially the modern technological
equivalent of a tool, a solid productivity
laptop can certainly make life a lot
easier. Asus already has a decent lineup
of productivity laptops but its latest
addition, the ProArt Studiobook Pro 16,
has some neat creativity-based features
that make it stand out from its rivals.
The first of these is the display on
the ProArt Studiobook Pro 16, which
the company claims is aimed at creative
professionals. As soon as you boot up for
the first time, you can tell this is a crisp,
16-inch OLED HDR panel with a 4K UHD
resolution of 3840x2400. It’s an ultra-
high contrast screen with deep blacks
and, with certifications from Calman,
Pantone, VESA, and a Delta-E color
accuracy value of less than 2, this screen
is ideal for designers and photographers.
The screen isn’t the only good thing
about this laptop, though. The overall
design and build quality may
be what you expect, but it’s
still beautifully finished. It’s
a squarish design due to the
screen’s 16:10 aspect ratio, and there’s
a thin bezel around the top and sides
with an Asus logo at the bottom. At the
top, there’s a 720p webcam with a slider
for privacy and infrared functionality to
support Windows Hello.
A 4K OLED HDR laptop aimed at the creative pro
Asus ProArt Studiobook
Pro 16 OLED (W7600)
8
VERDICT Asus ProArt Studiobook
Pro 16 OLED (W7600)
CREATIVE BOOM Gorgeous
display; snappy performance; packed with
features decent for gaming; impressive
build quality.
CREATOR’S BLOCK Lacking support for Asus
dial; very pricey; only 60Hz refresh rate.
$4,999, http://www.asus.comSPECIFICATIONSCPU Intel Xeon W-11955M @2.60GHz
Graphics Intel UHD Graphics, NVIDIA
RTX A5000 16GB GDDR6
RAM 64GB DDR4 3200MHz
Screen 16” 4K (3840x2400) OLED @ 60Hz
Storage 2TB + 2TB NVME M.2 PCIe 3.0 SSD
Ports
2x Type-A USB 3.2 Gen2,
1x Type-C USB 3.2 Gen2 (DP),
1x Thunderbolt 4,
1x 3.5mm Combo Audio Jack,
1x RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet,
1x SD Express 7.0, 1x HDMI 2.1
Connectivity WiFi 5 802.11ac, Bluetooth 5.0
Weight 5.29Ibs
Size 0.8 x 10.4 x 14.2-inchesAlong the bottom part of the ProArt
Studiobook 16, there are the speaker
grilles. For a laptop, the sound is clear
and has a deeper bass than some rivals.
Certified by audio specialists Harman
Kardon and with DTS technology, the
overall sound is good enough for media
consumption on the go.
Keyboards are a crucial part of a
laptop and this one is nice enough to
use on a daily basis. It’s not a satisfying
mechanical keyboard, but it is light and
springy with a good amount of key travel.
The keys themselves are evenly backlit
but could do with being a little brighter
in the maximum setting. The arrow keys
are textured, which makes finding them
easy if you’re not taking your eyes off the
screen—a bonus both for action gaming
and touch typing. Plus, you also get a
fingerprint scanner on the power button,
which adds another layer of security.
There is also a nifty control called the
Asus Dial. Supported by several Adobe
products and Microsoft suites, this wheel
allows you to scroll, scrub, and zoom in
and out. It is an intuitive device and can be
tweaked via the ProArt Creator Hub app.
Hopefully, this dial will support more
applications over time, as it’s a handy
control for creative and office tasks alike.
Along with the Asus dial, there’s a
large three-button trackpad, with the
middle button used for special functions
in applications which can help make your
workflow more efficient.Underneath the hood is an Intel Xeon
W-11955M CPU, a huge 64GB of RAM,
and an RTX A5000 GPU. Combined,
this makes for a speedy laptop that is
capable of running heavy loads from
design suites. In testing, it achieved some
impressive benchmarking scores, with a
notably higher CrystalDisk score than the
powerful Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 we’ve
tested in a previous issue. What also
came as a nice surprise was how well this
thing managed gaming at 1080p—it is
more than capable of achieving 60fps on
most titles.
At its core, this laptop is an awesome
productivity machine with a gorgeous
display, a large number of ports, solid
build quality, and snappy performance
across creative apps and games. A higher
refresh rate would have been great, but
if you’re a creator, this will see you on the
path to greatness. –SAM LEWISOur gaming laptop zero-point is the Asus ROG Zephyrus G15, with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS, NVIDIA GeForce RTX
3080 and 32GB of DDR4-3200. All game tests are performed at 1080p at the highest graphical profile.GAMING LAPTOPS BENCHMARKS
ZERO-
POINT
CineBench R15 Multi (Index) 2,137 1,859 (-13%)
CrystalDisk Q32T1
Sequential Read (MB/s) 3,595 6,393 (78%)
CrystalDisk Q32T1
Sequential Write (MB/s) 3,107 5,791 (86%)
3DMark: Fire Strike (Index) 20,529 19,377 (-6%)
Rise of the Tomb Raider (fps)^10779 (-26%)
Total War: Warhammer II (fps) 83 90 (8%)
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon:
Wildlands (fps)
61 63 (3%)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%MAR 2022 MAXIMU MPC 81