Pros | Cons |
+ Awesome Display | - Pretty heavy for a laptop |
+ Amazing Audio | - The ASUS Dial is a bit sensitive |
+ Perfect for hardcore editors | |
ASUS ProArt StudioBook 16 OLED
Price: TBA
My last laptop review was a VivoBook and this time, it’s a laptop made not only for Content Creators but for Creative Pros as well. Today, I received the ASUS ProArt StudioBook 16 OLED, powered by an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor as well as an NVIDIA RTX 3070. Not even gonna lie, I’m fangirling pretty hard for this one.
Design
At first glance, this laptop is super minimalist, having only an engraved logo of ProArt on the middle of the lid and nothing more. THUMBS UP from a Gen-Z like me! The lid is personally pretty heavy and you can’t lift it with one hand but on the bright side, it makes for a pretty sturdy laptop, I doubt you would want your money going down the drain if it’s too flimsy (yikes!).
On the sides and bottom of the laptop, there are a-TON of air vents for extra cooling, given that this laptop will be under a lot of stress whilst editing and rendering, the extra vents will ensure that your laptop won’t overheat.
Weight-wise, it is kind of disappointing as it has an approximate weight of 2.4 kg, which is considered a pretty heavy laptop especially coming from ASUS, but once I got to use it, I feel like it’s definitely worth the extra weight as it’s literally a portable full functioning PC with the power it comes with.
Display & Audio
Once you lift the lid, you will see a 16” 4K OLED HDR 16:10 NanoEdge display with pretty slim bezels on the sides. Aside from the screen, there is a webcam at the top of the screen with a hefty webcam cover. It's super neat that you can’t actually see the slider without good lighting, but you can easily feel it.
Display-wise, the colours are super duper vibrant and saturated. Since this laptop has 4K resolution, the display has blown me away and makes the display look so live-like. Aside from that, it also comes with an eye-care certification to ensure our eyes stay safe if we will use this laptop often.
As this laptop is designed for content creators or for people in the creative team, the 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut ; with up to 550 nits of brightness and the 1,000,000 : 1 contrast ratio should ease your workload when it comes to creating or editing. It also has VESA DisplayHDR 500 True Black Certificate, which also enhances the colour output of this laptop. The 0.2 ms response time, though not the best, should be sufficient and should not matter much if you aren’t using this for gaming.
This time, the speaker is above the keyboard which I personally prefer as the sound can go straight out opposed to being on the bottom of the laptop. The speaker is powered by Harman-Kardon. I am not an audiophile, but if you are, then you might be a tiny bit disappointed as I noticed the lack of bass it provides, but it’s still considered to be very good for a laptop speaker. Since the majority of people now opt for online meetings and ASUS knows that, so they made sure that this laptop comes with a powerful 4-mic array, combined with AI-Noise Cancellation technology to cancel ambient noises and you can also mute your mic or enable noise cancelling with simple clicks.
Keyboard & Touchpad
Since I’m pretty sure ASUS knows that this laptop will be used by professionals, the keyboard has a sleek black colour with no different coloured accents except for the arrow keys which have a tiny bit of texture. Aside from that, everything is pretty much plain and classy. I am, however, a little disappointed with the positioning of the keys, as everything is closely knitted together. On the bright side, you can customise your favourite functions via the ProArt Creator hub just by using the 2 customisable keys provided. There is also a backlit keyboard design which has 3 levels to choose from as well as a fingerprint scanner for people who prefer to have an added layer of security.
The touchpad is pretty big and features 3 buttons below it which would come in handy for professionals out there who need more buttons to ease their workload. Aside from that, the touchpad supports a stylus pen, which I unfortunately didn’t get to try as it doesn’t come with the review unit.
ASUS Dial
On to the main feature of this laptop, the ASUS Dial. In all honesty, it’s my first time seeing a laptop with such a knob, which I later found is important for editors to ease their workload, compared to connecting additional accessories.
You can customise the features on the ProArt Hub and choose what features you want it to help you with. Aside from editing, you can also use it to adjust the volume and brightness of your device, but I hoped it also allows me to adjust the brightness level of the backlit keyboard.
For editing, the ProArt does take some time to get accustomed to as creators would usually just use the ALT key to do their task but some features like backtrack and fast forwards are particularly helpful when editing. After experimenting with it, we realized that it will be more efficient for lightroom users as you can edit almost everything with the ASUS Dial. Though it does turn smoothly, it is a tad bit sensitive, so you might tend to overpass the feature you are looking for, but it’s still a pretty reliable feature once you get used to it.
Ports
Given that this is a big laptop, I was expecting a tad bit more ports however the positioning this time is in favor for us right-handed peeps! On the left of the laptop, it has a USB Type-A port, an HDMI 2.1 port, and two USB Type-C ports. On the right side, it has a USB Type-A port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet port, and an SD express 7.0 card reader. One thing to mention, is that the charging port is towards the middle of the laptop as to having it on the top of the laptop.
I’m particularly happy with the included ethernet port and full sized card reader included, and with the Ethernet port, you can also get fast internet as this laptop supports Wi-Fi 6e.
Performance
Besides the awesome display it has, the unit I got is running on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900 HX processor, a beefy NVIDIA GeForce RTX3070, 64 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage. Since it is a laptop for creators, we put it to the test and edited some videos on Adobe Premiere Pro.
Firstly, the transfer rate is pretty fast for big files which took about 15 minutes. Editing can also be done in full 4K footage in comparison to us using 2K when we usually edit our videos.
Cooling wise, it is pretty decent while using standard cooling. It went up to 73℃ when we used it in a hot room for about an hour of editing, while it stayed at around 58℃ in an airconditioned room after an hour of editing. There are three fan modes to choose from, Standard, Performance and Full Speed Mode. The Full Speed Mode dropped the laptop's temperature by 10℃ in 2 minutes while having 4800 RPM, which is pretty crazy.
You will be getting a 240W charger with this laptop. I started the day at 10AM with a fully charged battery and did editing with this laptop as well as type scripts, it dropped to around 48% at 3pm in the afternoon. I think it’s pretty good as it can handle some heavy workload and still managed to last the day.
Buy or no Buy?
All in all, with a great display, performance and the ASUS Dial, I highly recommend this laptop to hardcore editors to ease editing and to fully utilize the specifications it comes packed with. Even if it is a little on the heavier side, I genuinely think it’s worth the weight.
If this laptop may be an overkill for you, there are 2 other variant you can opt for - the H5600QM which is powered by the AMD Ryzen 9 5900 HS and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 or the H7600HM that is powered by an Intel Core i7-11800H Processor and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060.
