This Windows Laptop BEATS the MacBook - ASUS Zenbook A16

- When Snapdragon landed on Windows, I was really excited. Apple Silicon shook the PC space up in a big way, I think Qualcomm saw that as their opportunity to bring some real competition to Windows. And that first generation of Snapdragon X, it was good. The battery life was incredible, the performance was solid, but there were enough rough edges at launch, that really caused a lot of people to bounce off. So when ASUS asked me to sponsor this video to take a closer look at their new Zenbook A16, it was a no brainer, because this laptop is running the most powerful Snapdragon chip that's ever been put in a Windows PC. So before we get into what's good about the A16, actually wanna point out a few things that I am not a fan of. The keyboard is fine. It has a little bit less travel than I'd like, about 1.3 millimeters, and it feels a little bit shallow. The touchpad does have a cool feature, which is smart gestures. Now I remember when I looked at the A14 last year, it was a cool idea there, but it was pretty unreliable. This time though, it's much improved, so the way it works is you can swipe on the right side to adjust your brightness, left side to adjust your volume, it generally actually works pretty well, especially considering how massive this touchpad is. However, I wish that this was a haptic touchpad. I find myself sometimes just having to double click on things, because my little like light taps aren't being registered, but honestly at this point, any laptop that costs more than $1,000, I want a haptic touchpad on. Now it does have a six-speaker setup, but they're just fine. Now, especially on this A16, there's a lot of empty space on the left and right of the keyboard. I wish they would've put speakers grilles there to take advantage of the real estate, and if I'm gonna be nitpicking, it does have a pair of USB-C ports, but they're both on the left side, meaning that I always have to plug in on the left side. It's a small thing, but for me, I really appreciate where I could plug in on either side of a laptop. When you actually touch and feel this laptop though, the thing that really jumps out is just how lightweight it is. Even though this is a 16-inch device, it weighs just a little bit over two pounds, and you can really feel it. I mean it's almost like they forgot to put a battery in it, which is nice. I think it feels premium, that paired with the fact that they're using their updated Ceraluminum finish, so ASUS have been using this for a little while now, the idea is it's an aluminum chassis, but it is coated in a sort of ceramic kind of feel, to me it feels quite similar to like stone, like a really, really smooth stone. The ports are also good, besides the fact that there's only two USB-C on one side, so we do have HDMI, a headphone jack, USB-A, and a full-size SD card reader. I will say the screen is a real highlight. So this one is rocking a 16 inch, 2.8k OLED, 120 hertz and 1,100 nits of brightness. As a guy who been using a Surface Pro 12 for a little while, the screen is very, very lovely. Honestly, it's about as good as a laptop screen gets in 2026. One of the big features of the Zenbook A16 though is a single number, 48. That is how many gigs of RAM this ships with. I think someone forgot to let Qualcomm know that we're in a RAM crisis. Every version of the X2 Elite Extreme comes with 48 gigs of RAM, because this is actually on chip. So the memory is integrated directly onto the package. Unlike most laptops, whether you RAM is sort of soldered to the motherboard, it means that when it's on chip, you have faster bandwidth, there's lower latency, and importantly, it's standard. There's no upselling you on hundreds of dollars for more memory. It just comes with the X2 Elite Extreme. Now, 48 gigs of RAM is, I will say, absolutely overkill, but in 2026, if someone offers you more RAM without charging a fortune for it, don't question it. It is a legitimately big selling point. For context, you're looking at 16 gigs of RAM on an M5 MacBook Pro that is more expensive than the A16. The Snapdragon X2 series also comes with an 80 TOPS NPU, which is the most powerful in any laptop right now. Not only is this cool for features like voice changing, if you saw my demo at Snapdragon Summit, Hey, everyone, ring-a-ling the ding-a-ling it? But paired with the 48 gigs of memory means you can actually run some pretty powerful local AI models if you want here. But back to the pricing, I wanna be very clear about which of the two models of these Zenbook A16s that I actually think is worth it. So my review unit is exclusive to the ASUS store, and it comes in at $2,000. The benefit here is that it has the highest binned version of the X2 Elite Extreme, that boost up to five gigahertz. And as far as I know, this is the only laptop that is launching with that version of the chip, but for some reason, this model lacks a touchscreen. The one I think most people should actually look at is the Best Buy exclusive model at 1,600 bucks. It's got the same 48 gigs of memory, the same 2.8k OLED display, except it actually has touch, and it has the same 18 core X2 Elite Extreme chip just clocked slightly lower at 4.7, as opposed to five gigahertz, but importantly, it is a full $400 less. I would absolutely save the money. Now they do still make the Zenbook A14, as well, if you want something smaller, which is usually what I gravitate toward, and this starts at $1,149, but I will say that this does not ship with the X2 Elite Extreme, just the regular X2 Elite. So at Snapdragon Summit this year, they had the big reveal, of course, of Snapdragon X2 Elite and Extreme, and you know, there's a lot there. The brand new third-generation Oryon CPU cores, more GPU, and of course, you have those years of Windows improvements from everything from audio drivers, all the way up to like AVX emulation and whatnot, but I think the thing is, it's one thing to get an early look at those shiny red demo models, but how does this stuff actually work in the real world? Well, I will say, quite well, I've been daily driving the A16 for a little over a week now, and I think the thing that jumps out to me most is how snappy it feels, right? Obviously, this benchmark's, I just wanna get to those in a second, but compared to where I'm coming from, which is a first-generation Snapdragon device, everything is just a little bit quicker. Even something simple like, so I spend a lot of time captioning the videos that go up on YouTube, and the YouTube Captions Editor is very laggy, on most systems, it drops frames, it kinda like pauses from time to time, but on the X2 Elite Extreme, it has the raw horsepower just to blast through it. It's actually really quite smooth, and I think that that's a good example of not something that's gonna show up on a Geekbench score or something, but something that I immediately noticed, and as soon as I go back to my other laptop, I'm like, "Oh, it feels like I'm taking a step backward", right? Like it's just that perceived just sort of snappiness literally is like ... (Austin snapping) One thing I wanna point out is that this is the X2 Elite Extreme, and emphasis on the extreme part. This is the most powerful Snapdragon chip anywhere right now and at least that five gigahertz bin is exclusive to the Zenbook A16, so keep that in mind. Other Snapdragon X2 series laptops are likely gonna come a little bit behind what you see here, but let's just say that the performance really isn't an issue this generation. It's funny, I actually had a little bit of a hard time figuring out what to compare this laptop to, because it's a 16-inch laptop, it's obviously quite thin and light, but it also has like 80 watts of overall system power, which is roughly double what a lot of thin and light laptops do, so my best comparison really was the 14-inch MacBook Pro, specifically the M5 variant. It's about the same price, it's $100 more expensive, and I also, for benchmarks, wanted to throw in the original Zenbook A14 with the first generation Snapdragon X Elite. So how does it stack up in benchmarks? Well, I'm glad you asked, and if you didn't, I'm gonna tell you anyway. In single-core performance, Apple's M5 still has an edge here. It's about 5% in Geekbench, and a little bit more in Cinebench. The Macbook has a small advantage, but the difference is pretty minimal. And I'll say this is a lot better than a lot of other x86 Windows options. Multi-core is really where the 18 core stretch their legs. The Extreme scores 27% ahead of the M5 in Geekbench, and in Cinebench, it is a massive 67% lead. I think a big part of that gap is down to thermals, Cinebench runs for a full 10 minutes, while maxing out the CPU, where that sustained power really matters, and I think the cooling on the A16 was definitely enough to keep things under control, but what really surprised me were the graphics. The Zenbook actually beat the M5 in both of our graphics benchmarks, and not by a lot, mind you, but even a year ago, Apple Silicon had a pretty sizable lead in the GPU, and especially look at the jump between the original X Elite and this, it's over double the performance, which is a huge leap in a single generation. But here's the thing I think that gets lost in all the benchmark charts. This performance is coming from a chip that sips power compared to traditional x86 processors. That's kind of the whole point of Snapdragon on Windows. You're not just getting performance, you're getting it at a fraction of the power draw. That's how you get all-day battery life, and this level of performance, and a laptop that weighs less than three pounds. I mean, this is really the main sales pitch for why you wanna use a Snapdragon laptop. It's a big reason why I've been using Snapdragon laptops for the last couple of years, even through a lot of those teething issues. Now, speaking of battery, what you get in the real-world of this is pretty solid. I'm legitimately getting between 10 and 12 hours of use. It's to the point where I only charge my laptop like every other day, and if that's not enough, the Zenbook A14 has the same 70 watt hour battery, but a smaller screen, and a slightly more efficient processor, meaning, it should go even further. So when I first tried a Snapdragon X Elite laptop about two years ago, gaming was probably the biggest downside, because right out of the box, while not all apps worked, a lot of the basic stuff worked just fine. But when it came to games, there were a lot of issues, performance, compatibility, a lot of games just straight up didn't work, and the big one for me was anti cheat really just wasn't a thing, so a ton of competitive games, even though it had the hardware to do it, straight up just would not work. Thankfully though, almost all of these have been addressed, if not outright fixed over the last two years. So something like this, "Baldur's Gate 3" is a good example, because this is a game that is fairly nice looking, but importantly, it's a game that I wanna play, but it will actually work well in this hardware. Keep in mind, this is not a gaming laptop, this is a laptop with integrated graphics, I think for most people who wanna game on a Snapdragon device, such as the Zenbook A14 or A16, gaming's secondary, if you really care about gaming, let's be honest, you're probably buying an ROG. But as you've seen from the benchmarks, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme actually does have the performance to play fairly demanding games, as long as you've got your settings somewhat reasonably set. So you'll see here right now, I'm running at 1200p with FSR 2.2 on quality upscaling, and generally speaking, I'm on the medium preset. And what you'll see is that this is a game that is very much playable. Do I wanna start a fight, or do I wanna walk through this one? - Fight, fight, fight -- - Fight? - Fight, fight, fight. - And because it's got that Lumina OLED display, not only does it look good, you actually can run it up to 120 FPS. There we go. I got exactly 15. (Austin laughing) Now there is built in auto super resolution, which actually uses the NPU to upscale as opposed to using your GPU, I've tried it, it actually works fairly well, but at least to try to get some reasonable comparisons, I've actually got it off for right now, I am gonna go (duck quacks) these guys up though, because I want some cool gameplay. All right. ♪ Let's start some problems ♪ (Austin imitating explosions) I dunno why I have to make the sound effects when I'm playing a game that has plenty of sound effects on its own. So while I'm in the middle of combat, I just wanna point out the FPS, we're anywhere between 60 and 100 FPS, which I will say, pretty good. And keep in mind that this is not optimized for Snapdragon in any way. It just works, and it works surprisingly well. A game that used to not work at all on Snapdragon laptops is Fortnite. So I actually was able to try this at Snapdragon Summit, and right here, I am running at performance mode in Fortnite and I've got it scaled to go down as low as 720p, although for the most part, it runs a little bit higher than that. However, with this, I can actually come pretty close to full 120 FPS. Did they get rid of the bots? - [Alex] Yeah. - I haven't played Fortnite in a minute. It's people now, not bots? - Yeah. (upbeat music) - Luckily I've got a solid 120 FPS right now, so it's totally playable. This is another game that is, I think, pretty popular on thin and light laptops, and the fact that you can get pretty solid performance is nice. I mean, again, 120 FPS pretty consistently, even as I'm dropping down, one thing I do wanna mention is that you do hear a reasonable amount of fan noise on the A16. It is not loud, I will say, however if you listen carefully, you can hear it cranking, (fan whirring) but it's not egregious. Oh, I'm just eating pizza. Okay, okay, I'm just gonna take all the pizza with me. And importantly, it stays very cool, like the palm rest area stays very cool, it's only when you get above the keyboard you feel some of the heat, but even then, it's actually really not bad. The way that you actually calculate TDP on a Snapdragon laptop's a little different, it doesn't actually have a traditional TDP, it's something called, it's like total system power or something, but it's everything including stuff like your memory, I think even like VRM gets included. And here's one of the cool parts about a Snapdragon laptop, I can unplug it, and guess what? I'm still getting 120 FPS, even on battery, they claim that there's essentially no drop in performance when you run on battery, I have seen sometimes that there's a very small difference, but it also depends on your Windows power profile. Now, I'm not gonna tell you that you should go out and buy a Snapdragon laptop as a gaming device, because really, it is a secondary thing, right? But the idea that I can not get shot by whoever that is, where is that person? Are you sure there's no bots left? What I will tell you is that if you are like me, and you primarily use your laptop for getting real work done and you wanna do a little bit of gaming on the side, it is super, super doable this generation. So let's address the elephant in the room. Can you actually use this thing as a normal laptop without running into issues? Well, in my experience, yeah. Everything I throw at it just works. Chrome, Slack, Spotify, most Adobe apps, even stuff like NordVPN that was broken when the X Elite launched, all work just fine now. Now I can't speak to every workflow. I still edit in Final Cut Pro, which sadly doesn't exist on Windows, so I don't have a lot of experience editing on the A16, and I will say, if you're running very specialized software, it's probably worth double checking before you commit, but for most people doing most things, it just works. And that's probably the biggest change from where Snapdragon started. And it really does measure up to the competition, even compared to the M5 MacBook Pro, it is right there in single-core, and ahead on multi-core and graphics. Now sure, some of you might say, "Well, why not just step up to an M5 Pro?" But that's a minimum of $500 more than the Best Buy variant of the A16, it only comes with half the RAM, and a smaller 14-inch chassis. If you spec a 16 inch MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro, and 48 gigs of RAM to actually properly beat the A16, it's legit $3,100, it's almost double the price. So does the Zenbook A16 and the new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme actually deliver? I think it does. The performance is legitimately competitive with Apple Silicon. It's not good for a Windows PC, it's just good, period. I think they cooked with this one. If you want to check out the Zenbook A16, I'll have links in the description, and again, huge thank you to ASUS for sponsoring this video. If you enjoyed, make sure to subscribe the channel, and to ring-a-ling that ding-a-ling button, and if you excuse me, I'm gonna go try to find my Zen...book. Sorry, that was uncalled for. You know what they say about Zen? It's...what you read books about. (Austin humming)