Asus ROG Zephyrus M16 review: Impressive performance and a gorgeous display

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Asus’s authentic ROG Zephyrus M16 made highly effective efficiency an actual risk in a slim and light-weight 16-inch gaming laptop computer, and whereas the 2023 M16 doesn’t fairly reinvent the wheel right here, remarkably, and regardless of some very respectable upgrades, the brand new mannequin holds agency to that precept, nearly equaling the dimensions and weight of its more moderen forebear.

Indeed, Asus have taken a extra conciliatory strategy to this 12 months’s M16, conserving the bones of the laptop computer intact whereas constructing upon key efficiency {hardware} – bettering the ability output with 13th-gen Intel and Nvidia RTX 40 Series chips, ramping up the TGP to 140 watts and my favourite new addition, altering out the IPS QHD+ show to be a QHD+ Mini LED panel clocked at 240Hz. If that’s not sufficient so that you can hit the set off on it, chances are you’ll take solace figuring out the M16 is without doubt one of the extra reasonably priced mid-range laptops in its class.

Looking for extra choices? Check out PCWorld’s roundup of the best gaming laptops obtainable proper now.

Asus ROG Zephyrus M16: Specs and options

You can discover three variants of the Asus ROG Zephryrus M16 at Asus’s on-line retailer, every sporting an i9-13900H processor however with totally different RTX 40 Series GPUs or different various elements. My evaluation unit with its RTX 4070 is at present probably the most reasonably priced of the bunch, retailing for $1,949.99 at Best Buy, whereas a top-line variant with a souped-up RTX 4090 GPU will value you $3,499.99 USD at Asus Online.

Scouring the sphere of different 16-inch laptops for worth comparisons, our mannequin’s $1,949.99 sticker worth skims greater than a $1,000 USD off the worth of a 2023 Razer Blade 16, which ships with the identical RTX 4070 GPU (for $2,999.99) however with a extra premium Intel i9-13950HX CPU.

The 2023 Lenovo Legion Pro 7i makes a better comparability, with one mannequin that includes an Intel i9-13900HX CPU and similar GPU as my evaluation unit’s and but the M16 continues to be barely cheaper. The Lenovo at present prices $2,175, which is $200 extra. The actual specs of this explicit M16 evaluation unit are as follows:

• CPU: Intel Core i9-13900H
• RAM: 32GB DDR5 / 4800Hz
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070
• Display: 16-inch QHD+ (2560×1600), Mini-LED, 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut, 16:10 ratio, 240 Hz refresh price, 3ms response price, Pantone Validated, MUX Switch and Advanced Optimus, G-sync
• Storage: 1TB NMVe PCle Gen 4 SSD
• Ports: 2 x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (DisplayPort and Power Delivery), Thunderbolt 4, HDMI 2.1, 3.5 mm combo audio jack
• Networking: Wi-Fi 6E(802.11ax), Bluetooth 5.3
• Weight: 4.63 lbs (2.10kg)
• Dimensions: 13.98 x 9.69 x 0.78 inches
• Webcam: 1080p FHD IF digital camera, Windows Hello
• Battery Capacity: 90WHrs
• Price: $1,949.99 (with 16GB) from Best Buy

Asus ROG Zephyrus M16: Design and construct

This 12 months’s Zephyrus M16 boasts subsequent technology CPU and GPU upgrades that push the ability envelope additional, but impressively its proportions stay the identical as in 2022. It measures a exact 3.98 x 9.57 x 0.78 inches which inserts final 12 months’s Zephyrus M16 chassis like a glove. A tiny weight achieve of 3.52 ounces means it’s solely barely heavier year-on-year, so that you gained’t must double what you bench-press on the fitness center.

The dimension of the show too is usually unchanged from final 12 months, that means it’s massive and beautiful and a surprising sight to behold. It’s nonetheless exceptionally tall due to its 16:10 side ratio, which implies there’s further eye sweet for motion pictures or simply catching up on a bit of work or gaming. Personally, I used to be tremendous stoked that I might lastly truly see these tiny conflict elephants in Age of Mythology: Extended Edition that I often must squint to see.

The extremely slim bezels and the additional low-set hinges actually carry the laptop computer right here, doing wonders to border the show up as splendidly as could be, such that the M16 can boast a whopping 92 p.c screen-to-body ratio, which isn’t any imply feat of engineering.

But alas there are different meaty modifications to be discovered on this 12 months’s M16. For one, the HDMI port has been upgraded from a HDMI 2.0 to HDMI 2.1, so it advantages from the a lot increased 48Gbps bandwidth. The new mannequin additionally ships with no LAN port, relying as an alternative on wi-fi connectivity upgrades within the type of Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 – the quickest at present obtainable. Suffice to say, wonderful wi-fi even of this caliber isn’t fairly a substitute for a fast dependable LAN connection, so that is form of a sore level with me.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Still, the port choice is superb. You get a number of USB-C and USB-A ports to play with, so I by no means had a difficulty discovering an outlet for a favourite mouse, exterior keyboard, or USB dock. One of the USB-C ports is a Thunderbolt 4 port, which I shortly made use of to switch excessively massive video games, just like the 100GB plus Elden Ring, which I’d fairly watch paint dry than sit and wait to obtain.

For styling, my M16 regarded a bit of understated up in opposition to its flashier 2023 stablemate the 16-inch Asus ROG Strix G16, which I occurred to be testing on the identical time. It eschews options just like the G16’s blinged out RGB gentle bar on the entrance and clear cyber punk keys, in favor of a plain entrance and single-color Backlit Chiclet keyboard. The M16 is available in only one colour, too – black – so the entire thing seems remarkably modest.

That is, my mannequin regarded modest – being the variant that shipped with no function referred to as AniMe Matrix. This function lights up the 18,710 machined perforated holes within the M16’s lid to create a blinding LED gentle show, though it solely is available in some variants, so it’s price checking before you purchase should you do need to add some razzle dazzle to the styling.

Asus ROG Zephyrus M16: Keyboard and trackpad

The M16’s trackpad match snugly within the chassis, offering ample house for my arms to imagine a relaxed typing place. That stored me comfy by one of many longest quest chains in WoW Classic: Wrath of the Lich King I’ve ever achieved – Escape the Lich King’s grasp. Additionally, the trackpad felt delicate sufficient for all day use and made hardly any sound, which was best for a sly gaming classes within the library.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

The keyboard has each deserves and pitfalls, in that it’s fairly properly sized, however the keys really feel a bit of too mushy to be actually comfy. For one, they’re fairly low set into the keyboard already, however drop down 1 / 4 inch extra once you press them and don’t rebound properly.

The format is completely fantastic for all of your gaming wants, nevertheless, being the usual kind you’d count on on a 16-inch laptop computer. It lacks a devoted numpad, however supplies all of the Fn keys in addition to go-to gaming favorites like Left and Right Shift keys. You do get helpful media keys on the very prime and conveniently the operate keys double as helpful brief cuts, which saved me a ton of time each in Windows and in my video games for doing issues like taking fast screenshots.

Asus ROG Zephyrus M16: Display, audio

While we’re starting to see OLED shows pop up in gaming laptops as of late, relating to efficiency for me it’s onerous to miss one thing just like the M16’s ROG Nebula HDR Mini LED show which in my view hit the fitting steadiness between attractive imagery and buttery clean movement. OLEDs make me a bit of anxious too since burn-in grew to become a factor to fret about on laptops, however as a Mini LED there was no want to fret about that.

To make certain, the M16’s QHD+ (2560 x 1600) Mini LED, is in each approach the epitome of a shiny, immensely colourful but in addition remarkably clean gaming panel. With its tiny diodes that measure simply 0.2 milimeters in diameter, it hits a powerful peak brightness of 1100 nits, and has a distinction ratio of 100,000:1, which isn’t only a metric – it’s one thing you’re actually going to note.

Suffice to say, the standard of pictures I obtained on the 100 p.c DPI-P3 panel hit residence instantly in a recreation of Red Dead Redemption 2 the place pictures appeared brighter and extra saturated than I’ve seen them in 16-inch rivals. Darks additionally regarded true and immensely deep. I cross reference numerous laptop computer shows and the colours appeared extremely correct, too – therefore the panel’s VESA Display HDR 1000, Dolby Vision and Pantone certifications.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

But what actually offered me on the M16’s show was how fluid fast paced motion appeared. Legacy applied sciences return in an enormous approach to make {that a} actuality – at least a fast three millisecond response time, G-Sync, and a really quick 240Hz refresh price. In regards to the latter, that’s an improve from the 165Hz price we noticed in 2022, which I’m very pleased about.

When it involves audio, the M16 isn’t any slouch both; it outdoes a contingent of rival mid-range laptops due to a well-placed smattering of not 4, however six audio system powered by Dolby Atmos. These do remarkably properly to provide a sound profile that balances out properly throughout the tonal spectrum, with fairly deep-sounding lows and highs that pop by the speaker grilles clearly with out sounding like they’re getting shattered by chassis vibrations.

Asus ROG Zephyrus M16: CPU efficiency

My evaluation unit featured an Intel 13th-gen Core i9-13900H cellular processor which packs in a complete of 14 cores. This chip, which belongs to Intel’s Raptor Lake collection, and is very designed for light-weight fanatic gaming laptops, advances Intel’s hybrid chip structure to leverage 8 Efficient (E-Cores) and 6 Performance Cores (P-Cores) with a most of 20 Threads. Intel’s benchmarks present it has a most turbo frequency of 5.4 GHz per every of its efficiency cores – which actually pushes the higher limits of CPU efficiency capabilities.

To discover out the place precisely within the PCWorld’s panoply of mid-range gaming laptops the M16’s CPU sat, I pulled comparisons from our 2022 gaming evaluation charts, together with laptops just like the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 with its AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX CPU, however I additionally added in 2023 laptops just like the Razer Blade 16 which encompasses a Core i9-13950HX CPU.

First CPU check off the blocks was Maxon’s Cinebench R20 Multi-Threaded benchmark, a check that makes use of each core of the laptop computer’s CPU. In our benchmark outcomes you possibly can see the M16’s CPU squeezes each ounce of CPU energy it will possibly to hit a rating of 7,352 – a powerful end result which bested even the Razer Blade 16 amongst our comparisons.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Based on this end result we will confidently say that the Intel i9-13900H is a robust performer within the context of the M16, which in flip means it ought to simply energy the most recent AAA video games and simply as simply breeze by CPU-intensive duties like encoding or video enhancing.

Following this, I checked out how properly the M16’s CPU might maintain processing knowledge confronted with rising thermals. Would it must throttle efficiency to maintain overheating at bay, or sustain the tempo to complete duties at breakneck pace? To discover out I ran a bespoke check designed particularly for the free HandBrake utility – with the target being to see how shortly the laptop computer might end encoding a 30GB MKV file to MP4 utilizing the Android Tablet Preset.

As you possibly can see within the graph under, the M16’s i9-13900H processor did remarkably properly, defeating a lot of the comparability discipline. Put merely, this implies the M16 is unlikely to place the brakes on an excessive amount of when the laptop computer heats up, which is a good information for players that basically want constant efficiency.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Asus ROG Zephyrus M16: Gaming efficiency

Moving sufficient frames on a 2560×1600 show for respectable gameplay isn’t any imply feat – in reality, it’s one of many causes many players typically go for a 1080p panel as an alternative. Consequently, I used to be very eager to see if the M16’s RTX 4070 GPU – considered one of Nvidia’s highly effective new mid-range graphics playing cards – might do exactly that.

The cellular RTX 4070 is actually 2023’s reply to final 12 months’s cellular RTX 3070, in that it’s meant to be the choice that players on a funds can flip to for strong energy at a nonetheless reasonably priced worth. Looking at its specs, this GPU sports activities 4608 Cores, 144 of that are Nvidia Tensor Cores, designed to assist enhance the pace of machine studying purposes. It additionally has 36 ray-tracing cores, which render texture and shadows higher in 3D graphical purposes – so theoretically, it’s properly geared up for the most recent video games.

3DMark’s Time Spy 1.2 benchmark was my go-to efficiency benchmark to gage the GPU’s graphical efficiency. This DirectX 12 benchmark for Windows 10/11 PCs, is very designed to help new API options like asynchronous compute, specific multi-adapter and multi-threading, so it’s best for evaluating Nvidia’s newest GPU releases.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

As you possibly can see within the outcomes, my laptop computer’s GPU hit a excessive of 11,862 within the benchmark’s ‘Overall’ class, which all issues thought-about, wasn’t far off what the Razer Blade’s RTX 4090 GPU hit. This end result proves the RTX 4070 is a stellar possibility within the M16 and implies that it’s fairly able to tackling probably the most graphically demanding duties – be that video games, video enhancing, or 3D rendering.

While the Time Spy 1.2 benchmark supplies a scattergun glimpse of the GPU’s capabilities, it doesn’t actually present any details about the sorts of common body charges you’re more likely to get in video games. Next up, I ran the Rise of the Tomb Raider gaming benchmark. Here we see the M16’s GPU outpaced the vast majority of laptops – displaying fairly significantly sooner common body charges than laptops with older Nvidia RTX 30 collection GPUs.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Last however not least, the outcomes of our benchmark for the sport Shadow of the Tomb Raider are fairly in keeping with the 2 exams we accomplished above. While it’s true that the Razer Blade 16 once more has the sting on the M16 – but once more the M16 isn’t far behind, which is testomony to the form of graphics energy this machine can produce.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

Asus ROG Zephyrus M16: Battery life

The M16 featured a big 90Whr battery, however we’ve seen earlier than that giant batteries don’t at all times equate to raised efficiency. So, to check simply how lengthy it could final, I utilized PCWorld’s in-house battery check, which meant I ran a Hollywood film on repeat at 50 p.c quantity with a pair of low cost headphones inserted to maintain sound to a minimal. With the keyboard backlighting turned off, the M16 lasted virtually eight hours earlier than the battery died.

Dominic Bayley / IDG

That’s not the very best I’ve seen this 12 months – the Asus TUF Gaming A16 Advantage Edition holds that title at greater than 11 hours, but it surely’s one of many higher outcomes and nothing to sneeze at both. That means in a real-time gaming state of affairs, you possibly can count on about 4 hours of gaming time away from an outlet earlier than you’ll must plug again in and recharge.

Asus ROG Zephyrus M16: Should you purchase it?

While the 2023 Zephyrus M16 does a novel factor with the Zephyrus model, focusing extra on decadent energy upgrades than persevering with the development in direction of a lighter and thinner chassis – this modification however truly makes it probably the greatest 16-inch choices in 2023.

For players in search of a fairly gentle and transportable laptop computer that’ll produce fast body charges at 2560×1600, it’s very onerous to look past the M16. What’s extra, you possibly can count on to pay rather less than some rivals for the privilege. While a mushy keyboard and extra modest styling could also be irksome for some players, this laptop computer will get the whole lot largely proper, which isn’t any small feat.