ASUS ProArt P16 H7606 (2024)  Laptop Review

The ASUS ProArt P16 is only available in the Nano Black colorway. See the bottom of the laptop.

The ASUS ProArt P16's build quality is outstanding. Its full-aluminum chassis feels very sturdy, exhibiting little to no flex on the lid or keyboard deck. The display twists slightly when manipulating it, but not enough to be of concern in terms of durability. As with most devices with a dark color finish, this laptop picks up a fair amount of fingerprints and smudges, especially on the lid. The finish picks up light scratches, too, though these don't seem to be permanent, as you can buff them away fairly easily. The feet feel solid and stick firmly to the bottom.

The hinge feels smooth when opening and closing the lid. Stability is good in general; the screen doesn't wobble when typing heavily, but it does when adjusting it. There's also some wobble when using touch input, especially near the top of the screen.

Accessing the internals is straightforward; you need to remove 11 screws and release the clips holding the bottom panel. Two of the screws are under the back rubber strip, and two others have a rubber cover. These rubber pieces are easy to remove, as there's no adhesive holding them. The screws are of different sizes, so it's best to keep them organized to facilitate the reassembly. There are two storage slots; both support M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

Note: We encountered an issue when turning on the laptop after reassembly. The simple act of removing the bottom panel (with no removal or any tampering of the components) triggered the BitLocker recovery blue screen, an issue also reported by multiple online users. Entering the BitLocker key didn't solve the problem, requiring a full reset of the PC. Unfortunately, the PC was then stuck in a boot loop after the reset. We could only resolve this issue by installing an older firmware in the BIOS.

You can also access the user manual for more information.

• Documentation
• 200W power adapter

The ASUS ProArt P16's 4k+ OLED display looks very sharp, with a pixel density exceeding that of the Apple MacBook Pro 14 (2024)'s Mini LED display. Its 16:10 aspect ratio is well-suited for productivity; it gives you more vertical space than a standard 16:9 screen, allowing you to see more information at once when reading a document, so you don't have to scroll as much. The downside is that you'll almost always have black bars at the top and bottom when watching standard 16:9 videos. OLEDs are susceptible to permanent burn-in, so you'll have to take active measures to prevent it, like hiding Windows' taskbar.

You can only get the ASUS ProArt P16 with a 60Hz display. The response time is rather slow for an OLED panel, resulting in visible ghosting in fast moving scenes.

The display's contrast ratio is effectively infinite since OLEDs can turn off individual pixels to produce perfect blacks.

The display gets bright enough for use in most indoor settings, but because its glossy finish doesn't handle bright reflections all that well, you may have some visibility issues if there's light shining directly at the screen. The display gets very dim at the lowest brightness setting, which helps reduce eye strain when viewing content in the dark.

ASUS advertises a maximum brightness of 500 cd/m² in HDR. We got a maximum of 505 cd/m², though this is only possible with small highlights, not with the entire screen.

The display's glossy finish struggles with bright light sources, like a lamp or open window during the day. These reflections are visible even when viewing light-color content with the screen at maximum brightness.

The display's out-of-the-box accuracy is good. Most white balance inaccuracies are minor and hard to spot with the naked eye. The color dE is high mainly because the display uses a wider color space by default (Native - Default vivid colors in the ASUS ProArt Creator Hub), resulting in oversaturation. Some people may prefer this oversaturated look; just know it isn't accurate. The gamma doesn't follow the curve all that well, over-darkening most scenes and crushing blacks in very dark scenes.

The ProArt Creator Hub has a few preset color profiles, including sRGB, DCI-P3, and Display P3. You can also change the color temperature and calibrate the display via the app.

The ASUS ProArt P16's display has an outstanding color gamut. It has full sRGB and DCI-P3 coverage, as well as near-full coverage of the Adobe RGB color space, making it suitable for color-critical work like photo and video editing.

The ASUS P16's OLED display has two flicker frequencies: 120Hz (above 50% brightness) and 240Hz (below 50% brightness). Both frequencies are relatively low and may cause eye strain.

The ASUS ProArt P16 has an excellent keyboard with a spacious layout that's easy to get used to. The keys are stable, exhibiting almost no wobble. Typing feels very comfortable; the keys could use a little more travel, but there's a good amount of tactile feedback, as well as a bit of padding to give a softer feel when bottoming out. The operating force is quite low, making the keys easy to actuate, though some might prefer heavier switches, as it would prevent accidentally switching tools when editing a photo or video. You can adjust the backlight brightness using the F4 shortcut; the white backlight shines well through the legends, except for some secondary legends.

The ASUS ProArt P16 has an excellent touchpad. It's large and responsive to all movements and gestures. The only part that feels a little less responsive is the top left corner, though that could be due to the ASUS dial, a capacitive reiteration of the ASUS ProArt Studiobook Pro 16 OLED (2021)'s physical dial. Palm rejection is a bit of a hit-or-miss—accidental triggers mostly happen in the top portion of the touchpad, where most people rest their thumbs. This is a diving board touchpad with mechanical buttons, so you can only click in the bottom half.

As for the ASUS dial, it's essentially an additional input method that can be quite handy for content creators, as it allows you to quickly navigate timelines, change tools, and tweak the image/video quality, like the exposure, saturation, and hue, etc. You can also use the dial to control media and other system functions. The dial feels responsive and easy to use. However, it'll likely take a lot of customization to integrate it into your workflow, as the default functions might not suit everyone's needs. Also, it only works with certain apps, and only some functions are programmable. Another minor gripe is that it can feel a little cramped when using the touchpad and the dial simultaneously.

The speakers are outstanding. They get very loud with minimal compression artifacts at max volume, and they sound natural and well-balanced, with a good amount of bass and instrument separation. These are among the best speakers you can find on the Windows side, rivaling that of the Apple MacBook Pro 16 (2024).

The webcam's video quality is very good overall. The image has a decent amount of fine details, but it's on the softer side and a tad over-exposed. There's also visible noise, especially in the shadows and background. Voices sound relatively clear over the microphone with little to no background noise.

The ASUS ProArt P16 has an outstanding port selection. The USB-A ports have the same specifications, supporting USB 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speed of up to 10Gbps. Both USB-Cs support DisplayPort and Power Delivery; however, the one on the left side supports a USB4 data transfer speed of up to 40Gbps, while the right one supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 (up to 10Gbps).

The ASUS ProArt P16's wireless adapter is a MediaTek MT7925B22M. Like Wi-Fi 6E, Wi-Fi 7 gives you access to the 6GHz band but with even faster speeds and lower latency. However, you need a router that supports Wi-Fi 7 to benefit from these features. Check out our best router recommendations if you want to upgrade your wireless setup.

The ASUS ProArt P16 is only available with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, a high-performance CPU typically found in gaming, creator, and workstation laptops. Sporting a hybrid design, its 12 physical cores comprise four Zen 5 (performance) cores and eight slower, more power-efficient Zen 5c cores. This processor can handle general productivity tasks like web browsing and text processing, as well as highly intensive workloads like video editing and simulations. It has a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) to handle AI-based tasks like background blurring on video calls and image generation, with a rated performance of 50 TOPS (Trillions of Operations per Second).

See more information about the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 on AMD's product page.

The ASUS ProArt P16 is available with the following GPUs:

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU 8GB GDDR6 (105W TGP)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU 8GB GDDR6 (105W TGP)

Both are mid-range GPUs based on NVIDIA's 'Ada Lovelace' architecture. NVIDIA has already introduced its 50-series 'Blackwell' GPUs, so these are technically last-gen models. That said, these 40-series GPUs are still very capable and likely more than adequate to handle most content creators' workloads. At 105W, these GPUs operate at the higher end of their 35-115W power spectrum. The performance difference between the 4060 and 4070 is relatively small, with the latter performing 5% to 15% faster, depending on the workload.

These GPUs are suitable for gaming. Both can handle 1080p and 1440p gaming, though you'll have to dial down the settings more and rely on features like DLSS and Frame Generation to get good frame rates at 1440p on models with an RTX 4060.

See more information about the 40-series GPUs on NVIDIA's product page.

You can configure this laptop with 32GB or 64GB of RAM. The memory isn't user-replaceable.

You can configure this laptop with 1TB or 2TB of storage. The storage is user-replaceable. There are two storage lots; both support M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

The keyboard deck gets pretty hot under load, but the hot spot is near the top, away from where most people rest their hands. The bottom gets just as warm, though, reaching 48 °C (118.4 °F) under load, so you'll have to be careful when using the device on your lap.

The posted results are measurements taken in the Performance mode (in the MyAsus app). Switching to the Standard mode raises the keyboard temperature to 51 °C (123.8 °F) but lowers the fan noise to 46.5 dBA.

The ASUS ProArt P16 has many pre-installed applications; see this video for the full list.

The ASUS ProArt P16 has a Windows Hello facial recognition camera. You can use it to log in quickly, authorize purchases in the Windows Store, and auto-fill saved passwords on supported websites.

This laptop's display supports pen input, but you may have to buy the stylus separately, depending on the region and retailer. Models that include one come with an ASUS Pen 2.0 SA203H stylus, which uses Microsoft Pen Protocol (MPP) 2.0 technology. Any MPP 2.0 pen will work.