ASUS Zenbook S 16 UM5606 (2024)  Laptop Review

The ASUS Zenbook S16 is available in a Scandinavian White and Zumaia Gray colorway. See the bottom of the laptop for more details.

The ASUS Zenbook S16's build quality is outstanding. Like the ASUS Zenbook A14 UX3407 (2025), this laptop's chassis is a mix of ceramic and aluminum dubbed Ceraluminum. However, the material feels more premium and metallic than the A14, and the device as a whole feels more rigid, too, exhibiting only a small amount of flex on the lid and keyboard deck. The finish is fairly resistant to minor scratches from regular use as well as to fingerprints and smudges.

The hinge feels smooth when opening and closing the lid, with just the right amount of resistance so it doesn't feel too loose but still allows for a one-handed lift. There's very little wobble when typing heavily or using touch input.

Accessing the internals is relatively easy; you need to remove 11 Torx screws and release the bottom panel's clips. A prying tool might help release the clips, but it isn't absolutely necessary. The screws are of different sizes, so it's best to keep them organized to facilitate reassembly. The storage slot supports M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

Download the service manual here.

• 65W power adapter
• Documentation

The ASUS Zenbook S 16 is only available with a 2.8k OLED display. The panel looks very sharp, with a pixel density close to that of the Apple MacBook Air 15 (2024)'s Retina display. There's no screen-door effect, which can sometimes happen with touch-sensitive OLEDs. The screen does look a little grainy, but you'd have to be pretty close to see it.

Although this OLED display has a 120Hz refresh rate, its response time is on the slow side, causing some ghosting behind fast-moving objects.

The contrast is effectively infinite since OLED panels can turn off individual pixels to produce perfect blacks.

The display gets bright enough for use in most indoor settings, but you may still have trouble seeing some content because the display's glossy coating doesn't handle bright reflections very well.

The display's glossy finish primarily struggles with bright light sources, like a lamp or open window during the day. These reflections are visible even with the screen at full brightness.

The display's accuracy is great out of the box. Most white balance inaccuracies are minor and hard to spot. The color dE is high mainly because the display targets a wider color space by default, resulting in oversaturation. The gamma isn't bad; dark scenes look a tad too dark, while bright scenes look slightly over-brightened.

The ASUS Zenbook S 16's OLED 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 general media consumption and color-critical work like photo and video editing.

While the display's 480Hz flicker frequency isn't a problem for most people, it may still cause eye strain in people sensitive to display flicker.

The ASUS Zenbook S 16 has a great keyboard. Its layout feels spacious and is easy to get used to. While the keys are easy to actuate, they don't have a lot of travel or tactility, with the overall typing experience leaning on the mushier side. The backlight is white; you can adjust the brightness using the F4 shortcut.

The touchpad is excellent. It's quite large, making it easy to perform actions like dragging and dropping over a long distance. The tracking is good for the most part, though the top edge seems a little inconsistent, sometimes failing to register inputs. Swiping vertically at the left and right edges of the touchpad lets you change the screen brightness and speaker volume; you can turn these functions off if you don't like them. This is a diving board touchpad with mechanical actuation. You can only click in the bottom half of the touchpad; the actuation feels clear and satisfyingly tactile.

The ASUS Zenbook S16 has bottom-firing speakers that get reasonably loud with minimal compression at higher volume levels. They sound decent: clear and relatively natural with decent instrument separation. There's some bass, but not a whole lot.

The ASUS Zenbook S16's webcam is decent. The image looks fairly detailed but slightly overexposed and quite noisy throughout. Voices sound loud and clear over the microphone, albeit with some static noise in the background.

The ASUS Zenbook S16 has an excellent port selection. The USB-A port supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps. Both USB-Cs support USB4 data transfer speeds of up to 40Gbps, DisplayPort, and Power Delivery. Though advertised as HDMI 2.1 TMDS (Transition Minimized Differential Signaling), which limits the output to 4k @ 60Hz, we can confirm that the HDMI port can output at a maximum resolution of 4k @ 120Hz.

The ASUS Zenbook S 16's wireless adapter is a MediaTek Wi-Fi 7 MT7925.

The ASUS Zenbook S16 is available with the following CPUs:

• AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 (8 cores/16 threads, up to 5.0GHz, 16MB L3 cache)
• AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 (10 cores/20 threads, up to 5.0GHz, 24MB L3 cache)
• AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (12 cores/24 threads, up to 5.1GHz, 24MB L3 cache)

Although all three available CPUs feature Zen 5 (performance) and Zen 5c (efficiency) cores, they belong to two separate families in AMD's lineup, as the Ryzen AI 7 350 is from the Krackan Point family, while the Ryzen AI 9 365 and Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 are from the more powerful Strix Point family. The Ryzen AI 7 350 is designed for light to moderately intensive general productivity tasks, like web browsing, spreadsheets, and programming. The Ryzen AI 9 365 and Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 can handle much heavier tasks, like data analysis and simulations. All three chips have an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) to handle AI tasks with a rated performance of 50 TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second).

See more information about the Ryzen AI 300-series chips on AMD's product page.

The ASUS Zenbook S 16 is only available with integrated graphics. The AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 uses the Radeon 860M; the Ryzen AI 9 365 uses the Radeon 880M; the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 uses the Radeon 890M. These integrated GPUs are primarily designed for light productivity tasks, though the top-end Radeon 890M can handle some moderately intensive games at 1080p, as long as you lower the graphical settings.

You can get this laptop with 24GB or 32GB of RAM. The memory isn't user-replaceable.

You can get this laptop with 1TB or 2TB of storage. The storage drive is user-replaceable; the slot supports M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4x4 NVMe SSDs.

The ASUS Zenbook S16's AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU performs well in the Geekbench 5 benchmarks. All three available processors are more than adequate to handle common, everyday tasks, so the choice of the CPU depends on your budget and the amount of headroom you'd like to perform heavier workloads.

As for the GPU, while the Radeon 880M isn't bad for integrated graphics, its performance is still relatively weak, so it isn't ideal for heavy computing tasks. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370's Radeon 890M will perform better, but you're probably still better off getting a laptop with a discrete GPU if you have an intensive workload.

Here are scores from Geekbench 6 in case you're more familiar with those numbers:

• CPU Single-Thread: 2,844
• CPU Multi-Thread: 12,966
• GPU Compute: 24,769

The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 performs well in the Cinebench R23 benchmarks, scoring roughly 5% higher in multi-threaded workloads than a base Apple M4 SoC in the Apple MacBook Pro 14 (2024). This performance level is suitable for some demanding sustained workloads; the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is best if you need to perform even more intensive tasks.

Here are scores from Cinebench 2024 in case you're more familiar with those numbers:

• Single-Thread: 114
• Multi-Thread: 893

While you can perform some 3D rendering work in Blender on the ASUS Zenbook S16, getting a laptop with a dedicated GPU is best, as even an entry-level discrete GPU, like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050, can complete renders in considerably less time.

The posted GPU result is the average render time when using the GPU + AI option. Using solely the GPU increases the render time to 3.79 minutes.

The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365's Radeon 880M is an integrated GPU designed primarily for productivity. It can handle some moderately intensive games at 1080p, but only with the lowest graphical settings, and even then, you might experience frequent stutters. If you want to game on this device, getting an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 configuration is best. The Ryzen AI 7 350 can only handle light or older titles.

Borderlands 3 runs poorly on the ASUS Zenbook S16 with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU. While you can get around 60 fps at 1080p with the lowest graphical settings, there are frequent stutters due to frame drops. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 configuration will fare better, though you might still experience some choppiness in busy scenes. The AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 configuration will struggle to even reach 60 fps with low settings.

Civilization VI runs very smoothly with just a few tweaks in the graphical settings. You likely won't have any trouble playing other similar titles, as these types of strategy games typically don't require a lot of GPU processing power.

Counter-Strike 2 doesn't run very well on the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 configuration. Although you can get over 60 fps at 1080p with low settings, the game stutters a lot due to frame drops, which isn't ideal for a competitive FPS game. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 will perform better, but the game might still be too choppy to be playable. The AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 configuration will struggle to reach 60 fps, even with low settings.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is playable on the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 configuration at 1080p with low settings, but expect some stutters, especially in busy scenes. The Ryzen AI 7 350 configuration will likely struggle to achieve 60 fps, even with the lowest settings, while the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 configuration will push higher frame rates.

The keyboard gets quite warm under load, but the heat is primarily at the top, above the number 7, and away from where most people rest their hands. Unfortunately, the bottom gets even hotter, reaching 52.6 °C (126.68 °F), which is hot enough to cause discomfort. The fans are fairly loud at full speed; you can change the fan profile via the MyASUS app if you want a quieter experience; just know you'll lose some performance.

The ASUS Zenbook S16 has many pre-installed applications; see this video for the full list.

The display supports pen input, but you may have to buy the stylus separately, as it doesn't always come with the device. ASUS recommends using their SA203H stylus, though any MPP (Microsoft Pen Protocol) 2.0 pen will work.