Asus ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED review: Multimedia laptop with extreme CPU performance

[Redaktion]

Asus offers a powerful machine for creative users in the ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED. Intel's Core i9-13980HX and the GeForce RTX 4070 laptop take care of performance-related matters, but the new 120 Hz OLED panel is not completely convincing.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ProArt-Studiobook-16-OLED-review-Multimedia-laptop-with-extreme-CPU-performance.728757.0.html

[NikoB]

"ProArt" with dE greater than 2 in hardware calibrated mode?!

So where is the vaunted color accuracy on OLED, what do you say, OLED apologists? =)

Very funny for professionals who need dE less than 1...

[Wulli]

Noise level on default equal to Performance mode?
Either the Review or the test unit did something wrong, I guess.

[TonDaron]

Serious creators, stay away from this laptop (and forgive me for my bad english)

I had this computer for a month. I've returned it.
I've made 2 clean install on it, one without the asus softwares, one with them. I have to say, before you ask, I'm capable with computer installation/harware/software/drivers etc..

In both cases, the computer had a lot of issues. Freezes/lags even BSOD twice. I've runed all the diagnostics, everything was "OK".

Reliability monitor was full of warnings and errors, each days for a month.

I'm a professionnal photographer. Comming back from a day of work, I have 650 HDR files to process. File size I have to merge are 120Mo. This computer can't handle it. Preview processing, exporting was nearly as slow as on my i7 1060ti laptop from 3 years ago.

I don't know if my unit was faulty but it seems it was not. Clearly not the power you want for this price

Screen looks beautifull but, as stated, precision editing is quite hard on it. I don't know why, it's hard to tell the difference between 100% white and around.

Sound is HORRIBLE !! It feels very far, comming from the rear of the laptop, almost no bass. I'v read on a website (not this one) it has the best speakers..... what a joke. A dell XPS 15 is millions miles away from this sound garbage.

Asus dial looks intersting at first glance, but it is a waste of time in the end (at least for my experience with lightroom and photoshop). Why ? It is not responsive enough. You realy feel there is a "software" trying to keep up with your imputs. There is no snapiness feeling of mecanical rotation of the dial. Again, if you are serious about photo editing, this lack of responsivness is a no go when you have to edit thousands of files.

When you buy something at this price, you can't be disapointed this much.

I hope I don't look like a haters. I really wanted to ike this product. I've tried a lot to make it work. Retourning it was a real pain as I had no laptop for 2-3 weeks.

Maybe It was bad luck, maybe you will enjoy this laptop, I didn't.

[RobertJasiek]

"I hope I don't look like a hater"

You don't. Rather we much appreciate such honest experience reports!

[NikoB]

Preview processing, exporting was nearly as slow as on my i7 1060ti laptop from 3 years ago.

The 2020  i7 is nearly 3x+ slower than the 13980HX at its maximum performance profile. But everything rests on extremely slow memory controller, and this is critically important for Photoshop, etc. software.

The i7 2020 had a RAM speed of about 40Gbyte/s (if we compare classmates), and 13980HX one has 70-75Gb/s with DDR5600. Those. memory speed increased at best only 1.5 times, and latency, on the contrary, significantly worsened – i7 2020 by latency is faster.

Thus, a 3+ times increase in core performance compared to 2020 is not supported by a similar increase in RAM performance by 3+ times (including latency).

The Apple M2 Max 2022 has a memory controller 5 times faster than x86 controllers (but it's soldered memory, although available up to 96GB). That's where Photoshop can kick in, but there's a reduced set of Arm commands set that backfires, as does the need to emulate x86 software if necessary.

Unfortunately, there are no real changes in the performance of x86 memory controllers and are not expected in the near future, especially with the possibility of upgrading memory in 2-4 slots.

In order for Photoshop and similar software to work many times faster, it is necessary that not only the processor cores, but also the memory controller become 512 bits bus width, as in the Apple M2 Max, and not as it is now - shameful 128 bits on all x86.

I have already written many times anywhere - an obvious technological impasse x86 on the memory controller. That is why Intel/AMD are trying to increase the L2/L3 cache at times so that everything is not completely devastating in their camp, against the background of an increasing amount of memory.

At the same time, the same Intel builds tens of gigabytes of HBM memory directly into the Xeon Max processors. But this should have been in a regular consumer processor with many of the same cores for a long time...

I don't know what they will do next, but further increasing the number of cores and threads is completely pointless in such tasks without a cardinal increase in the memory controller bandwidth by an order of magnitude at once – from 500Gbyte/ s to 1Tbyte/s.

[Tondaron]

NikoB, thanks a lot for your explanations. I was asking on adobe's forums about optimization issue with lightroom and photoshop between Intel and adobe's softwares but had no answer.

In regard of this Asus studiobook, I was ready to accept the fact that not having a macbook pro si a waste of raw power versus optimization.

The issue with my unit was application freezes. Windows explorer bugs, lots of slowdowns etc... Experience in game was not good, a lot of stuttering.

Cherry on the cake, the SD card reader's speed... Ô My..... when you have four 128Go card to copy.... @80Mo/s... it's a shame on a "Creator" notebook ;)

[Ednumero]

Hmm, the new display is a better balance between resolution and refresh rate, though I preferred the hardware trackpad buttons on the older model.

I also wish they didn't add the "ProArt" label under the display now, too. The branding of this laptop already alienates non-creators who just want a vibrant display, let alone the calibration issues others are mentioning for their more-canonical target audience. It should just be called "Studiobook".

Why do companies so often saddle positive changes with negative ones?

[Brian Smith]

I'm curious about the color correction error.  I owned this laptop and I found I was getting a delta value of 3-4.5 on the reds and magentas, which I could not correct.

I am curious, is that what the Notebookcheck also noted?
 

I am thinking of getting the Gigabyte Aero 16 instead.  What do you guys think?  I am just really bummed by the horrible speakers on the Aero.  I listen to them all the time while I am working. 

[Pawel]

I've owned this laptop for past two weeks. Straight from the box driver issues, Asus Dial was not working. Probably initial W11P updates brake things meaning Asus software needs work. Now my latest discovery - this "great" SD Express 7.0 Card reader advartised as up to 985MB/s* which I hoped could handle my Sony Tough G cards at smth around 300MB/s and save some space in backpack... Forget about it. Transfers up to 80-85MB/s. External 3 yo reader is 3x faster. What a joke. Don't get fooled by Asus with this like I did. Lastly keyboard not so great for pro Adobe users (using ctrl/shift+arrows with left hand). Most annoying thing is to touch screen while typing with top raw, keys are too close to the screen. Performance wise I've noticed fast export times but really strange and annoying long freezes in Lightroom develop module while for ex.crooping. I had not used it on battery but if performance is worse I would return this laptop if I could :/ What a shame Asus... so disappointed.

[Pawel]

I just want Asus to prove how this Realtek SDXC reader reads over 900MB/s. Othervise they are just liers that hide behind *(may change depending on conditions) which means it just doesn't work.

[RobertJasiek]

"ProArt" label under the display [...]
Why do companies so often saddle positive changes with negative ones?

As to the model label under the display, manufacturers count on first second impressions in stores and disregard years of annoyance for the enduser. The more prominent the label the greater the first second effect and the long-term annoyance become. They think they sell 2 more to instinct buyers and 1 fewer to serious buyers. I expect that opposite.

As to overall changes, manufacturers always try to be cost-efficient. They overlook that many endconsumers do not buy at all if at least one aspect is bad or becomes worse. Manufacturers overlook this so much because they hardly get feedback from non-customers. They are too focused on the loyal customers and plain income reports. Only when sales drop below 50% they might start noticing that their strategy is wrong. We have seen companies quit markets who have started to notice the impact of their earlier decisions. That manufacturers actually fundamentally change the quality of their product designs is the exception. The endconsumers are the victims - not the friends.

[NikoB]

In addition to the deadlock on x86 - the other day Larry Ellison, without restraining himself, said(www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/oracle-bets-on-amd-ampere-cpus-ellison-says-intel-x86-architecture-is-reaching-its-limit-) that the x86 platform as a whole had reached its limits of development (and the memory controller is the main deadlock here, and in the consumer segment this has long been obvious to any IT expert) and it's time move to Arm and GPU-like architectures. At the same time, he said at the moment that Oracle is completely abandoning the Intel Xeon platform in favor of AMD's EPIC, since their energy efficiency and scalability are much higher.

Cheaters at Intel started jacking up TDP a few years ago to stay afloat, losing outright to TSMC's process engineering competition. Now the US is urgently transferring TSMC to the US... And Intel, if it weren't for state subsidies in the EU/US/Israel, would have been bankrupt long ago. the whole company is rotten to the core long ago, and its management has turned into pure parasites, like in most of the old large companies / TNCs.

AMD, on the other hand, depends on the share of x86 in the global market - if everything goes badly for Intel, AMD, as their permanent shadow, if it does not quickly leave x86 for another base, will also gradually be left without business ..

And laptop manufacturers have completely forgotten about what customers need. Their endless nonsense in design and components has already got all the experts, as well as ordinary buyers. But they are also hostages of what Intel offers them - after all, it is Intel that provides 3/4 of the mobile SoC market, and not AMD, which cannot significantly expand production without the absence of its own factories, and they have little interest in the consumer sector, according to them statements...

In companies, there are a lot of extra people who only create a kind of violent activity in order to slowly squander budgets and parasitically continue to exist comfortably, which is clearly seen in the crazy design and the lack of understanding of the target audience more and more..

[julia_top]

€4,000 have gone crazy and also for an intel from 13gen to 10nm. I think we all think the same emphatically NO.

[Photog]

Serious creators, stay away from this laptop [...]
Asus dial looks intersting at first glance, but it is a waste of time in the end (at least for my experience with lightroom and photoshop).[...]

I second that. I've also noticed weird actions in Lightroom with the Dial. When processing thousands of pictures you probably have some specific workflow. I've tried to adjust but moving from one picture to another for faster processing I want to use one function mode and Dial is unusable as it keeps setting from the last picture as a starting point. So imagine wanting to correct exposition form 0,60 to 0,30 but first you need to rotate down to the actual exposition if its different that the setting of a picture you come from. Using multifunction Dial in Lightroom is slower than keyboard+mouse.

Performance is another topic, there is smth strange going on. I recon it might be just bad software that needs some love, but going through support and explaining what's wrong is a pain. It's a peaty that more and more testers are interested in building a hype and pushing sales than giving real world usage review.

This laptop has no advantages for creators. Let's start off with a card reader advertised as fast 985MB/s that achieves around 80MB/s with UHS-II card that's capable of transferring 300MB/s. For me as photoreporter it's a matter of hours saved everyday!