The Asus Zenbook A16 is an impressive debut for Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2

The Asus Zenbook A14 was one of last year's finest laptops; slim and impossibly light, highly capable and surprisingly affordable. The new Zenbook A16 takes it to another level. It shares aspects of its smaller sibling's elegant design and lightweight construction, its Copilot+ PC AI skills and branding, and its use of a Qualcomm Snapdragon arm processor. But this time, Asus has addressed one criticism of the A14 – its limited processing power – by basing the A16 and a revamped A14 on Qualcomm's cutting-edge Snapdragon X2 architecture, and the top-of-the-range X2 Elite Extreme.

Paired with up to 48GB of RAM, this makes for a laptop that's incredibly powerful for something that almost anyone could heft around single-handed. It's also made it rather less affordable, but then that's a bit of a 2026 theme. Even if it might be too expensive for some budgets, the Zenbook A16 is a low-weight, big-screen laptop to be reckoned with.

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Asus Zenbook A16: Design

In most respects, the Zenbook A16 looks like a scaled-up version of the 2025 A14, down to its attractive but durable Ceraluminium chassis. The matte, stain-resistant finish comes in two tones, Zabriskie Beige and Iceland Grey, and while there's some flex in the lid, the actual shell feels solid and robust.

Even with ultra-slim bezels left and right, this is a noticeably larger laptop, with a 353.5 x 242mm desktop footprint, and rising from 13.8mm to 16.5mm thick in profile, where the old model was just over 13mm. However, it's still only 1.2Kg in weight, which isn't much for a 16in device. Even the similar-looking Acer Swift 16 AI SF16-71T came in at 1.55Kg. There's only just enough weight in the body to hold it down when you open up the lid, though you can still do so one-handed.

The deck is dominated by the keyboard, but also by the unusually large trackpad, measuring 150 x 98mm. It's not quite as big as the 175mm-wide trackpad on the Acer, but this gives you a little more space to rest your wrists while typing, and it's still very smooth and sensitive. With the pointer speed ramped up in Windows from the default, it's relatively easy to navigate complex interfaces or make accurate selections without reaching for a mouse.

As for the keyboard, it's another solid job from Asus. There's plenty of travel, the feel is consistent across the deck, and the layout is sensible and spacious. A full-sized return key without the tilde and hashtag split-key would have been welcome, as would larger Ctrl and Shift keys on the left, but at least Asus hasn't stuck the Power button in the top row where you'd normally expect the Delete key, or tried to cram in a numeric pad. There's nothing cramped about this design, yet it's not too spaced out for comfort, either.

Connectivity is also well considered, with the exception that both USB 4.0 ports are on the left-hand side. You'll need one periodically for charging, and having one on either side gives you a little more flexibility. Beyond these, you have an HDMI 2.1 port and a headphone socket on the left and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port and a full-sized SD card slot on the right. That's enough to cover most needs without a separate dock, and you have Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 to cover networking and wireless peripherals.

Asus Zenbook A16: Display

Big-screen usability and entertainment is the name of the game here, with a stunning 16in OLED display with a 2880 x 1800 QHD+ resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. To our mind, this is the sweet spot for laptop screens if you're working all day long, giving you more space for complex apps and multi-tasking, great clarity and definition, but not a massive desktop footprint. It's bright, reaching 504.8cd/m2 with standard SDR content, and boosting up to nearly 1100cd/m2 peak brightness for HDR. It even has the TrueBlack 1000 DisplayHDR certification to prove it.

As always with OLED, you get deep blacks, subtle, darker shades, and heaps of contrast, plus extremely vivid color. In tests, the Asus's screen covers 100% of the sRGB color space with a 165% gamut volume, plus 93% of Adobe RGB and 99.9% of DCI-P3. There's a sense that a display this brilliant is wasted on Word, Excel, and Google Workspace, but it's perfect for image-editing, streaming video, or other apps where it gets a chance to shine. 4K movies and trailers look fantastic. They also sound more than decent, thanks to a six-speaker Dolby Atmos audio system, which can dish out a clear, beefy, and surprisingly immersive sound at low to medium volumes, though the output can sound harsh at higher levels.

The 1080p webcam is a little basic for a laptop at this price point, capturing good, well-exposed footage in daylight and artificial light, but struggling slightly with noise in gloomier conditions. Still, it's fine for video calls and meetings, where the built-in mic does a decent job of capturing your voice without picking up unwanted sounds or music in the background.

Asus Zenbook A16: Performance

The Zenbook A16 is a debut for the Snapdragon X2 family, specifically the high-end X2 Elite Extreme (surely the one hyperbolic suffix would have done the job). The variant here is the X2E-94-100, featuring 18 of Qualcomm's new Gen 3 Oryon 3nm cores running at 4.45GHz with a boost to 4.7GHz, with an eight-core Adreno X2 GPU running at up to 1.85GHz. The Qualcomm Hexagon NPU has also been upgraded, providing 80 TOPS of AI processing instead of 45.

The X2 Elite Extreme is paired with 48GB of RAM, installed within the same chip package. This means there's no scope for upgrades, but that's not much of an issue when there's so much bandwidth (228GB/sec) and when 48GB is enough to cover anything from video editing to running local LLMs.

The Snapdragon X Elite was the first ARM64 processor for Windows that could go toe-to-toe with Intel and AMD's best chips, but the X2 Elite Extreme is an even more fearsome contender. In Geekbench 6, we recorded a single-core score of 3724 and a multi-core score of 21914, making mincemeat of the 2900 and 16920 delivered by the Intel Core Ultra X9 in the Asus Zenbook Duo (2026), and beating the mighty HP ZBook Ultra G1A with its 16-core Ryzen Max+ 395 on multi-core performance. The HP scored 2905 and 18083 in the same tests. This is a thin and light, energy-efficient laptop pushing ahead of a workstation-class device. It's extremely impressive.

We still can't run PCMark10 on ARM64 laptops, but we can run Cinebench 2024 in order to test their compute-heavy 3D rendering performance. Here, the Zenbook A16 scores 149 for single-core performance and 1433 for multi-core. The Zenbook Duo scored 127 and 929 in the same tests, and even the Asus ProArt P16 creator laptop, with its 12-core Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 could only hit 117 and 1156.

There's stiffer competition from the M5 MacBook Pro, which scored an incredible 4248 for single-core performance, but the Qualcomm CPU still pulls ahead on multi-core, as the M5 tops out at 15234. It's a similar tale in Cinebench 2024, where the M5 wins on single core with a score of 201, only to fall behind on multi-core, with 1179.

This is a phenomenal result for Qualcomm and the A16, but the good news doesn't stop there. If the last-gen Snapdragon X processors had a failing, it was that GPU performance lagged behind AMD and Intel's latest integrated GPUs. The Adreno X2 is a big improvement. The Zenbook A16 scores 5351 in 3DMark's Steel Nomad (Lite) test and 1022 in the tougher Steel Nomad. That's not far behind the 5498 and 1343 scored by the Zenbook Duo with its Core Ultra X9 388H, and you'd really have to look to AMD's Ryzen Max+ 395 to see significantly faster integrated graphics.

It's also worth noting that these performance figures are with pre-release firmware and drivers. Qualcomm has claimed that launch drivers and firmware (unavailable at the time of writing) will boost benchmark figures even further. What's more, the A16 still runs quietly. We noticed some fan noise while running Cinebench 2024 or 3D games, but it's close to silent when running mainstream business apps.

Of course, performance was a moot point in the days when ARM64 CPUs struggled with compatibility issues and relied mostly on emulation to get Windows apps to run, but the situation has changed dramatically since the Snapdragon X series launched. There are native ARM64 versions of most of the big hitters, including Microsoft and Adobe's key apps, and the only real caveat is that some app versions lag behind the Windows and MacOS versions, causing trouble if, say, you're working on Adobe InDesign files across a team running different hardware. Meanwhile, Microsoft's PRISM emulation layer does a solid job of covering where there's no native app.

You'll still find some peripherals without working ARM64 drivers, but as someone who uses a Snapdragon X Elite laptop as a daily driver, we'd say that it's not a massive issue. Even games are running these days. You might find problems with some recent releases, such as Doom: The Dark Ages or Crimson Desert, but we had Resident Evil: Village and A Plague Tale: Requiem up and running on the Zenbook A16, and they were perfectly playable on low to medium graphics settings, and still looked great.

Energy efficiency has been another key focus for Qualcomm, and while we couldn't match the 21 hours plus of use on a single charge that Asus claims in its marketing, we still got 17 hours and 43 minutes of HD video playback with the brightness set to 170 nits. That's in line with what we've seen from recent 16in laptops, though a little short of the 20 hours and 6 minutes we had from the Acer Swift 16 AI and the nearly 21 hours we saw from Asus's ExpertBook Ultra. Both of these used Intel's Panther Lake chips.

If the battery life is more solid than outstanding, the Zenbook A16 is no slouch when it comes to charging. Plugged into its 130W charger, the Zenbook A16 can recover 52% of its battery in 30 minutes.

Asus Zenbook A16: Is it worth it?

Yes. With the Acer Swift 16 AI, we were impressed with how a 16-in laptop could deliver great performance and big-screen usability in such a slim and light package. Asus's new rival gives you even more power on tap in an even slimmer, lighter body. The screen is incredible and the sound impressive, and there's little reason for business users to avoid the Snapdragon architecture these days unless they're running legacy software or specific hardware that needs an x86 processor to run. Games may be a different story, but for professional purposes, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme does an outstanding job.

In fact, the only reason to hold back is the price. £2099 is reasonable for a laptop with these capabilities and this performance, not to mention the generous 48GB of RAM, but that price point moves the Zenbook A16 out of the more affordable market segment of the original A14. Next to the Acer Swift 16 AI, it might look pricey. Given the performance and all-around quality, the A16 justifies the extra, and this is the top-of-the-range spec. Less expensive versions should be coming down the line.

Asus Zenbook A14 Specifications