16 inch gaming laptops that are the size of 15 inch models are getting much more popular,
and ASUS have joined this trend with their new Zephyrus M16 gaming laptop, so let’s
find out what this model has to offer us in this review.
I’ve got one of the higher specced options with 8 core Intel i9-11900H processor, Nvidia
RTX 3070 graphics, 16 gigs of memory, a 1TB SSD, and a 16” 165Hz screen, but there are
also other examples, you can check out examples and other prices with the links down in the
description.
The M16 has a dark finish and the build quality feels nice.
The interior is black and has a soft touch finish, no sharp corners or edges anywhere.
The laptop alone weighs about 2kg or 4.5lb, then 2.8kg or 6.1lb total with the 230 watt
power brick and cables.
It’s on the thinner side like other laptops from the Zephyrus lineup, and really similar
to many other 15” laptops despite the larger 16” screen.
There’s basically no bottom screen chin, it’s mostly viewing area with a high 94%
screen to body ratio.
The 16” 165Hz screen has a 16:10 resolution of 2560 by 1600, so higher than 1440p, just
like the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro and Legion 7, but unlike those laptops the M16 does not
give us the option to disable optimus, but at least it has adaptive sync.
The color gamut was excellent for a gaming laptop, contrast was decent, and it almost
got to 500 nits at maximum brightness and was still above 300 nits at 80%.
The ASUS Armoury Crate software, the control panel for the laptop, gives us the option
to enable or disable panel overdrive.
With overdrive on, which is the default, there was some overshoot and undershoot, but we’re
getting a 4.4ms average grey-to-grey response time, but expect lower results with the slower
144Hz option.
It’s doing quite well when compared against others, one of the faster results I’ve recorded,
and right in line with the other 165Hz 2560 by 1600 panels measured in the Legion 5 Pro
and Legion 7 laptops.
This is the amount of time it takes from a mouse button press to when a gunshot fires
in CS:GO as tested with Nvidia’s LDAT.
The total system latency was on the lower side, a good result considering laptops that
let us disable optimus generally see a boost here.
Mine had some backlight bleed along the bottom left.
I didn’t personally ever notice this during regular use, but this will vary between laptops
and panels anyway.
There’s a 720p camera above the screen in the middle, no IR for Windows Hello though.
This is what the camera and microphone look and sound like, this is what it sounds like
while I’m typing on the keyboard, and this is what it sounds like if I set the fan to
full speed, so it’s not doing the best job of isolating my voice over the fan noise.
The chiclet keyboard has a single zone of RGB backlighting, and all keys and secondary
functions get lit up.
There are 3 levels of brightness available with the F2 and F3 shortcuts, while F4 will
cycle through limited effects - there’s only so much you can do without per-key customization.
Typing on it was alright, it’s got 1.7mm of key travel and I thought it was a little
clicky feeling, I’m just not personally a fan of the small arrow keys.
The power button is separate to the keyboard, so less chance of accidentally pressing it,
and it’s also a fingerprint scanner, which I found to work quite fast and accurately.
The glass precision touchpad is big.
It’s smooth to the touch, clicks down anywhere, and works very nicely, and despite the larger
size I never had any problems with it getting in the way while typing or playing a game.
Fingerprints showed up easily on the soft touch finish, it just really seems to show
dirt and oil, but it’s easy enough to clean with a microfiber cloth.
The left has an air exhaust vent, the power input, HDMI 2.0b output, gigabit ethernet
port facing the preferred way so you don’t have to lift the laptop when unplugging, a
USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A port, two Type-C ports, the first is Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 while
the second is USB 3.2 Gen2, followed by a 3.5mm audio combo jack.
The right just has a second USB Type-A port, but slower 3.2 Gen1 this time, a MicroSD card
slot, air exhaust vent, and Kensington lock, so if you’re a right handed mouse user having
most of the cables on the left should be preferable.
Now both of the Type-C ports can be used to charge the laptop, and they both also offer
DisplayPort 1.4 support, however both the Thunderbolt 4 and HDMI ports connect to the
Intel integrated graphics.
Only the front most Type-C port connects directly to the Nvidia graphics, bypassing optimus,
and I’ll show you a bit later how much of a speed boost this gives us in games.
The front is just clean, not even an indentation to help with opening, which sometimes I did
find a little more challenging compared to other laptops as there’s just less to grip
onto, but the screen goes the full 180 degrees back for sharing.
The back has air exhaust vents and you can see the status LEDs, at least when the lid
is closed.
Opening the lid raises the back of the laptop up, which both helps air get in underneath
for cooling and slightly inclines the keyboard while typing.
This results in the back of the lid holding up the rear of the laptop with these small
rubber feet towards the corners, and I’m guessing that it’s this sort of lift up
design that results in a little more keyboard flex, though it felt solid during normal use,
but the screen sometimes had a bit of wobble while typing hard.
Flex to the actual lid itself wasn’t too bad though.
The lid has a rainbow prismatic film material behind it, and you can see it through the
8279 CNC machined holes from different angles depending on the light.
The bottom panel just has some air vents towards the back and speakers near the front, and
as we can see here there are actually holes directly above the fans.
Getting inside requires removing 13 Phillips head screws of two different lengths, and
three in the center are covered by rubber for some reason, while the front right screw
doesn’t come out and makes it easier to open using the tools linked in the description.
Inside we’ve got the 90Wh battery down the front, two M.2 slots for storage just above
on the left and right, single memory slot above near the middle and Wi-Fi 6 card to
the left.
Like other laptops from the Zephyrus series, there’s either 8 or 16 gigs of memory soldered
to the motherboard to keep the machine on the thinner side, so you’ve just got the
one SODIMM slot for upgrades.
You need a stick installed in order to run in dual channel, and officially it supports
up to 48 gigs total if you get the 16 gig soldered model and put a 32 gig stick in.
There are 6 speakers in total, two front facing tweeters on either side of the keyboard, and
dual woofers on either side underneath.
I thought they sounded alright, a little above average with some bass, though that’s harder
to notice at higher volumes.
The latencymon results were looking good too.
Speaking of sounds, it plays this one by default on boot.
You can disable it through armoury crate or the bios though, but apparently a lot more
of you than I expected seem to like boot sounds.
The M16 has a 4-Cell 90Wh battery, however I didn’t find the battery life to be that
impressive, lasting close to 5 and a half hours in the YouTube playback test, and this
was with the iGPU mode enabled.
This option basically disables the Nvidia discrete graphics to prevent random apps from
attempting to wake it up, resulting in battery drain, because during the video playback test
it should already be idle and not required.
Like other ASUS laptops, the M16 automatically lowers the screen’s refresh rate down to
60Hz and disables panel overdrive automatically when you unplug, a nice battery saving feature
that I wish other laptops had.
Let’s check out thermals next.
The Armoury Crate software lets us change between different performance profiles, which
from lowest to highest are silent, performance, turbo and manual, and you can also swap between
them easily with the F5 shortcut.
You can only use up to performance mode when running on battery power.
Both turbo and manual modes apply the following overclock to the GPU, while manual mode also
lets us adjust power limit sliders for the CPU and adjust fan speed.
There are plenty of heat pipes inside, and there’s Thermal Grizzly liquid metal on
the CPU.
The 3070 graphics are listed as 80 to 100 watts with dynamic boost on the ASUS website,
and while I confirmed mine could run at 100 watts with the CPU idle, with the CPU also
under stress test I found the GPU could run at 65 watts.
The BIOS also allows us to undervolt the processor by up to -0.08v.
The idle results down the bottom are quite warm compared to others.
I’ve run stress tests with both the CPU and GPU loaded up to represent a worst case,
as well as playing an actual game.
Overall the temperatures are very impressive here, worst case the CPU is like 80 degrees
in turbo mode, most other laptops are reaching 90, 95, maybe even 100 degrees in these tests.
Manual mode with the fan maxed out was able to lower this further, then if you really
wanted to, the cooling pad I use, linked down in the description, offered further improvements.
These are the clock speeds from the same tests.
The i9-11900H has an all core turbo boost speed of 4.4GHz, which is almost reached best
case in the game, but we’re a way off in the stress test.
The GPU clock speeds don’t really change in turbo or manual modes, despite the overclocks,
maybe there’s not enough power.
The GPU was running up to 80 watts at times, which is the best we can expect from the 3070
in the m16 as higher with dynamic boost requires the CPU to not be loaded up.
The CPU was using more power in manual mode or with the cooling pad, apparently at the
expense of GPU power, it appears that at the cooler temperatures dynamic boost shifts the
power in this way.
Anyway I’m surprised that we don’t have a higher GPU power limit given how cool the
internals were earlier.
Here’s how an actual game performs with the different modes in use.
Manual was giving the best results in this title, though turbo was close.
Silent was just under 60 FPS, but in a more CPU heavy game like Watch Dogs earlier it
felt more stuttery.
Here’s how the different modes perform in Cinebench R23, a CPU only workload with the
GPU now idle.
Now interestingly turbo mode was doing better than manual mode in multi core score, and
this is because in a CPU only workload I found that turbo mode would run the CPU at around
85 watts, while manual mode maxes out at 65 watts.
Undervolting the CPU was able to give us a 5% boost to multicore.
This just doesn’t seem ideal to me, manual mode should be the best as it’s the one
that gives us fan control as well as access to those power limit sliders.
I think the PL1 slider should just go higher than 65 watts, or at least have the option
to go higher if the GPU isn’t active.
Despite the higher CPU power limit seen in turbo mode, manual mode did seem to have an
edge in gaming, as we just saw earlier, which is why I used manual mode to test all of the
upcoming games.
It’s doing well compared to others, and I’ve used the best results for comparing.
The single core score is one of the best I’ve recorded, only rivaled by other Intel 11th
gen laptops, though the Ryzen options aren’t too far behind there.
The multicore score is decent too, both beating and being beaten by other Ryzen options.
The single core score doesn’t really change when running on battery power, however the
multicore score drops back a fair bit comparatively.
A lot of other ASUS Ryzen based laptops seem to be able to do quite well here, but the
Intel based M16 and S17 are down.
The middle of the keyboard is warmer compared to most other laptops I test, which typically
sit in the low 30 degrees Celsius range, expected I suppose with the warmer internal temps noted
while idle earlier, though it didn’t really change much once the combined stress tests
were running.
Performance mode gets a little warmer right in the center, and then it’s the same for
turbo mode, reaching the mid 50s, quite warm and starting to approach hot but not too uncomfortable.
Manual mode with max fan was cooler, but it’s also louder as you’ll hear soon, but in
all tests the WASD area was much cooler comparatively as air passes through the keyboard.
Now some of you mentioned in the comments that you wanted to hear more about the hot
air blowing onto the bottom of the screen and if this was going to be a problem.
I asked ASUS and they told me that they’ve done long term tests at high temperatures
and haven’t found any problems.
I can’t say that I’ve personally heard of anyone having a laptop screen die or anything
due to heat on the bottom of the screen, so I don’t know if it’s actually an issue
in practice, but yeah based on lots of laptops having this sort of design now, while it might
not be ideal it doesn’t seem to be causing any problems.
Now let’s have a listen to the fan noise.
The fan was audible when idling, but it was very quiet.
It gets louder at the higher modes, and is very loud in the highest manual mode with
it manually maxed out.
Personally I view this as a positive, because I prefer having user choice, if you want it
quieter, then do that, but if you’ve got headphones on and want maximum cooling at
the expense of noise, then you can do that too rather than being stuck one way or the
other.
Now let’s find out how well this configuration of M16 compares against others in games.
Cyberpunk 2077 was tested in little China with the street kid life path, and I’ve
got the M16 highlighted in red.
Let’s start with 1080p results, as I’ve got more data at that resolution.
I’ve pretty much only got current gen laptops to compare with as this is a newer game and
I’m not able to keep the laptops I review.
In any case it’s actually ahead of some other RTX 3070 laptops that have higher GPU
power limits and a MUX switch, like the MSI GP76, though that does also have a 6 core
Intel CPU.
Unfortunately I’ve got less data at the higher 1440p resolution because those screens
are still relatively new.
The M16 is one of the lower results now relative to the other laptops, but hey it’s still
ahead of the Zephyrus G15 with similar wattage RTX 3080 graphics just below it, while the
much smaller Blade 14 is a couple of FPS ahead.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the game’s benchmark.
At 1080p the M16 is one of the lowest scores I’ve got in this game.
The much cheaper HP Omen 15 with a similar wattage RTX 3070 is nearby though, and it’s
still ahead of the quad core TUF Dash F15 a couple of positions below.
Stepping up to 1440p and things don’t really change, the M16 is still below most of these
other laptops, granted most of the results are also from 3080 laptops as those just happen
to be the specs I’ve gotten that have actually been paired with screens that can support
this resolution.
Control was tested running through the same part of the game on all laptops.
At 1080p we’re looking much better compared to red dead redemption 2 just before it.
The M16 is slightly ahead of the higher wattage 3070 in Alienware’s m15 R5, and some of
the lower wattage 3080 options are only just a few FPS ahead - again all options without
MUX switch.
Moving up to 1440p and once more the M16 is lower compared to others, but almost 60 FPS
in Control at max settings before activating DLSS sounds alright to me at this higher resolution.
I’ve also tested the M16 in way more games at the native 2560 by 1600 resolution in this
video over here, so refer to that one if you want to get a better idea of how well it runs
in games at the resolution you’ll actually be playing at.
I just had to test 1080p and 1440p for the purposes of comparison as those are the resolutions
that I’ve got data for.
16:10 gaming laptops are still relatively new.
Now as I mentioned earlier we can boost gaming performance by connecting an external screen
to the front most Type-C port, as this will bypass the integrated graphics, alleviating
the bottleneck.
We’re almost looking at a 15% boost to average FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider with this
simple change, putting it a couple of FPS ahead of the larger and higher specced S17
just below it, though my S17 was also constrained by optimus and could also receive a performance
boost with an external screen too.
Here are the results from 3DMark for those that find them useful.
Now for some creator tests.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark.
The M16 was able to give me one of the best scores I’ve ever seen in this test, only
behind the higher specced Zephyrus S17, implying that 11th gen Tiger Lake laptops do quite
well here.
Adobe Photoshop generally depends on CPU performance, however the M16 was quite a bit lower compared
to the S17 with the same 11900H processor this time, but still a good result and ahead
of a number of Ryzen options with similar GPUs.
This testing was done in manual mode, I suspect the higher CPU power limit of turbo mode might
boost it higher.
DaVinci Resolve is more GPU heavy, and the M16 was doing fairly well here, beating some
higher wattage 3070 laptops.
Again I guess tiger lake is giving it an edge, as the S17 with the same 11900H is at the
top of the 3080 results.
I’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads.
The 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD is doing extremely well for the read speeds thanks to PCIe 4.0, the
writes are lower comparatively, but still reasonable.
11th gen Tiger Lake systems provide 20 lanes of PCIe 4, the RTX 3070 is using 8 lanes,
but ASUS only note the primary M.2 slot offers PCIe 4, so not sure what they’re doing with
the other 4 lanes as the 2nd M.2 slot is apparently PCIe 3.
The MicroSD card slot was basically maxing out my V90 card.
The card clicks in and sits the entire way in the machine.
The BIOS has the standard options that most other ASUS laptops have, however there’s
a section in here for undervolting the processor, which can go as low as the -0.08v as mentioned
earlier, and it has TPM 2.0.
I booted an Ubuntu 21 live CD to test Linux support.
Out of the box the touchpad, keyboard, speakers, ethernet and camera worked, but Wi-Fi wasn’t
recognized and the keyboard shortcuts for screen brightness and keyboard brightness
didn’t work.
Let’s discuss pricing and availability next.
Prices will of course change over time, so refer to those links down in the description
for updates.
At the time of recording, I haven’t been able to find the RTX 3070 model that I’ve
tested here yet.
I’ve only been able to find the RTX 3060 model available, but with same CPU, screen
and total memory capacity.
It’s $1850 USD, so definitely on the more expensive side for a 3060 laptop.
Higher price is generally going to be the case in order to get good features in a thinner
chassis, like the screen for instance which is excellent.
It’s got good response time, good color gamut and it gets quite bright.
Now a problem with thinner laptops is generally they get hotter, but that wasn’t the case
with the M16, in fact I was quite surprised with just how cool it ran.
Even with the higher RTX 3070 model that I’ve got here the internals didn’t get hot at
all.
Worst case getting up to like 81 degrees Celsius, which is relatively cool compared to other
gaming laptops tested.
Now that said, the middle of the keyboard area could get fairly warm when under heavy
load, and I’m guessing that must be the reason why they haven’t given us an RTX
3070 with even higher power limit, despite the internal temperatures appearing to be
under control.
Unfortunately this does result in lower gaming performance, but it’s a trade off in order
to get a balanced system, but that said at the same time personally I would prefer a
slightly thicker system to get that extra power.
Speaking of less performance, I hope we can get a software update that gives us more control
over the CPU power limit in manual mode when in a CPU only workload like Cinebench, otherwise
turbo mode technically performs better there but without fan control.
The single memory slot is a downside of the thinner design, but I suppose most people
that get the 16 gig soldered to the board version are going to be perfectly fine with
32 gigs in dual channel.
A lack of MUX switch is also partly responsible for the lower gaming performance, but as we’ve
seen it is possible to attach an external screen and get that speed boost.
I suppose addition of a MUX switch might of increased the cost further, but I think it
would be worth it for that boost, because as we saw it could be quite large.
Battery life wasn’t as good as Ryzen alternatives, but the i9-11900H generally stacked up fairly
well when it came to performance.
For me personally, the M16 just seems a little too expensive for the level of performance
on offer, there are definitely much cheaper 3060 gaming laptops, but at the same time
their build quality and design also won’t be as nice as this, again it’s a trade off.
At the end of the day it just depends what your priorities are.
Check out this video next if you want to see how well the M16 performs in a number of games
at the native 2560 by 1600 resolution, get subscribed if you’re new to the channel
for future laptop reviews like this one, and come and join me in Discord and get behind
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