It's been about 2 years since we first saw Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite chips in
laptops, and it was a pretty important step for ARM. But today, Asus is
sponsoring this video to have us take a look at two of their laptops containing
the successor to the Snapdragon X Elite,
the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme. In
front of me are the two updated versions of Asus's 14 and A16 laptops. While the
A14 is a very nice spelt small size,
we're going to be taking a look at the big boy today, the ZenBook A16, which is
a 16-in laptop. I think ASUS has been on somewhat of a hot streak with their
laptops this year. I was really impressed with their ZenBook Duo. We
also liked their expert books for their business lineup, and I have been pretty
keen to check out the Zenbook.
Wow. You know, it's pretty it's pretty light. Is there anything else
interesting in here? No, just documentation. Inside the box, you
obviously get your laptop and I can feel it's using the same Asus exclusive ser
aluminum with magnesium material, which makes this thing both much more durable
than standard aluminum laptops. And it makes this thing really light. I don't
know the exact weight of this specific unit, but the A16 comes as low as 2.65
lb, which is a lot lighter than a MacBook. 2.67. You know what? Being 20 g
off, that's that's pretty close. Also included in the box is a 130 watt
charger, which is higher than I was expecting, but it does thankfully terminate in a USBC port, which means
that we don't have any sort of proprietary connection. Love to see that. Speaking of ports, we do have an
HDMI 2.1 and two USB 4 ports that are
capable of doing 40 Gbits per second. We have a 3.5 mm combo jack and on the
other side, a single USBA and an SD 4.0
card reader. Now, you know what I'm going to say? I would love to see a second USBA port cuz then it's really
easy to attach your peripherals. But this is probably a pretty ideal loadout
for a laptop of this size. And you can still run three displays through these
ports without having to use a dock. And I guess once you're hooked up to your display via USB, you can start using
like the USB ports on your display. So like maybe I'm asking for too much. Ever
think about that? On the bottom, we have ventilation intake as well as an exhaust that goes out the back of the laptop
underneath the display as well as venting for our speakers and some very
slightly very slightly raised feet. Get those fans just barely off the ground.
Man, it's so light. So light. And it's like
Look at how thin this is. This is This is like not This is going to happen in
life, Glenn. You got to You got to understand the keyboard's a standard
chicklet style keyboard. I find that the ASUS keyboards tend to be pretty nice.
That's just my preference. And there's not too much flex. You kind of have to give her, but it is present. Also, ASUS
missed opportunity. Could have made that a button. or like a fingerprint reader, which this doesn't have, but it does
have Windows Hello builtin into the top of the display, which is got tiny little
bezels. Should we turn it on? Let me know in the comments below if we should
turn this laptop on. The A16 features a 16in ASUS aluminina OLED display that is
certified display HDR, true black 1000.
Because it's OLED, it means you're going to have really great contrast ratios. You're going to get 1100 nits of HDR
peak brightness as well as 100% coverage of the DCIP3 color space. And it comes
factory calibrated. if you care less about the productivity side of things and you just want to know if you can
game on it. You do get 120 Hz with a 0.2 millisecond response time. So, it's
going to be good for pretty much anything you're going to throw at this class of laptop. Qualcomm's been like
pretty hard at work on their new chips, and they promise a lot of improvements
to performance, especially when it comes to the GPU. The Snapdragon X2 Elite
Extreme comes with 18 cores on its CPU. 12 of those are high performance prime
CPUs, and six of those are highly efficient performance cores. Their
naming is very funny. They claim that it will deliver up to 64% faster
performance in creative applications compared to the last gen and 2.3% higher
gaming performance versus the prior gen Adreno GPU. 2.3 times, what did I say?
Correction, 2.3 times the performance, not percent, it's much higher than that.
And they also claim that the GPU is getting that much more performance while
being 125% more efficient. But even with
all of the efficiency that you'd find on a Qualcomm powered laptop, that didn't
stop ASUS from packing this thing with a nice large 70Wh battery. Sure, it's not
the biggest batteries. We're seeing a lot of laptops with 99W hours, but I'm
going to hope that the general efficiency of the Snapdragon chip is
going to mean that this is going to get pretty good battery life. I mean, Asus claims 21 plus hours of offline video
playback, which is how everyone uses their laptop, and 12 plus hours of web
browsing for those weirdos out there. In our battery endurance test where we're
doing Plex playback at 1080p in Windows battery saver mode, we saw this laptop
get 13 and 12 hours of battery life. And
in our battery stress test where we just run Cinebench on repeat until the thing
dies. The Asus A16 got an hour and 15
minutes, which is also pretty good and also indicates that this is probably
running at around 65 watts because it's a 70Wh hour battery and if this thing
was pulling 70 watts for a full hour, that would make it die. the math maths
which is kind of crazy. I just don't associate like Snapdragon with like such
high powered chips but actually the Snapdragon XLite 2 can go up to 95 watts
depending on the configuration which is crazy. Compatibility is a fair concern.
I have found that for the most part my apps perform basically identically as
they would on an x86 system. Though I have encountered specific issues with
games like uh UFO 50 where it like boots but like for some reason it doesn't
accept like any inputs so I have to like force close it. It's It's kind of
frustrating cuz I love that game. But there are ongoing efforts to improve
compatibility. In October 2025, Microsoft added AVX2 emulation to
Windows, which allows these chips to have far better performance in software
that requires AVX2. It's like it's getting better. Take a listen to the
speakers here.
At 100%, they're not very good, but up to like
40, they're decent, especially for something this thin. I think that the
speakers on this are completely serviceable, but they're um perfectly
chromulent speakers. Webcam. Webcam. This is a recording on the webcam and
also on the laptop microphones. Uh let us know in the comments how you think it
sounds. For the webcam quality, I have a lot of issues with the image quality.
There's some very clear white balance issues. Like I'm there's like weird
areas where I'm like kind of totally blown out and the color is really off.
It's to me the webcam right now looks like there might be something that's like not quite finalized in terms of
drivers. However, it is still like serviceable webcam and that it shows
images of you. So, hopefully they'll be able to fix this up and make it look a little bit nicer. Cool. I want a game
now. Whoa. Honestly, this looks really
good. There is some upscaling going on, is there? There isn't. There's just some
really bad artifacts in these lights. That's not how that's supposed to look.
Like, they're like goes to show that there's still some
weirdness with the with Qualcomm. But overall, the fact that I am on a laptop
this thin, this lightweight, running a Snapdragon CPU, and I am playing
Cyberpunk at 1920 x 1200 and it's like
totally playable. Sure, it's not the best experience of all time. It's not running at like 120 or anything. It
might not even be all the way at 50. Yeah, this is honestly pretty crazy. It
is not the quietest laptop, but also we're running a pretty thin laptop. If
this is how good it plays Cyberpunk, I'm really interested to see how it performs
in the rest of our gaming tests from Labs. And looking at the Labs results,
it performs pretty dang well. In Cyberpunk 2077, at 1080p, we're getting
50 average FPS with 41 on the 1% lows. That's actually pretty good. On Dota 2,
at the best looking preset, we're getting 88 average FPS, which isn't
particularly high for Dota, but also you could just crank the settings down a
little bit. In Rocket League, at max settings with no anti-aliasing, 151
average, 114 low. Obviously, we know that Qualcomm is capable of like strong
gaming chips with things in VR headsets and stuff, but I'm really surprised to
see them doing so well on the window on like a platform that isn't tailor made
for them. It's on Windows, but I don't think there's a ton of people buying this laptop for gaming, even though
apparently it can. You're probably buying it for, you know, other laptop
stuff. In our benchmarks, like our CPU benchmark performs really well in
Cinebench. In Blender, we render our scene in 4 minutes and 34 seconds, which
is nearly half of last gen. So, that's that's crazy. Now I feel my laptop is
inadequate. In Puget Bench though, we see kind of the first set of caveats. It
does really well in our Photoshop benchmark, but it uh would DNF in both
Da Vinci and Premiere. Now, it actually runs both of these programs pretty well
overall in general use, but there's some sort of compatibility issue with our
specific Puget benchmark, and we're not really sure. And that's the exact kind
of downside that you might encounter on a Qualcomm laptop is like your program
works 99% of the time. And there's one
small weird thing where it's really going to just like struggle. But as we
said, it's getting better. And with chips getting this powerful, we're probably going to be seeing more of
them. And that's going to hopefully mean more interest in supporting the
software. And in the interest of improving this compatibility, Qualcomm's
actually going to be taking over the driver updates instead of asking each specific vendor to make their own
drivers. So hopefully we're going to see more rapid improvements that are going
to broadly apply to all of the Snapdragon chips and they're going to
come out more faster. For our encoding benchmarks, we see great performance in H.264, but lackluster performance with
AV1. And in our archival benchmark, it does a great job with 7zip. And that
might be in part due to the 48 GB of RAM
that is on the chip. It's not soldered
on the board. It is on the SoC itself, which means that it runs really fast.
It's running at 9500 mega transfers per second. A little bit
faster than that actually, which might not make a huge difference in day-to-day usage, but also 48 gigs of RAM is hard
to come by these days. It's interesting to see how the two platforms of x86 as
well as like Snapdragon have been kind of like playing cat-and- mouse. X86 finally has good battery life, but
Qualcomm has really improved their gaming performance, but also they're
still kind of king in performance per watt. Depending on your workload, this thing could be a great choice.
Personally, for my job, this thing's awesome. And it's almost a problem that
it can gain because I'm going to be so much more distracted. Now, we can talk
all we want about power efficiency, but what's also important to know is the price. And this thing comes in at
$1,999.99,
which ain't cheap, but also it's a top-of-the-line CPU in a pretty nice
form factor. If you want to save a couple bucks, you can get basically the
same chip just slightly clocked down for
$1,600. It's still an X2 Elite Extreme. It's
still going to have the same great GPU as well as the same 48 GB of RAM. It's
just going to be a little bit slower. And honestly, seeing how fast this thing is, something to consider. Thanks for
watching ShortCircuit. If you enjoyed this, why don't you check out my video on the Asus Zenbook Duo, a machine that
I am absolutely smitten