The Ultimate Mobile Workstation – Asus ProArt StudioBook Pro 16 OLED Review
Asus thinks that this is the ultimate mobile workstation for creators. A slim, sleek machine with some pretty insane specs, and a feature list as long as my arm all tailored for creators. This is the Asus ProArt StudioBook Pro 16 OLED, yes they really put ‘Pro’ in there twice, but it’s actually somewhat deserved. Let me explain.
Most devices that bare the “pro” label normally indicate either that it’s a slightly higher end version of a standard model that might cater more to enthusiast users, or it’s their way of saying “we stripped out all the useful features in the standard model and are now charging more to give them back to you”. With this? No it’s actually pretty serious.
Take the display. This is a 3840×2400 panel which, while not exactly conforming to many common media standards, gives you more vertical space to work with while editing. It gets impressively bright at a peak of 550 nits, it’s not quite perfect for direct sunlight or outdoor use but if you’ve got even a modicum of shade, or more realistically you are indoors you should be fine. It covers 100% of the DCI-P3 spectrum meaning it’s as vibrant as you could ever hope for, and yes comes factory calibrated with a DeltaE of just 1.73, well shy of the 2.0 limit for the human eye.
Being an OLED, it’s also practically instant in it’s response time. While that’s a measure normally applied to gaming machines, it’s still relevant for creators as assessing your work in motion (animations and after effects work for example) is important and having the screen smear and blur your work as it moves isn’t what you want.
There are two main downsides to this otherwise absolutely stunning display and neither have to do with the panel itself. The first is the glossy finish, it catches the light very easily and in bright environments can make it difficult or even impossible to work as you just physically can’t see anything on screen. I’m sure for the vast majority of use cases this wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it would have been nice to see a matte coating here instead to help diffuse and deflect ambient light.
The second is the touchscreen, or lack thereof. Even if this isn’t designed to be an Art machine – despite its name – it still would have been nice to have even basic touchscreen support. I’m sure that point will divide people so feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments – it all boosts engagement – but for me I know I’d find it useful every now and again and if they could include proper stylus support, well that’s even better.
Specs wise, much in the same way the display isn’t some standard gaming panel passed of as “for creators”, the specs aren’t either. This machine is rocking a Xeon, specifically a W-11955M, which is basically an i9-11900H with a few ‘workstation’ features like ECC memory support and total memory encryption. It’s actually slightly higher clocked, with a 2.6GHz base clock and up to 5GHz boost, although in this machine it generally runs slightly slower than the 11900H I tested in the Zephyrus M16. It also rocks 64GB of DDR4-3200 RAM modules, which, yes, are ECC or error correcting modules. This really isn’t just a gaming machine tarted up.
On top of that, you get 4TB of NVME SSD space, in RAID 0 no less. One of the two M.2 slots does support PCIe Gen 4 as it’s directly connected to the CPU, although Asus have gone with two Micron Gen 3 2TB NVMe SSDs here which is perfectly fine. Personally I’m somewhat against using RAID 0 here as while Asus are clearly confident in the reliability, it seems like a step backwards to me. If you care about getting up to 7GB/s in reads and writes, use a large Gen 4 drive, otherwise in this setup if the machine itself fails or gets damaged to the point where it won’t boot, all of your data is gone. At least with a single drive you can just remove it and plug it into another PC and read the data, but with RAID 0 only this specific motherboard knows how it split all your data up. If you do buy one of these, make sure you have a good backup solution.
Next is the GPU – this is also workstation specific – an RTX A5000 Laptop. It’s basically an RTX 3080 Laptop, has the same number of cores and can run at similar TDPs, this one is meant to be rated at between 80W and 110W, although I clocked it at around 155W at its peak. The biggest difference though is in the VRAM. This has 16GB of GDDR6 for you to play with. Yeah. I think that’s a decent amount, don’t you?
On the topic of power, the CPU can kick back a cool 92W in it’s “Rendering” mode. In theory it should be able to spike all the way to 109W which is it’s PL2 limit, but thanks to the aggressively quiet fan curves it never got that high. In fact, even in it’s “Rendering” mode, the machine was really pretty insistent on remaining as quiet as possible which is a nice change from most gaming machines that turn into jet engines at the mere sight of a game or render. In it’s normal mode it did its very best to not spin up the fans almost at all, so for working on a quiet train or set this does a great job.
It’s worth covering the performance of that Xeon too. Starting with Cinebench R20 single threaded, in the rendering mode it’s actually the first chip to break 600 points, making it the fastest single thread chip I’ve tested. That’s likely thanks to its up to 5GHz single core boost speed compared to the 11900H, which is only a couple points behind it.
In multi threaded thanks to the i9’s much more aggressive boost and willingness to abuse its fans it holds a pretty decent lead over the Xeon, of around 500 points comparing Turbo to Rendering modes. The 11955M actually falls behind AMD’s more mid-range 8 core, the 5800H, which interestingly draws between 10 and 20 watts less power while doing so.
Moving onto Blender, rendering the BMW scene, again the 11900H is technically faster here although you can quite clearly see the difference between the normal and rendering modes where the standard mode takes 52 seconds longer to render the same scene – that’s 25% slower!
In the Gooseberry render that difference is only made worse thanks to this being a much more complex, and therefore lengthy, render. Switching to the “Rendering” mode saves you just over 4 minutes to render this one frame. 4 minutes! Can you imagine forgetting to switch this over and wasting 20% more time than you needed to? That’d be painful. With that said, in it’s high performance mode it does offer reasonable performance although is still slower than the 11900H and a number of the 5th gen Ryzen chips.
In Puget Bench for Premiere Pro again it performs well, but it only really ties with the Ryzen options and gets trounced by the 11900H, by over 100 points no less. In Puget’s After Effects test it actually ran as one of the slower options – still well performing for sure, but again the 11900H is practically lightyears ahead. And finally in Photoshop it’s a similar story, although this time only a couple of points shy of the i9 and otherwise ahead of everything else.
It’s not all about the performance though, especially when you get some rather nice creator-specific features like this dial. This, much like the Surface Dial, is meant to be a one size fits all place where depending on the application you have a number of controls at your fingertips. In Premiere you can have it zoom in and out on the timeline or skip back and forward, in After Effects you can.. Scroll in and out on the timeline.. And in Photoshop you can.. Zoom in and out…
So here’s the thing. I absolutely love this idea. Having controls on a physical dial you can spin around with tactile notches as it turns, that’s amazing. The trouble is, the implementation needs work. The physical dial, while screwed in on all four corners internally, isn’t all that well supported. It’s got a little too much play in it side to side, and even the button which lets you switch and select different tools is mushy throughout its long travel. I also feel like the steps in it’s rotation are a little too far apart. It all adds to a less premium feel than I’d like.
On the software side, it only works with Premiere, Photoshop, After Effects and Lightroom, and even then it’s got a pretty small list of options you can choose from, and none are really suited for a dial like this. Zooming in and out on the timeline is something I map to Z and SHIFT+Z and is arguably easier to use than to take my hand off the keyboard and spin the dial. Surprisingly even in the Photoshop options you don’t get things like brightness, curves or HSL controls – only in Lightroom do you have those options. This is the same issue with the dedicated action button on the right side of the space bar – I love the idea but all the options you have are all things you can use standard hotkeys for and you often wouldn’t need to move your hands to press them. I’d love to see more options to choose from here, and more programs supported!
Interestingly, despite not having any touchscreen support, they did decide to add 1024 level pressure sensitivity to the touchpad, so I guess if you do want to draw with this, on the fairly small for a drawing surface touchpad, you can. What’s more unique though is the triple mouse buttons. This is actually a pretty big deal, as the number of programs (especially 3D ones) that require the middle mouse button is astonishingly high. This is a great addition, although is somewhat downplayed by the weirdly mushy button action. They have such long travel but again are definitely on the mushy side which again leads to a less premium feel than I’d like.
As for the I/O – they’ve really paid attention to detail here, with the key point for me being the SD Express 7.0 reader, which can read at just shy of 1GB/s. That’s a massive step up from what is often a USB 2 SD card reader in many other machines, and is something I can see prospective owners of these making good use of. For anything else, they’ve included both USB A and C ports running USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, aka 20Gbps, AND Thunderbolt 4 with up to 40Gbps. For displays, that’s HDMI 2.1 which is great to see available, and you even get up to 2.4Gbps from this absolutely adorably small Intel WiFi module built onto the board.
The built in speakers are Harmon Kardon branded, and while not absolutely perfect and still bottom firing, they are remarkably clear even when loud and offer an impressive if a little harsh range. I can’t say I’d edit from them alone, but in a pinch I wouldn’t be mad about making use of them.
They even went all out and got this ISV certified with Adobe and Autodesk, and even give you three months of free Creative Cloud subscription. Not too bad. Oh and before anyone asks, yes this games remarkably well. I’ll throw up the charts so you can see it’s performance but it’s basically an RTX 3080 Laptop and 11900H so beyond some driver performance it’s perfectly capable should you want to game on it in your spare time.
So, is this absolute beast worth buying? Sadly I’m not 100% sure on pricing, but it’s reasonable to assume this won’t be cheap. For your money you do get a lot though, it’s very clearly a proper mobile workstation rather than a high power consumer laptop, and sporting ECC RAM, a Xeon W chip and what used to be called a Quadro GPU shows it. At the moment for me the dial is a bit of a gimmick, but with some software tweaks I can see it being incredibly useful. The display is stunning, like seriously it’s easily one of the best panels I’ve seen full stop, and editing on it is amazing. I’m used to editing on multiple monitors so it is a bit of a down-size, but I think it’d be hard to beat this level of performance and portability, on top of such a gorgeous display.
As a business expense, I can see this making its way into a lot of creator’s hands. I expect it’s going to be pretty unobtainable otherwise, but they do sell lower spec versions and Ryzen models too if you’d prefer the lower power consumption albeit also dropping Thunderbolt support. It could definitely do with some refinements, but as a package for creators they’ve done a remarkable job.
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TechteamGB Score
