Asus Zephyrus M16 2022 Review – One Fatal Flaw…

The Zephyrus M16 from Asus is a high end, powerful, stylish gaming laptop with killer performance, a stunning screen and a fatal flaw that makes it a completely unusable gaming machine. That is such a shame, because otherwise it’s a pretty great laptop – so let me explain.

Spec wise, while you can pick this up in a variety of configurations, the one I have here is the one I’d generally head for which is an i9-12900H, a 6P8E core chip that in turbo mode has a 135W peak power limit, 32GB of DDR5-4800 RAM, an RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU with 8GB of VRAM and a 2TB sort-of PCIe Gen 4 SSD. That’s not bad, and performance isn’t bad either. In jet-engine mode, oh sorry turbo mode, you get chart-topping in game performance. Seriously, this thing can best even the much thicker Aorus 17 XE4, in CSGO it nets not far from 400 FPS average, around 75FPS higher than the XE4. In Cyberpunk it beats out the Aorus machine by 5 FPS, running at 116 FPS average, and with some solid 1% low performance too. Watchdogs is a full 20 FPS faster too, although it basically ties in its balanced/performance mode. Fortnite is again a solid win in turbo, running at 185 FPS, versus 169 FPS from the XE4, although the non-turbo result does lag a little behind – although still very impressive – at around 150 FPS average. Microsoft flight simulator runs at 101 FPS average on medium settings, up from 85 FPS on the XE4, and in Shadow of the Tomb Raider you net 138 FPS average in turbo, or 123 FPS in performance mode, compared to 130 FPS from the Aorus 17.

Native resolution performance, that’s 2560×1600, is expectedly lower, although still pretty decent. You can expect well over 60 FPS in any title on medium to high settings, and pushing for well over 100 FPS in more optimised titles. Not quite enough to match the 165Hz refresh rate in most cases, but a decent enough experience for sure.

Even CPU performance is stand-out – in turbo mode this is, by far, the fastest gaming laptop I’ve tested. In Cinebench R23 it ran at just shy of 19,000 points, or around as fast as a DESKTOP 12700K! It’s pretty incredible, especially from a laptop chip, and well exceeds the next fastest 12700H in that Aorus machine I’ve been going on about already, by over 3,000 points which is going on 22% faster. Mental! The single threaded performance gains are massive, running at just shy of 1,900 points there, up from around 1,750 points from the other 12th gen laptop chips.

But by far the most surprising and impressive results come from Blender, where the 12900H in this takes just over 2 minutes to render the BMW scene, again running 20% faster than the next fastest I’ve tested. In Gooseberry, 20% goes a long way, with the M16 taking a little over 12 minutes to render the frame, down from 15 minutes from the 12700H’s I’ve tested, and AMD’s 6900HS. And compared to my more recent Puget bench suite tests, again in turbo mode the M16 holds a reasonable lead in most cases. Premiere is a soft win, although After Effects couldn’t be more clear, nor could the Photoshop result.

The reason for all this performance though has to do with the power limits. See, in the “Turbo” mode, the chip’s PL1 and PL2 figures get locked to 135W. Yes, you heard that right, 135W. And it hits that. Ok it hits that for like 5 seconds then throttles to more like 107W “stable”, of course running at between 95°c and 101°c the entire time. The outright power or thermals isn’t the fatal flaw in this machine though – let me show you what is.

When you fire up a game and start enjoying those sweet sweet frames, you’ll be having a great time for a little bit… But after about five minutes you’ll start to feel rather uncomfortable. After ten minutes you’ll likely think about stopping playing, and at the fifteen minute mark you’ll give up. Why? Well let me just fire up my temperature sensor and point it at, oh I don’t know, the T key… Ah, 55°c. Ouch. Even holding W starts getting uncomfortable rather quickly, and pressing anything right of D becomes a no-go-zone real fast. I physically couldn’t game on this, on a desk, after around 20 minutes. It just hurt too much. That’s what I’d call a deal breaker.

The key phrase there though was, “on a desk”, because if you lift this up off your desk you get a completely different machine. I got 10 FPS more average performance in Shadow of the Tomb Raider with the laptop lifted off the surface, and keyboard thermals were considerably better. Not fixed, but at least somewhat usable. I think I’ll do a full video on how much performance you can get by lifting your laptop – so make sure you are subscribed so you don’t miss that!

Happily, the display is brilliant. While 16:10 isn’t my personal preference, the impressively crisp, rich and vibrant panel does a great job for everything from gaming to content consumption and creation. In my testing it peaks at 500 nits of max brightness which is plenty for most use cases, and will look good doing it thanks to its 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 spectrum. It will even do it accurately as I measured a DeltaE of under 1 which is fantastic. Of course this will drift over time, but out of the box that’s great!

As for response times, that’s an interesting one. While my fairly strict methodology of a 5 RGB tolerance and including time spent overshooting reports an average of around 7ms, there are a few results that get close enough that a more lax definition could call them “within the refresh rate window”. You do get some overshoot though, which is unusual for a laptop – until you notice that in the Asus Armory Crate software there is a panel overdrive option that’s enabled by default. Turning that off does get rid of the overshoot, but instead introduces the mother of all slow-downs. The average slows to near on 9ms, with the worst results taking between 12 and 14 ms to complete, leading to a decent amount of ghosting on screen, as you can see in the UFO test. It’s far from the worst I’ve seen though, although it’s a toss-up between overdrive on and off which is more noticeable. With overdrive off, the inverse ghosting is visible to the eye and can be more distracting than the slower overall time – plus the shift from bright white to a mid white to gone is more noticeable to my eyes than just a slow trail personally.

As for the keyboard, when it’s not on fire, it’s ok. This is apparently their “Stealth Type Keyboard”, and I’m not sure why but I don’t really like it. It just feels a little off, definitely a little light and possibly not enough tactile feedback for me personally. It is perfectly usable though, that’s just more personal preference. The trackpad though is fantastic, it’s large, easy to use, well supported and has a great tactile click to it. Even the I/O is decent enough, with two USB C ports, one being Thunderbolt 4, two USB A ports, a headphone jack, ethernet, DC in, a microSD card reader and an HDMI port.

Inside you get a spare M.2 slot capable of running a full speed PCIe Gen 4 drive, alongside partially upgradable RAM. Half of your 32GB is soldered, with the other half being here as a SODIMM module – although good luck finding any DDR5 SODIMMs around! From the bottom you can also see where the CPU is, and oh look, that’s where the T key is on the other side! That’d do it, 135W of heat through your fingers!

Overall, if I forget the thermal issue, this is a damn impressive machine. Sporting literally top-of-the-charts performance, a pretty top notch display, and a crazy thin frame, it’d be easy to recommend this as a halo-tier product for someone with a decent chunk of change to splash on a high end gaming laptop. But, thanks to the unbearable heat especially while gaming, I just can’t see this as anything other than one to avoid. Sure, if you can have it lifted 24/7 then maybe, but even then it still can get uncomfortably hot and just makes it a no-go for me.