Asus ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED
A staggeringly powerful workstation with a gorgeous OLED screen and a time-saving integrated dial
SCORE
PRICE £2,083 (£2,500 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk
Allow me to dangle temptation into your path: a mobile workstation not only packed with so much creative power it would make George Lucas weep, but one that integrates a time-saving dial that’s perfect for scrubbing through timelines and fine-tuning settings.
Still on the fence? How about a glorious 16in AMOLED screen, 2TB of RAID storage and one of the finest keyboards I’ve ever used? The ProArt Studiobook isn’t perfect – read on to discover its quirks – but if you sit unmoved, then your creative heart has surely turned to stone.
Full circle
I’ll start with the most intriguing inclusion, the Asus Dial. If you’re in Windows, pressing it reveals a choice of two segments (think Trivial Pursuit): volume and brightness. Highlight a segment, press down and then you have fine control over the level, so you can scroll instantly from 0 to 100. A two-year-old can master this.
I love that the controls skip so easily between granular (say, from 80% brightness to 81%) and sweeping, so it takes a moment to move from 0% to 100%. That’s merely convenient for brightness, but could be a colossal time-saver in tasks that otherwise involve fiddly mouse movement.
Asus is launching the laptop with support for a bunch of
Adobe apps, including
Photoshop, Premiere and
After Effects. I tried it out in Photoshop, where it allows you to cycle through open images, zoom in and out, access brush effects (this brings up a submenu of brush options, so you can choose brush opacity, for example) and quickly undo recent changes. I expect more options will come in the future.
Note that the dial sits under your left hand, which worked fine for me as a right-handed person but could be an issue for left-handers. Thankfully, it didn’t get in the way when I was typing. Unlike my Surface Dial, which sits in a drawer, I could see myself using the Asus Dial every day.
Zippy speed
It helps that the ProArt Studiobook is so quick. Top pegging goes to the
AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor with its eight cores and 16 threads. With the help of 32GB of RAM and a 2TB RAID array we’ll come to shortly, this romped to 354 in the PC Pro benchmarks. A score of 6,892 in PCMark 10 is similarly admirable, with its 9,953 tally in the Digital Content Creation section of particular note.
What hammered home this machine’s power was the way it sliced through the Cinebench R23 multicore test with such speed it almost made a mockery of the test, scoring 12,638 overall. That’s faster than an Apple MacBook Pro 16in with an M1 Max processor; I asked Jon Honeyball to run the test on his beast, and it scored 12,367.
That’s with both machines plugged in. I ran Cinebench R23 multicore, a ten-minute benchmark, twice on the battery and it scored 11,365 and 11,414 with the battery falling by 27%. When Jon did the same, his MacBook scored