Asus takes on MacBook Pro with 4K+ OLED workstations

Asus Dial for intuitive and precise control scenario
(Image credit: Asus)

Asus has unveiled the world's first Ryzen-based Nvidia RTX Studio laptop together with a number of mobile workstations to target the lucrative and ever-growing creator market.

The ProArt Studiobook Pro 16 OLED features a 16:10, 3840 x 2400 4K+ OLED HDR display with 100% DCI-P3 color gamut and up to 550 nits peak brightness. As a comparison, that's 50% more pixel and 10% brighter than the Retina Display on the MacBook Pro 16-inch.

Users can choose between the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, the Xeon W-11955M, the Ryzen  7 5800H and the  i7-11800H, which are some of the most powerful mobile processors on the market right now. However there's no Core i9 available yet though.

Surprisingly, the Ryzen model offers only the RTX A2000 while its Intel counterpart is paired with the far more powerful RTX A5000 model. That's despite the fact that the cooling system that all processors have a 45W TDP and are cooled by the same proprietary Asus IceCool Pro cooling solution that has a total thermal capacity of 140W.

Elsewhere, there's up to 64GB RAM (with ECC support for the Intel Xeon), up to 4TB storage (two 2TB M.2 MVNe PCIe 3.0 SSDs configured in RAID-0) and a flurry of ports. The StudioBook Pro 16 OLED  has a starting price of at $2,500 in the US and £1,999 in the UK. Prices elsewhere have yet to be disclosed.

Gaming creators, a new market?

Whether you want a video editing laptop or a notebook to run Photoshop, there seems to be a creator's laptop. Asus took it to the next level by offering three laptop tiers for casual, advanced and professional creators.

However, to its credit, other than the headline OLED display, Asus has added a few other useful features like an Asus Dial, which is a rotary accessory not dissimilar to Microsoft's Surface Dial and a memory card reader that's compatible with the new SD7.0 format.

We'd still like to see Asus bump the battery capacity to 99WHr (instead of the current 90WHr) and equip the Ryzen version with the A5000 and PCIe 4.0 storage.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.