The Asus Zenbook S16 with AMD Ryzen 400 does not have to hide behind Intel Panther Lake

The Asus Zenbook S16 is a 16-inch laptop with a slim chassis and high-quality components. For 2026, the manufacturer updated the processors and now uses Ryzen AI 400 chips from AMD. Our review unit was equipped with the fast Ryzen AI 9 465 in combination with the integrated Radeon 880M iGPU as well as 32 GB RAM, which is now faster than before. In our CPU analysis of the new AMD chip (Gorgon Point) we saw that the general architecture with Zen 5 cores remains unchanged and only the clocks were slightly increased.

Asus was able to increase the power limits, so the maximum performance is better compared to the previous model, which was available with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 or the Ryzen AI 9 365. When you use the performance mode and really use the full performance, however, the fan noise is noticeably louder compared to the old model. In everyday situations this is usually a pretty rare scenario and the other two power profiles stay much quieter; the silent mode, for example, only creates a slight murmur.

Intel recently launched its new Panther Lake chips recently and we have already tested them during our analysis. The two CPUs Core Ultra X9 388H and Core Ultra X7 358H also offer good CPU performance, but there is basically no noticeable performance advantage over the Zen 5 chip in daily tasks. The biggest difference is the new Intel GPU. While AMD and Intel were pretty much on par last year, Intel managed to increase the GPU performance of the new Arc B390 iGPU by roughly 70 %.

This means the new Intel CPUs are especially interesting when you want to play games. If that is not the case, we can easily recommend the Zenbook S16 with the Ryzen AI 400 processor, because there are no real differences in terms of features (both CPUs also meet the requirements for Microsoft's Copilot+ certification). Please see our comprehensive review of the new Zenbook S16 for more information.