AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Review: Zen 5 Tested On A Gorgeous ASUS Laptop
ASUS Zenbook S 16 Review: CPU, System, Graphics And Gaming Benchmarks
To evaluate its performance, we put the ASUS Zenbook S 16 through a comprehensive battery of benchmarks to test performance across a variety of workloads. So, without further delays, let's see what this machine can do...
CrystalDiskMark And ATTO Disk Benchmark
We'll start off the barrage of benchmarks with the ATTO Disk Benchmark. ATTO is a fairly quick and simple test which measures read/write bandwidth and IOPS across a range of different data sizes. While we don't typically compare these results across multiple machines, it's useful to gauge whether a particular notebook's storage subsystem performs well.
The ASUS Zenbook S 16 has a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe Samsung SSD, which peaks just shy of the 5GB/s mark in ATTO's read test, with about 3.4GB/s writes. These numbers are somewhat bland in light of other premium notebooks, but should still be fine for the vast majority of use cases.
Speedometer Browser Benchmarks
We use BrowserBench.org's Speedometer test to take a holistic look at web application performance. This test automatically loads and runs several sample web apps from ToDoMVC.com using the most popular web development frameworks around, including React, Angular, Ember.js, and even plain-Jane JavaScript. This test is a better example of how systems cope with real web applications in comparison with a more compute-focused JavaScript test like JetStream. All tests were performed using the latest version of Chrome.
With the outgoing Speedometer 2 benchmark, the ASUS Zenbook S 16 powered by the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 put up the best score we have seen to-date from a Windows-based laptop, topping the charts at 430. With the updated and more taxing Speedometer 3 test, however, the ASUS Zenbook S 16 drops down a few rungs and lands about in the middle of the pack, behind some of the higher-end Snapdragon X Elite and Intel Core Ultra-based notebooks. We should mention, however, that this test can vary by a point or two between runs, so the middle grouping of systems performs similarly.
Maxon Cinebench Rendering Benchmarks
Next up is the previous-generation 3D rendering benchmark from Maxon, based on the Cinema 4D R23 rendering engine. It's a purely CPU-based test that doesn't make use of the graphics processor at all, and it scales very well with additional CPU cores. We ran both single- and multi-threaded tests on all of the notebooks represented here.
In Maxon's Cinebench R23 benchmark, the Ryzen AI-powered ASUS Zenbook S 16 top the charts, offer the best single- and multi-threaded scores in the group. Despite the availability of Cinebench 2024, we ran R23 mostly to see how the Snapdragon X-powered systems fared with a strenuous application running under Prism emulation. As you can see, the Snapdragon machines do OK, but can't AMD or Intel. What happens with an arm-native rendering test? Let's find out...
Geekbench 6 System Benchmark
Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real-world workloads in a wide variety of tasks, including encryption, image processing, physical simulation, machine learning, and many more. We tested the notebooks featured here with the latest Geekbench 6 version to get an idea of their overall system performance in scientific applications.
The ASUS Zenbook S 16 with its Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 lands in the upper-third of the chart, with a particularly strong single-thread score according to Geekbench, but it couldn't quite catch the top-end Snapdragon X-based systems or the Macs. Still, the ASUS Zenbook S 16 is performing very well overall.
PCMark 10 Applications Productivity Benchmark
The standard PCMark 10 benchmark uses a mix of real-world applications like Open Office and Zoom as well as simulated workloads to establish how well a given system performs productivity and content creation tasks, including but not limited to image and video editing, web browsing, teleconferencing, document creation, and so on. However, because many of those benchmarks are not yet optimized for ARM64, we chose instead to run the PCMark 10 Applications benchmark, which tests performance in the actual Microsoft Office suite, as well as in the Edge browser, all of which are native versions for these machines.
The ASUS Zenbook S 16 perform very well here, trailing only a monstrously-powerful gaming notebook and the MSI Core Ultra 7 powered Prestige AI EVO. We suspect the SSD in the ASUS Zenbook S 16 held it back just slightly, versus the dual-SSD config in the MSI system.
UL Procyon AI Computer Vision Benchmark
The idea of "edge AI", or running AI workloads natively on your local hardware instead of in the cloud, is only really emerging into the mainstream on PCs. As such, benchmarks for these workloads aren't exactly prolific. Fortunately, UL has already built a few into its Procyon benchmark suite. Let's take a look at how a few machines do on the AI Computer Vision benchmark:
We're starting to work in some AI-related tests in our notebook coverage, to (hopefully) suss out the NPU performance of today's modern notebook platforms. Unfortunately for AMD, its drivers and software still need some updated and its NPU isn't detected by Procyon AI. As such, we ran the test on the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370's CPU and iGPU, which resulted in performance only marginally higher than previous-gen platforms.
UL 3DMark Night Raid Gaming Benchmark
If you're a regular reader, you most likely know that 3DMark offers a wide variety of tests. Most of them aren't really suitable for thin-and-light system like this, as it is not a gaming laptop. That doesn't mean it's incapable of playing games, though, especially with AMD's most powerful iGPU yet -- the RDNA 3.5-based Radeon 890M. The thing is, unlike games, some 3DMark tests are ARM64 native. For that reason, we chose to run 3DMark Night Raid, a modern DirectX 12 test specifically for mobile parts and integrated graphics, as well as the extremely-demanding Wild Life Extreme 4K UHD benchmark.
The Radeon 890M iGPU in the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is among the best currently on the market. In addition to benefitting from AMD's long history and experience making graphics drivers, the updated RDNA 3.5 architecture improves performance somewhat to the point that only the ROG Ally is faster vs. another Radeon. The MSI machine with Arc graphics, however, comes out on top here.
With the cross-platform 3DMark Wildlife benchmark, which runs natively across many different platforms, the Radeon 890M performs well, but ultimately lands about in the middle of the pack. What's most striking again is how closely matched the thin-and-light machines are in our comparisons -- save for the Macbook Pro 14, which has a much more powerful GPU.
F1 22 Formula 1 Racing Game Benchmark
Racing simulator F1 2022 is a DirectX 12 title with ray tracing support, but we can't enable it here because the Adreno GPU does not support ray-tracing. This one is surprisingly sensitive to certain system configurations, so we enjoy using it as a test because it can really tease out some strange performance characteristics. We tested the game in its High graphics preset, with upscaling (including AutoSR) disabled.
In our first actual game test, the ASUS Zenbook S 16 with it Radeon 890M comes out on top by relatively large margin. Although not marketed as a gaming machine, the iGPU in the ASUS Zenbook S 16 is perfectly capable of playing some game with high-quality settings at lower resolutions. And that's not even taking FSR or other resolution scaling techniques into consideration. Utilizing FSR would have pushed framerates much higher.
Gears Tactics Strategy Game Benchmark
Gears Tactics, released in 2020, still makes an excellent benchmark for integrated hardware like this. It's a tightly-optimized Unreal Engine title with a highly-configurable built-in benchmark that provides a wealth of performance data after each run. We tested it on High, Medium, and Low presets at 1920×1080 resolution.
At Low and Medium settings, the Radeon 890M once again comes out on top. With the High Graphics preset, it ends up trailing a couple of configs, but still offers very good performance.
