The Asus Zenbook S16 (2025) returns with the same Ceraluminum ceramic chassis and 3K OLED display, but swaps in AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 465 on Zen 5, faster LPDDR5X memory, and refined thermals. At Rs 1,69,990, it’s a focused upgrade—not a redesign. A few days in, it’s been quick, quiet, and easy to live with.
Same 1.1 cm thin profile. What Asus has changed is under the hood—newer AMD Zen 5 silicon, faster memory, refined thermals. It’ll cost you Rs 1,69,990. The 16-inch 3K Lumina OLED panel was already one of the best in this segment last year. Calibrated to Delta E under 1, True Black HDR, touch support—the works. Asus manages the extra headroom through a dual-fan setup, a barely-there 0.7 mm vapour chamber, and those 3,522 geometric vents on the keyboard deck that are equal parts design statement and functional engineering. The 83 Wh battery has been holding up reasonably well too—though, again, I’ll need more time to see if it can genuinely last a full workday with that OLED panel always on.
Same Ceraluminum body. Same two colours. And honestly, that’s not a complaint. When you’ve got a design that already stands out in a sea of identical aluminium ultrabooks, leaving it alone is a perfectly valid move. For that money, the changes better show up in daily use—and from what I’ve seen so far, they just might. The build is rigid, the hinge is confident, and the Scandinavian White still looks clean. My only gripe—and this is more of a wish than a complaint—is that Asus is still offering just two colour options for what’s supposed to be their design-forward flagship. No changes to the display, and none were needed. Pull up the same image on this and on a good IPS laptop side by side, and the gap is almost embarrassing. This laptop runs at 28W sustained. For context, most ultraportables at this thickness top out at 15W and call it a day. During regular use—browsing, writing, light multitasking—the fans are practically silent. Whether that composure holds during heavier workloads is something I’ll have to test properly.
You’d struggle to spot the new Zenbook S16 next to last year’s model.
The headline upgrade is the AMD Ryzen AI 9 465—a 10-core processor on the new Zen 5 architecture. It’s paired with 32 gigs of LPDDR5X memory (faster, though soldered in, so what you get is what you’re stuck with) and a 1 TB PCIe 4.0 SSD (PCIe 5.0 would’ve been nice at this price). But what’s more interesting than the chip itself is how Asus is cooling it.