The Asus ProArt P16 (2025) is a surprising MacBook Pro M4 rival

Design and Keyboard

• MacBook Pro-inspired look and feel
• Strong port selection
• Responsive keyboard and trackpad

The ProArt P16 certainly sustains Asus’ recent trend of providing sleek and modern designs that look excellent, though this specific candidate has a stronger touch of Apple about it than its rivals. 

Allow me to explain – in the black colourway I have here and with its chunky, rounded corners, this laptop certainly has a very similar profile to the 16-inch MacBook Pro M4. As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them.

The ProArt P16’s execution isn’t tacky, either. As you’d perhaps expect from a laptop at its price tag, build quality is exceptional with an anodised finish and understated looks. It tips the scales at 1.85kg, making it quite hefty, but being 14.9mm thick means it’s more portable in a large backpack than you may expect.

As for its port selection, this Asus laptop is strong, with an excellent range of inputs. The left side is home to a DC input for charging, as well as a proper HDMI 2.1 FRL port, a high-speed 40Gbps USB-C, USB-A and headphone jack.

On the right side, you get another, albeit lower speed, USB-C, a second USB-A, and an SD card reader. That’s even stronger than modern MacBooks.

The keyboard, in spite of this being a larger laptop, is a smaller form factor choice. It has a function row and dedicated arrow keys, although no number pad. The sacrifice is for upward-firing speaker grilles on either side of the keyboard, just like with a modern MacBook.

The keyboard itself is comfortable and tactile, with a smooth keypress that makes it one of the more responsive options I’ve used. 

The ProArt P16’s trackpad is huge, rivalling Apple’s laptops in size. It’s especially responsive with fast tracking, while featuring the clever DialPad in the top left corner. This is an integrated jog-wheel of sorts which allows you to control functions for everything, such as adjusting volume, or scrubbing through a YouTube video in Chrome. You can set it up to act as a useful shortcut for advanced functions in Adobe apps, too.

Display and Sound

• Gorgeous, high-res OLED screen
• Deep blacks, immense contrast, and excellent colours
• Surprisingly good speakers

One area where this ProArt P16 truly excels is with its display. It has a large, 16-inch 3K resolution OLED panel with a smooth 120Hz refresh rate. It is also a touchscreen.

It’s easily one of the better displays I’ve used on a premium laptop like this one, with the deep, inky blacks and immense contrast we’ve come to expect from OLED panels, as measured by my colorimeter’s 0.01 and 26360:1 readouts, as well as a virtually perfect colour temperature of 6600K.

In addition, the ProArt P16’s panel is wonderfully colour-accurate, with perfect 100% coverage of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts, as well as 94% Adobe RGB coverage. With it, it proves this laptop’s impeccable credentials for work with both colour-sensitive and productivity workloads.

The peak SDR brightness of 361.1 nits is perfectly fine, and gives general images a fair amount of pop and punch, although it is bettered by some more ‘affordable’ OLED laptops I’ve tested. Nonetheless, for HDR workloads, the panel also supports DisplayHDR True Black 500 for a little more pop in supported content.

As for the speakers, these are some of the more impressive ones I’ve used on any laptop, with surprisingly excellent depth, body and clarity. They rival those on my 16-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro, which is an achievement in itself, considering how meagre some laptop speakers can be.

Performance

• Potent Ryzen AI HX 370 processor inside
• RTX 5070 GPU offers good gaming and graphically intensive performance 
• Generous RAM and SSD capacities, although the latter isn’t the quickest

The biggest change with this 2025 iteration of the ProArt P16 is a move to one of Nvidia’s new RTX 50-series discrete laptop GPUs, with my sample packing in the mid-range RTX 5070 8GB model. 

This comes alongside the same powerful AMD Ryzen AI HX 370 processor with its 12 cores and 24 threads, which I’ve previously noted to be one of the most potent chips in its class. It’s much the same story here, with zippy performance in real world use as well as in the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests.

The Ryzen AI HX 370 shines in both single and multi-core tests, with the latter serving up some of the most potent results you’ll find on any laptop today, although they are still behind those posted by the MacBook Pro M4’s namesake processor.

In addition, with the presence of a discrete RTX 5070, the ProArt P16 is also more than up to the task of the graphically intensive workloads that it’s primarily designed for. The high-riding score this laptop achieved in the 3DMark Time Spy test is indicative of such potency. 

Moreover, that GPU also makes this a beefy laptop for mid-range gaming, with some good results in the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal. At 1080p, the ProArt P16 achieved respective results of 82.19fps and 90fps respectively, without any ray tracing enabled. Esports titles also won’t break a sweat with Rainbow Six Extraction posting a 154fps average.

In bumping up the resolution to QHD, the results are still playable with a 48.92fps average in Cyberpunk, and a 96fps average in Rainbow Six Extraction. Adding in ray-tracing to the mix at this laptop’s native 3K resolution in Cyberpunk 2077 pushed the figure down to 34.25fps, while at 1080p, it posted a 34.88fps average.

The RTX 5070 does have some tricks up its sleeve to get more frames, though. For instance, the clever new DLSS Transformer model is a marked improvement over its predecessor, which boosted the RT: Ultra result to 55.32fps at 1080p.

In addition, Nvidia has added a clever feature known as Multi Frame Gen that adds in up to three ‘fake frames’ for every traditionally generated one, thanks to AI, for a perceivably smoother experience.

The addition of these frames is reliant upon there being a high enough base FPS figure to mean the displayed image with Multi Frame Gen isn’t choppy or laggy, and with the ProArt P16, that wasn’t the case. The output was smooth and responsive, with the tech taking the average all the way up to 172.1fps with the maximum 4x setting applied alongside the clever DLSS Transformer Model upscaler.

The beefy specs of the ProArt P16 don’t stop there, either. My sample also came equipped with 64GB of fast DDR5 RAM to provide more than ample capacity for both general multitasking and for undertaking more creative or gaming-oriented workloads.

The 2TB SSD is generous in capacity, although not necessarily in speed, against laptops that are cheaper than this one. I measured respective reads and writes of 5280.88 MB/s and 4896.13 MB/s, which makes it fast, although some laptops are pushing towards PCIe 5.0 speeds with results that are virtually double.

Software

• Clean Windows 11 install
• Some Asus-specific apps pre-installed
• Also enough AI horsepower for Copilot+ PC functionality

The ProArt P16 comes running Windows 11, and features a couple of Asus-specific apps pre-installed. These include GlideX, which is where you can manage tasks such as casting or mirroring the screen to other devices wirelessly, or transfer files across the same network. You can also enable remote access to a mobile device, too.

The StoryCube app is designed as another means of organising photos and videos, using AI to recognise faces and file your photos for you, which is handy. MuseTree comes pre-installed, which is an AI image generator.

There is also enough AI horsepower from the Ryzen AI HX 370 chip inside to mark this laptop as a Copilot+ PC, providing access to Microsoft’s AI functionality for generative powers and filters in the Photos and Paint app, as well as the clever Windows Studio webcam effects for background blurring, auto framing and maintaining eye contact.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 10 hours 24 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for a working day

The ProArt P16 comes with a huge 90Whr cell inside, which arguably is as big as it is to power its beefy components, not least with a discrete GPU. It’s actually the same capacity that Asus bundles into their gaming laptop range, intriguingly.

With this, in the PCMark 10 battery life test with the brightness at the requisite 150 nits, the ProArt P16 lasted for 10 hours and 24 minutes, which meets our longstanding 10 hour target. For such a powerful machine, that isn’t a bad result, considering comparable gaming laptops will fall short by a few hours. In a similarly intensive set of multi-tasking, the MacBook Pro M4 lasted for 12 hours, though.

Asus bundles the ProArt P16 with a potent 200W DC charger to allow for quick recharging powers if you are caught short; I measured it took just 28 minutes to go from zero to 50%, while a full charge took 75 minutes.

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Should you buy it?