ASUS ROG Zephyrus M16 Laptop Review

Today we are taking a look at the ASUS ROG Zephyrus M16 Laptop. This is an upgrade to my previous laptop, the most excellent HP Sepctre x360 15t that I reviewed 2 years ago.  Lets see how it stacks up, and find out if it will be a worthy replacement.  If you would rather watch than read this review, scroll to the bottom and hit the YouTube link. 

The 2022 version of the M16 is a refresh from the product released last year. The M16 has been updated with the more powerful and versatile Alder Lake Intel 12th gen CPU, and more capable and efficient RTX 3070ti. Aside from the expected spec bumps, a few of the more notable upgrades are improved chassis strength and an updated camera with IR for Windows Hello. 

I have been using this laptop for just over 2 weeks, and am ready to provide my thoughts, impressions, and even hesitations for some users when considering this laptop. 

There are a few different variations of this Laptop floating around, but the one we will be looking at was purchased from Best Buy and is the model GU603ZW.  Quick note on the different versions and some of the confusion it has caused to customers. You will notice on the Best Buy Website, despite this being a powerhouse of a laptop, it only has a review score of 3.8 out of 5 stars. This is primarily due to 1 factor, mis-stating how much RAM is soldered into the Motherboard. 

When customers asked in the question section of the Best buy website how much RAM was actually soldered in to the motherboard, the response came back from an ASUS rep was 16 GB.  The Asus product website also showed the same information. So many users purchase this laptop thinking it comes with 16 GB soldered in, and they can easily add another 16 or 32 GB dim.  Turns out that was not the case, and there is only 8 GB soldered to the motherboard, and a separate removable 8 GB dim. Now this laptop is still upgradable to 40 GB of RAM total, but a lot of users were pissed about being mislead, and tanked the reviews because of it. So with that other way let's go ahead and move on to the specs.

This particular version I am reviewing today is currently available at Best Buy retailing for $2149. There are other configurations available from different retailers, at different pricing options, but at a high level this one comes with:

Intel 12th gen Alder Lake, up to Core i9-12900H, 6C+8c/20T. this is a mobile workstation class processor, so on paper this should be a pretty powerful laptop or desktop replacement

In addition to Intel’s UHD Graphics, we have a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070Ti with 8GB VRAM, supporting up to 120W with Dynamic Boost  with the Hybrid MUX mode and Adaptive Sync (no GSync on Primary Display).

For the display with have a 16in, 16:10, Matte / Anti-Glare, IPS Panel, with a QHD resolution of 2560 x 1600 @ 165Hz.  

16GB DDR5-4800 (8GB Soldered, 8GB Removable, up to 40GB total)

A 4-cell, 90Wh Battery, chargeable with both the 240 W power adapter + USB-C charging up to 100W PD

1TB SSD (2x M.2 PCI 4.0 x4 slots)

WiFi 6E 802.11ax (Intel AX211) 2×2, Bluetooth 5.2, and 2.5Gigabit LAN (Realtek RTL8125)\

Input wise we have a Single-zone RGB backlit keyboard, HD (720p) IR Webcam

Lots of port options here staring with the 3.5mm Combo Mic/Headphone Jack, 1x HDMI 2.0b, 2x USB-A 3.2, x1 USB 3.2 Type-C with DisplayPort & Power Delivery, 1x ThunderBolt 4, 1x RJ45 LAN, 1x MicroSD Reader

Size comes in at 13.98" x 9.57" x 0.78”in  (35.5 x 24.3 x 1.99cm)

Laptop weight is 4.19 lbs  (1.90 Kg), Power Brick 1.56 lbs  (0.71 Kg)

6x Speakers with Dolby Atmos, Soft Touch matte rubber finish on Interior, Rainbow Prizm Lid

One thing to note, this year's version does NOT have the fingerprint reader built into the Power button like last year's version did, but Windows hello via IR Webcam is better and faster in my opinion, so no loss there. 

Wtih specs out of the way, lets take a look at what comes in the box, and the exterior of this Laptop. In the box we have a pretty minimal load out.  Laptop, Power Brick, and a bit of documentation. For a 16in screen, this laptop has a very compact profile, with tiny bezels all the way around the display, but still enough room for a webcam and microphone. 

The screen to body ratio is excellent, but there are a few drawbacks

First the LED indicators reflect onto the screen.  This is really only an issue in low light situations, but it is noticeable.  Because of the design, hot air from the exhaust vents blows directly onto the display.  We will go over the specifics of this a bit later.  The Material on the has a black matte rubberized texture, looks and feels great… but as is expected, is a fingerprint magnet. 

The lid has a ErgoLift hinge that allows for more airflow for the fans as it pushes up the laptop. This can be opened with 1 hand, and can go back a full 180 degrees. 

The lid also features a reflective rainbow prism look wherein the colors shift depending on how the light hits it.  Pretty cool. 

The rubber feet on the bottom give nice stability, and there are no sharp edges to bother your wrists while resting on the laptop.  At 4.19 lbs its not the lightest of laptops, but not horrible especially considering the power this brings to the table.  All that power and the excellent 16:10 display comes in at a max thickness of 0.78in

As far as IO is considered, it pretty much has everything you would need.  The one exception would be replacing the MicroSD card reader with a full size one. 

Most of the ports are all located on the left side, making it tight at times, but as the majority of people are right handed, I assume this was done to eliminate cords hitting your mouse on the right. Lots of display options here with The HDMI, USB C, and Thunderbolt ports.

Charging at the full 240w happens via the 6mm barrel plug, and as mentioned earlier you can also charge using USB C Power Delivery up to 100w. 

The Keyboard feels great, has good travel, and is very comfortable to type on while being fairly quiet. 

Its a minimalist design with dedicated Media Keys on the upper left, function keys along the top, and your Home, End, PgUp, PgDn keys tied to the Arrow Keys on the bottom right. 

There is no dedicated Print Screen button, but you can use FN+F6 to launch the Snipping tool. The single zone RGB backlight can be configured in the Armoury Crate application, and there are also hotkeys to quickly modify the brightness levels. The large glass trackpad comes with precision drivers.  Its smooth, accurate, and a great size. Feels solid, and is one of the better clickpads I have used.

Now on to the Display. As mentioned we have a great 16in matte screen with a QHD Resolution of 2600x1600.  The panel operates at 165Hz when plugged in, but can drop down to 60Hz when on battery to save power, which is why the screen will flicker if you unplug the power cable while the laptop is on. 

The screen has a nice peak brightness of 500-nits and claims 100% DCI-p3 color coverage. 

The lowest brightness level is still pretty bright, but other than that I have no complaints about the display, and its one of the best I have seen on a laptop.  No stuck pixels to report here. 

The audio system has a total of 6 speakers, with 2 woofers on the bottom and 4 tweeters that fire through the grills around the keyboard.  Sound quality is excellent, and it does get fairly loud. Not rattling can be heard in the keys even at the highest volume levels. Overall one of the better speaker configurations I have heard on a laptop. 

The webcam is a welcome addition as some ASUS laptops don’t have them, which seems like a horrible idea.  Its only a 720p camera, but quality is adequate for web calls as long as room lighting isn’t too poor. 

IR cameras are present for fast Windows Hello login. I didn’t play around much with the microphone options, but as is, they sound pretty good for a laptop. 

Now Lets take a look at the guts of this laptop. Taking the bottom panel off this laptop is very simple and its one of the easiest laptops to disassemble I have come across.  Screws are standard Philips head, only only 3 of them are covered by easily removable rubber caps.  Inside you will find the cooling components, WIFI module, 90w battery, audio system, and the 2x SSD and single RAM slot. 

Performance & Gaming

Quick note on Laptop performance settings. The M16 comes with a few preset power profiles. These all work as intended, but do NOT mess with power settings in the Windows Settings, only modify them via Armoury Crate.  I did the latter, and it seriously screwed performance up, creating horrible lag doing simple things like opening the file browser.  Gaming was impossible.  Ended up having to wipe the laptop and start over. Stick with Armoury Crate settings and you will be fine.

Now lets go over the 4 power profiles you have available. They are

• Silent, runs quiet with the fans under 35db, but with limited CPU & GPU power. CPU 35w.  The CPU will run at about 70-80% of its full capacity, but the GPU is aggressively underclocked and ends up being about 50% of its maximum performance. Great compromise for general everyday computing tasks. 
• Performance is a balanced profile with close to stock CPU & GPU clocks. Fan noise goes up to around 45db, and a combined CPU+GPU power package of 110w, with the CPU hitting 65w. CPU and GPU performance both take about a 15-20% hit in this mode. 
• Turbo is a high performance profile with increased power and clock speeds.  GPU gets an overclock bump of +50 MHz on the Core and +100 MHz Memory.  Combined Power package of 140w, CPU maxing at 90W.  Performance is great, but at the cost of fan noise, 55db. 
• Manual Adjustment allows you to further tweak the settings and power levels to your liking, and create custom Fan curves based on Temps. 

So with these profiles, here is what to expect.  Turbo is a performance beast but only available when plugged into the power brick. (Note that although this laptop will charge over USB C, you only get access to Turbo with the 240w Power Brick). Great when you want to encode videos or get max FPS on games, but you will want headphones while using this mode. Performance will be your “daily driver” offering a good mix of performance and noise. And silent will sip a bit lighter on your battery, keeping things very quiet in the process, but not good for much more than web or file browsing. 

On to the performance numbers. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail here, but will show a few graphs showcasing performance metrics. All of these tests were run on the “Turbo” profile for max performance. 

BENCHMARKS

CPU (Synthetics)

Now for more gaming focused benchmarks lest start with UNIGINE’s SuperPosition

And not some more Gaming Centric Benchmarks

TEMPS 

The i9-12900H will level out around 90w on Turbo and 3.2GHz on the P Cores, with temperatures around 93C.  Turbo pretty much maxes out the fan RPM, so not going to get any cooler here when stressing the CPU. 

Performance will see temps in the high 80s, and Silent will keep things in the low 70s. Note that if on battery power, the CPU drops to only 40w on Performance Mode.  GPU on Turbo will pull around 115w on some test and games, but most saw it around 105W, hitting low 80s in these tests. Performance mode drops the wattage to around 80w, and keeps temps to the Low 70s. Silent hovers in the high 60s

External Temps were toasty, but the laptop surface or keyboard was never uncomfortable to the touch. 

Didn’t hit any thermal throttling on this device, which seemed to be an issue I ran into a lot with my previous HP Spectre. 

Bottom near trackpad

27c

Keyboard

48c

Top near hinge

55c

Under Laptop

50c

Power Brick

64c

Fan Noise

To keep temps from getting out of hand, this laptop has some pretty impressive cooling. ASUS refers to this as “Intelligent Cooling, and combines using Thermal Grizzly Liquid Metal thermal compound, with 6 heatpies, and what they refer to as Arc Flow 84 blade fans. So lets look at some numbers, and some sound samples from the fans at each power profile. 

When in Silent Mode, doing general computing tasks such as web browsing, the fans aren’t audible above ambient room noise, which for me was 37db.  When gaming fans kicked up to 44db.

Performance kicks it up to 39 dbs for general computing and up to 55 dbs when gaming. 

And with Tubo even when sitting idle we get a 52 db, and when stressed a very loud 63db. 

Needless to say, in order to keep this high performing hardware adequately cooled on the higher performance profiles, you are going to have to live with some fan noise, so bust out the headphones. But Silent mode is still very capable and keeps things nice and quiet for the majority of daily computing needs. 

Battery Life

In Silent, you can get almost 10 hrs of general computing.  The data above is in Performance Mode, not super efficient, you can still pretty easily get more than half a workday before having to plug in, especially in the lower power modes.  

Final Remarks

For its physical size, the M16 packs an amazing screen, and incredible performance, along with a solid array of IO and connectivity. The 16:10 QHD display with 500-nits brightness is one of its major selling points.  

Performance wise, this laptop can be a beast as long as you are ok with the loud fans when needed. Both Performance and Slient modes offer a good balance of noise and performance, and will probably be the profiles most users will enable 90% of the time while using this laptop. But if you need extreme performance, Turbo mode is there. 

I hoped for a bit better battery life, but as this isn’t a “thin and light” ultrabook, really wasn’t expecting much more than what we see in this hardware configuration.  

Overall, you get an amazing hardware combo, good keyboard and  speakers, and a bright 16in screen, all in the body of a 15in laptop that is less than 1in in thickness. It can be hot, it can be loud, but only when you need that extra performance bump. Overall, this is Laptop is best in class, and I am excited to have it as my new daily driver. 

Well, that's it for this one. If there is something I didn’t cover that you would like to know, hit me up in the comments. And as always, thanks for watching!

YouTube Video Link:  https://youtu.be/A5iAKGRAYLk

NanoLeaf Shapes Mini Triangles Unboxing and Review

Today we are going to look at a new product from NanoLeaf, the Shapes Mini Triangles.  Most of you are probably aware of the NanoLeaf Light Panels that have been featured with on a lot of Workstation pictures, but this is a new product as of November 2020, and we are going to go though a quick unboxing, comparison, and review of both the Mini Triangles and the NanoLeaf App used to Setup and Control your shapes.  Lets get started. 

We will be looking at 2 of their new products:

• Nanoleaf Shapes - Mini Triangles Smarter Kit
• Nanoleaf Shapes - Mini Triangles Expansion

Lets roll through some quick product specs and see those these mini triangles compare to the larger Light Panels. You can see here they are roughly half the size, but sill about 1cm thick in design. 

Here in the General Specs we see that for the most part things look about the same.  The Mini triangles still only communicate over a 2.4Ghz wireless network. The one big difference to call out here is the lumens drop when going from the Light Panels to the Mini Triangles. That being said, at max brightness, the Mini Triangles can really light up a room, so don’t be overly concerned about that. 

Here we see that both types of panels support the same color spectrum, and in regards to power, the Mini Triangles have a smaller power supply, which makes sense if the lumens output is lower than the larger light panels. The website states that you can connect up to 77 Mini Triangles to a single power supply, but when setting up your design in the application, it state that you can go more than 21 mini triangles, so I’m going to contact NanoLeaf on that one to get clarification

So I created a mock design her to show how what Nanoleaf calls their Linkers connect the triangles and the controller. You might also see that sticker on the right confirming that these just like the larger panels are touch sensitive.

The Linkers have 3 connector pins, and there are little compression tabs that allow it to just snap into place.  They hold pretty well, but don’t try to build the design and then hang it on the wall, you will fail, and it will come crashing down.  

Instead use the Design feature in the Nanoleaf App to plan out your design, and then begin to build it on your wall.  

Its called Layout Assistant and although there are is no way to select colors here, you can design the overall shaped based on the number of panels you will be using. Its drag and drop, and fairly easy to modify.

Once you have your design there is an AR Mode that lets you see it on your wall.  It works OK on a flat wall with nothing else in the frame, but as you can see here, if there are other objects near by, it doesn’t work too well. 

Now I’m going to quickly go through how to setup and connect your panel to the application and your wifi network.  I will state that this way by far the most frustrating part of the installation process for me due to connectivity issues, but more on that in a bit.  If yu9 don't want to read through this, just check out my YouTube video. 

Creating an account is optional, but I would suggest doing it as that will allow you to back up your designs and color scenes for later retrieval. 

Before selecting your shapes from this screen, make sure your panels are plugged into the wall and powered on. 

Select the shapes tab, and it will remind you that in order to connect, you need to be on your 2.4GHz wifi connection.  It will show a list of available 2.4GHz networks, and then ask for a password to connect.  Now on my first run, this worked fine, and everything connected without issue. BUT… after the initial pairing, the light panels kept becoming unresponsive, and I wasn’t ablet to control the kit.  After a few Hard Resets, and moving closer to my router, I was finally able to get it to work, but it wasn’t fun.  None of the other 40+ devices on my network have any issues, so putting the blame for this directly on Nanoleaf. I’m not sure if it’s an issue that can be addressed via a firmware update, or if the Wifi antennae on the controller is just far too small, but whatever the reason, if you aren’t in pretty close proximity to your router, you may experience similar issues. 

After connecting head to your devices tab and select the layout of your panels. By default there is a selection of solid fill lights, multi color, and even interactive music scenes to choose from, in addition to being able to adjust overall brightness. You can go with one of these, or hit the Add Scene button to create your own customized look. 

Again you can utilize existing color pallets, or Add New to create your own from scratch, using rgb sliders or even plugging in the color code directly into the app. 

Once you have your custom color palette you can chose between a motion design that will fade between the colors you selected, or you can go with a static color design, choosing the color for each panel individually. 

Once your colors are selected save your design, and if you aren’t having connection issues, you should be ablet to save it and apply it to your panels.  

After experimenting with a few other options, this is the design that I ended up going with above my PC. It is using 21 panels, currently, but I have a few more left over from the expansion kits, and might add those to the mix down the road. 

Once this product is available on Amazon, I will be sure to add a product link to the video description. 

To wrap things up, despite the connection issues I initially had, overall I’m happy how this accessory add turned out.  The size is just about perfect, it frames my Open Air computer, and adds some nice fill light to my workspace when the overhead fluorescent bulbs are a bit too harsh.  If you are wanting to get into some custom lighting for your workstation, this is a great way to do that, at a much lower price point than what was previously available. 

I hope this video helped give you a better idea of what to expect from this product. 

Hit me up with any questions, and if you guys think a different design or shape would look better above my PC, let me know in the comments.  I’m getting ready to completely rebuild this system, so be on the lookout for that. 

I also have lots of other project videos on the channel, so be sure to check those out as well. 

If you enjoyed this video hit me with a Thumbs up, and as always your subscription helps. 

That’s it for this one, thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time.