Asus ProArt P16 (2026, RTX Spark) Review

Design and Keyboard

• Thinner and lighter than other ProArts
• Excellent port selection
• Comfortable keyboard and huge trackpad

The key thing with this new ProArt P16 is that the form factor hasn’t necessarily changed – this remains an especially stylish laptop for creatives that maintains a minimalistic and classy aesthetic. The machined aluminium chassis from previous models remains, and its fit and finish is exemplary.

By moving to using RTX Spark inside, it has meant this Asus laptop doesn’t need to be as thick and hefty as if it had a discrete GPU and all the necessary cooling inside. At just 12.9mm thin, it’s the thinnest 16-inch ProArt laptop Asus has made, while a 1.77kg weight also makes it surprisingly portable.

Being a pro-grade laptop, the ProArt P16 also doesn’t skimp on ports, in spite of being so thin. On the left, there’s room for a pair of 40Gbps USB4-capable Type-C ports, plus a full-size HDMI and a 3.5mm headphone jack, while the right side has a full-size SD card reader, a further USB4 Type-C port and a USB-A port.

Asus has also stuck with the MacBook Pro-style keyboard tray, putting a smaller form factor layout on the ProArt P16 with speaker grilles on either side. We do have a function row and arrow keys, though, and the layout is sensible. It’s a comfortable and smooth keyboard to type on with some pleasant tactility that makes work easy, and a bright white backlight for after-dark use.

The trackpad also retains its lovely qualities, being typically huge and providing responsive and accurate tracking. It also supports the modern gesture controls for Windows and has pleasant haptics, although if you were a fan of the DialPad jogwheel Asus kitted out to previous ProArt laptops, then you’re out of luck, as it isn’t here.

Display and Sound

• Gorgeous tandem OLED screen
• Detailed and vibrant output
• Lovely audio for a laptop

The ProArt P16 in its previous guises that I’ve tested has often stood out for its display, as you’d expect for a creative-focused laptop, and that remains the case here. This model is kitted out with a larger 16-inch 3K, or 2880×1880, resolution Lumina Pro OLED screen, complete with a 120Hz refresh rate for smoother on-screen action to aid zippiness for productivity and gaming tasks.

As with other ProArt models, this new option retains a tandem OLED screen that stacks layers of OLED panels atop one another to yield higher brightness and potential efficiency figures. We’ve seen them fitted to everything from TVs to the latest iPad Pro models in recent years, as well as laptops and more monitors in recent times.

This laptop is available with a more dazzling 4K screen, although the 3K option is still strong in my testing. We’ve got deep blacks and immense contrast, with my colorimeter measuring 0.03 and 15940:1, respectively, while the 6800K white point is round and about where it should be.

Peak SDR brightness of 436.5 nits is a little dim by comparison to other ProArts I’ve tested, but it’s close to Asus’ quoted 500 nit peak and gives displayed images some punch. HDR can push this as high as 1100 nits in supported content; this is one area where the 4K screen also wins out, offering up to 700 nits peak SDR and 1600 nits peak HDR.

The colour accuracy is a highlight too, as you’d perhaps expect with an OLED panel. It hasn’t actually improved at all from the older panel, though, not that it needed to. We’ve got 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.

Its speakers also remain some of the best in the business for a set of laptop units, with 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

• Beefy 20-core CPU
• Standout integrated GPU results
• Capable local AI performance

Given the watershed moment RTX Spark feels like it’s going to be for Windows, it felt right to give our benchmark suite a little bit of an update. 

For legacy comparisons, we’ve still got the same tests as before, but have supplemented them with some UL Procyon tests and a new ML Perf AI benchmark on the synthetic side, and some additional 3DMark gaming tests that are a little more modern than good old Time Spy.

With that note out of the way, it’s time to talk about the meat on the bone – what RTX Spark actually is. Nvidia describes RTX Spark as a “superchip”, and the N1X looks to be one of the beefiest SoCs you’ll find in a laptop, pairing a 20-core Grace CPU that was co-developed with MediaTek (split between 10 Cortex X-925 P and 10 Cortex-A725 E cores) with an RTX Blackwell integrated GPU, complete with 6144 CUDA cores for raw grunt in equivalent numbers to an RTX 5070. That’s all running with a scalable TDP of between 45W and 80W, depending on the device, which is mighty impressive on the face of it.

This is paired with up to 128GB of unified memory (although the ProArt P16 sample I have has 64GB inside) that can run at speeds upwards of 9400MT/s, alongside having up to 300GB/s of memory bandwidth through a 256-bit bus. 

Configurations of RTX Spark with 24GB and 32GB are available, too, with an 18-core CPU and a slightly cut-down GPU with 5120 CUDA cores. For the full variant, it starts at 24GB and rises up to 128GB, with prices scaling accordingly.

The benefit of such high quantities of unified memory isn’t just a surefire allocation of VRAM for the integrated graphics, but is more to do with arguably the entire point of why these laptops exist – AI. We’re getting to a point where local AI models are beginning to catch up to cloud-based models in overall intelligence, and it’s starting to be the case that you can have a potent AI model running locally on your laptop, without data needing to be sent to the cloud.

As a very basic example, the Claude Opus 4.7 Max model that saw Anthropic introduce CoWork to the AI’s list of abilities launched in April, and has an AA intelligence rating of 41. The Qwen 3.8 Flash Next model that released in August can run locally and has an AA intelligence rating of 40. It proves local AI is catching up to data centres purely in intelligence alone.

The other big argument here is cost. An agent that runs on-device can run unmetered, without you having to necessarily think about cost. Nvidia’s recent briefing discussed Claude Sonnet 5.5 Medium – to run 61 million output tokens a month would cost $1200 in API fees, while using the Qwen 3.8 Flash Next model on an RTX Spark laptop with the same number of tokens will cost you $20 in electricity. If you’re an intensive user of agents, the argument here is that the device can pay for itself.

To run through the actual benchmark numbers, Geekbench 6 gives scores of 3,085 single-core and 19,313 multi-core in Balanced mode. That’s a touch ahead of the Core Ultra X9 388H in the Zenbook Duo (2026), which managed 3,003 and 17,285, and comfortably clear of the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 in the Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition (2,808 and 13,271). Only the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme in the Asus Zenbook A16 (2026) is faster, at 3,711 and 21,940.

Cinebench R23 is built for x86, so the RTX Spark’s emulated result undersells it, particularly in single-core, where its 1,323 trails the X2 Elite Extreme (1,579) and the native x86 chips such as the Panther Lake X9 388H (2,165). Multi-core tells a better story. Its 16,762 sits ahead of the Zenbook A16 (14,569) and the ProArt PX13 (12,785) and is level with the 388H (16,417).

Cinebench 2026 provides a different frame of reference that puts single-core performance for RTX Spark as being quite strong, with the ProArt P16 garnering a score in the mid-500s. Using the benchmark’s own built-in comparisons, this puts it roughly between M3 and M4 in MacBook terms, and similar in performance to Intel’s top-end Panther Lake chips. Multi-threaded performance, as you’d perhaps expect from an SoC with 20 cores, is strong, too, with it sitting between the same Apple M-series silicon as above and in-line with top-tier Panther Lake. For MediaTek cores that are a couple of years old (in raw terms), that’s strong.

Things are impressive on the GPU side, too. The customary 3DMark Time Spy score garnered a result of 11,763, which is more than double the Adreno graphics in the Zenbook A16 (4,317) and well clear of the potent B390 in Intel’s top Panther Lake chips (7,189). It’s ahead of Strix Halo, too, as I tested with the Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition (9,569), though that’s a slim 13-inch chassis, and sits in line with some discrete RTX 5070-powered laptops I’ve used, such as the Medion Erazer Deputy 15 P1.

On the point of gaming, it’s interesting to compare this ProArt model to the original P16 I tested, which came with a discrete RTX 5070 laptop GPU inside. Against that laptop, gaming performance is a little constrained, recording 69.73fps and 62fps at 1080p in Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal, respectively.

In bumping up the resolution to QHD, the results are still playable with a 47.12fps average in Cyberpunk, and a 46fps average in Returnal, which closes the gap somewhat to the 5070-powered ProArt. That said, ray-traced Cyberpunk at its Ultra preset might have been a little too far, with a 30.63fps result at 1080p and a 15.31fps average at this laptop’s native 2880×1800 resolution.

RTX Spark can take full advantage of Nvidia’s RTX stack of tech, including its clever new second-gen DLSS Transformer model that’s a marked improvement over the original, helping to boost FPS up to 73.25fps at 1080p and 49.11fps at native resolution in terms of rasterized numbers. There is also support for DLSS 5, with a new update unlocking a model that’s two times faster in supported titles, such as NBA 2K27.

On that point, you also get access to multi-frame-gen in supported titles, which adds up to three ‘fake frames’ in this instance for every traditionally generated one thanks to AI for a perceivably smoother experience. New updates to DLSS have added a further 6x multiplier, and a ‘Dynamic’ one, which automatically scales the output FPS based on a target you set.

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. With the maximum 4x multiplier applied, the ProArt P16 managed 218.12fps at 1080p in Cyberpunk 2077 and 121.98fps at native resolution. With ray tracing applied, these were 142.54fps and 85.96fps, respectively.

As much as it’s easy to get into the weeds when it comes to these benchmark numbers, it’s important to remember the numbers mentioned above are from integrated graphics. Even a couple of years ago, this kind of thing was unheard of, so to be sitting here stating you can get this beefy performance from an iGPU without sacrificing much elsewhere in terms of endurance and so on is something to behold.

As mentioned above, AI is a big part of the draw of RTX Spark. The ProArt P16 scored 578 in UL Procyon’s AI Inference benchmark with Windows ML.

ML Perf is more revealing. It measures tokens per second (TPS), which is how quickly a model writes, and time to first token (TTFT), which is how long you wait for it to start. Run on the GPU with Microsoft’s Windows ML and llama.cpp, Llama 3.1 8B averaged 54.3 TPS and 53.7 TPS respectively, so the two runtimes are effectively level. The smaller Phi 4 Mini is quicker, hitting 99.2 TPS on Windows ML against 86.3 on llama.cpp, although llama.cpp gets the first token out a touch sooner.

The task matters more than the runtime. Short jobs like content generation feel almost instant, with the first token arriving in around a tenth of a second. Summarising a longer piece is the toughest test. Llama takes about 1.5 seconds to start on Windows ML, and speeds dip to 49.4 TPS.

In the SWE Agent test, an agentic workload, Llama averaged 58.6 seconds on Windows ML and 47.7 on llama.cpp, while Qwen 3 8B took 51.0 seconds on llama.cpp. Put it all together, and the ProArt P16 looks comfortable in the 8-billion-parameter class.

Depending on the config, the ProArt P16 can be configured with up to a 2TB SSD, with my sample opting for the middling 1TB option. It’s solid in capacity and speed, with a run of CrystalDiskMark revealing this to be a zippy PCIe Gen 4 option. I measured reads and writes of 7218.24 MB/s and 5778.23 MB/s, respectively.

Software

• Wholesale changes to Windows to accommodate local AI
• Local AI runs surprisingly well
• Some Asus-specific software present

The ProArt P16 comes running Windows 11, although Microsoft has made numerous changes to the Windows experience to better suit RTX Spark, all of its AI horsepower, and the rise of agentic AI.

Microsoft is building the next generation of Windows around trust as much as intelligence. As agents move the OS away from being an app-based frontend, it is changing how Windows handles containment, identity and manageability for agents. Its Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC) give each agent its own lane, with OS-enforced limits on what it can access. Each agent also runs with its own credentials, though the user stays in charge as admin. Anthropic, OpenAI and OpenClaw are among those building on MXC, giving it some hefty backing alongside Nvidia’s own push for local AI.

The other half of the plan is “hybrid intelligence”, where AI runs locally on-device and only reaches into the cloud when you need it to. Windows ML provides the runtime across CPU, GPU and NPU, while HydraFusion routes tasks between local and cloud models to get more from your token budget. Microsoft has mentioned a 284-billion-parameter DeepSeek V4 Flash frontier-class model that can be squeezed into 60GB of memory, and Nvidia’s own Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B offers a 74-billion-parameter model in just 24GB of memory thanks to 2-bit quantisation and having only nine billion parameters running at any one time. It’s pitched as a natural fit for RTX Spark and for more general-use tasks. In Copilot, a new toggle gives the assistant local file access and permission-gated actions, while Microsoft has also updated the taskbar search for contextual quick actions, such as arranging windows, enabling dark mode or do-not-disturb.

Microsoft is adding an onboarding system to Windows to make running local models something anyone can do. My own process was a little fiddlier: I downloaded the Hermes agent, then picked a model that could live in the system RAM. For most of my testing, I used Qwen 3.8 27B. This is a model that can happily live in 32GB of system RAM (with the rest allocated to the GPU). I picked it because it handles images as well as text, and is aimed at agentic work, which is exactly where this hardware is being pitched.

To try out an agentic workload, I set up Himalaya to give Hermes live access to my Gmail, but only read-only using Gmail’s app passwords, and asked it to sort through any pitches/requests I had. I asked it to highlight any interesting pitches, giving products within my remit and with a reasonable deadline a higher priority, and asked it to give them a score and record it to a local file on the laptop.

It took around an hour, but outputted a document in priority order based on the samples it identified and when samples were embargoed for, notifying me of the most important ones and any next steps it recommended. Of course, the quality of the output depends on the quality of the input, and the reason it perhaps took so long was as a result of my initial prompt being so detailed.

Beyond the agentic AI elements, the ProArt P16 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 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 13 hours 55 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for between one and two working days

The ProArt P16 bundles in a 99.9Whr cell, which is one of the biggest batteries you’ll find on a laptop today. It’s bigger than the cell fitted to some older ProArts, and combined with the increased efficiency of RTX Spark, I had very high hopes for this laptop’s battery life.

The PCMark 10 battery life test wouldn’t play ball with this laptop, weirdly, so a 1080p video loop test at the requisite 150 nits of brightness had to suffice. With this in mind, the ProArt P16 lasted for 13 hours and 55 minutes before conking out. This easily meets our longstanding 10-hour target and means you’ll get between one and two working days out of this laptop.

It’s also three hours or so longer than the RTX 5070-powered ProArt, beats the MacBook Pro M4 by nearly two hours, and wins out against the Strix Halo-powered ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition by a similar amount. Although it’s behind other ultrabooks we’ve tested – for reference, the Zenbook A16 (2026) lasted for 19 hours or so with its Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme inside.

Asus has also bundled this laptop with a beefy 140W charger that, unsurprisingly, puts power back into the ProArt P16 rather briskly. It took just 30 minutes to get it back to 50 percent, while a full charge took 70 minutes.

Should you buy it?