I pitted my two of my favorite powerhouse Windows laptops against each other

Today, you can find more large-display laptops for content creation than ever. The 16-inch laptop has come into its own, taking over from 15-inch laptops and offering more choices. One of our favorites has been the excellent Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16.

The Asus ProArt P16 is a great laptop in its own right, with strong performance and a spectacular OLED display. It’s also one of the first to use AMD’s Ryzen AI 9, a new high-end chipset option. Can The Asus push the Yoga off our list of the best?

Specs and configurations

The ProArt P16’s base model costs $1,900 and includes an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chipset, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, and a 16.0-inch 4K+ OLED display (the only option). You’ll spend $400 to upgrade to an RTX 4070, and with 64GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD, you’ll pay $2,700.

The Yoga Pro 9i 16 has a less expensive, but less capable base model that costs $1,482 for an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, an RTX 4050, and a 16-inch 3.2K IPS display. The most expensive model is $2,043 for a Core Ultra 9 185H, 32GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and a 3.2K OLED display.

As we’ll see, the Yoga Pro 9i 16 does well with its components, meaning that you can get very close to the same performance for considerably less money compared to the ProArt P16.

Design

Compared to some other 16-inch laptops we’ve reviewed, such as the Dell XPS 16 and the Apple MacBook Pro 16, both the ProArt P16 and the Yoga Pro 9i 16 are rather pedestrian. They’re not bad-looking laptops, but they just don’t stand out in any significant way. That’s true on both the outside and when you open the lid. The point is, you’re unlikely to pick either laptop based on their looks alone, but neither will offend you. The ProArt P16 does have slightly smaller bezels, while the Yoga Pro 9i 16 uses a reverse notch at the top of the display to make room for the webcam.

In terms of their build qualities, both are made of aluminum and both have rigid chassis and keyboard decks. The Yoga Pro 9i 16 wins out in having a lid that resists all bending and flexing, where the ProArt P16 does not. Asus laptops are usually rock-solid, so this was a bit of a surprise. It’s not egregious, but the Yoga Pro 9i 16 gives an overall sensation of solidity that the ProArt P16 lacks.

Both laptops have good keyboards, with plenty of key spacing, large keycaps, and light, snappy switches. Neither is the best — this is becoming a theme — but you’ll get up to full typing speed quickly enough. Both also have mechanical touchpads, with both being large and taking up the valuable space on the palm rest.

Connectivity is also roughly identical, with the AMD-based ProArt P16 having one USB4 port compared to the Yoga Pro 9i 16’s single Thunderbolt 4 port. Both could benefit from more ports with more bandwidth. But both have identical legacy connectivity and a full-size SD card reader. The ProArt P16 does have more up-to-date wireless connectivity.

Finally, the Yoga Pro 9i 16 benefits from a 5MP webcam versus the ProArt P16’s 1080p version. However, that’s not likely to make a huge difference in image quality. For any AI features that can use a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), the ProArt P16 will be faster. However, right now, there aren’t many such AI features to worry about. Both laptops have infrared cameras for Windows 11 Hello facial recognition.

Performance

The ProArt P16 is built around the 28-watt AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chipset, with 12 cores and 24 threads running at up to 5.1GHz. It’s a solid update to AMD’s Ryzen lineup, and its main claim to fame is the NPU offering up to 50 tera operations per second (TOPS). That’s a lot faster than the NPU in Intel’s Core Ultra series that runs at 10 TOPS. We reviewed the Yoga Pro 9i 16 with the 45-watt Core Ultra 9 185 chipset with 16 cores and 22 threads running at up to 5.1GHz. We reviewed the ProArt P16 with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU and the Yoga Pro 9i 16 with the RTX 4060 GPU. These are all each laptop’s the highest-end options.

In most of benchmarks, the ProArt P16 was faster, but not by a lot. That includes in the PugetBench Premiere Pro benchmark that runs in a live version of Adobe Premiere Pro and can use the GPU to speed up various tasks. It’s an important benchmark, because many users will buy one of these laptops for video editing.

While the ProArt P16 has a lead here, these differences are unlikely to be noticeable in real-world use. Neither laptop is the fastest 16-inch machine for creators or demanding productivity users, but both are reasonably fast for both.

Display

The only display option with the ProArt P16 is a 4K+ (3840 x 2400) OLED display running at 60Hz. OLED typically provides bright, dynamic, and accurate colors, along with inky blacks. The Yoga Pro 9i 16 is among only a handful of Windows laptops to offer a mini-LED display, which typically provides extremely high brightness, very good (but not great) colors, and very deep contrast, but without OLED’s perfect blacks. The Yoga’s 3.2K (3200 x 2000) version runs at up to 165Hz, as does the 3.2K IPS option.

According to our colorimeter, the ProArt P16’s OLED panel lives up to its promise. The Yoga Pro 9i 16’s isn’t quite as great, in that its contrast is less than, say, Apple’s implementation in the MacBook Pro 16. That’s likely down to how Windows supports the display — switch from SDR to HDR mode, and the mini-LED display’s colors are shot, but contrast goes up to nearly as high as OLED.

Ultimately, the ProArt P16’s display will please more users. The Yoga Pro 9i 16’s is also very good, just not quite as stellar.

Portability

The ProArt P16 is slightly smaller and thinner than the Yoga Pro 9i 16, and it’s about half a pound lighter. However, these are 16-inch laptops, and neither can be construed as highly portable.

Battery life is another important consideration, and here, the ProArt P16 takes the lead. It lasted 8.5 hours in our web-browsing test and 11 hours in our video-looping test. Those are solid scores for a laptop with a high-res, power-hungry OLED display and a fast chipset. The Yoga Pro 9i 16 lasted for six and 9.5 hours, respectively. Those are more typical results for this class.

Neither laptop will last long on battery power when you’re performing demanding tasks like encoding video. But, the ProArt P16 will last for a reasonably long time when using it for productivity.

The ProArt P16 is more well-rounded, but it’s more expensive

We loved the Yoga Pro 9i 16 as a reasonably affordable 16-inch laptop with a very good mini-LED display, strong performance given the components, and a quality build. It beats out several strong competitors, all while undercutting the ProArt P16 in terms of price.

However, the ProArt P16 has an OLED display that’s better for almost everything, it’s faster, and it gets better battery life. In most aspects, it’s the better laptop. Its only problem is the price, and you’ll want to think carefully in terms of whether it’s worth the premium.

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