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There’s plenty to like with the ASUS ZenBook S 13 OLED laptop, and that’s simply because it combines premium components with the star of the show – AMD’s Ryzen 7 6800U.
The new AMD chip is excellent! Its performance increases versus the already-powerful Ryzen 7 5800U are modest but noticeable in computational workloads, but the overall platform and SoC improvements are incredibly useful. Particularly with reference to improved media consumption capabilities, LPDDR5 support, and PCIe Gen 4 storage.
The area where AMD has really improved with Ryzen 6000 Series Mobile though is the iGPU.
Now deploying RDNA2-based cores, the performance improvement versus the Vega-based Ryzen 7 5800U predecessor is sizable. And that performance uplift is actually useful because it takes some popular games from unplayable at 1080p to perfectly enjoyable at the go-to resolution. That’s a big deal on a 15-28W class of processor.
The most notable downside that I see with the Ryzen 7 6800U is that its media consumption capabilities are still not as good as they should be. Intel’s competing solutions even from as far back as 10th Gen Ice Lake have better capabilities with real-world media types in my own testing. And even in isolation, the inability to play 8K60 content from YouTube is not really a great showing for a 2022 market where 8K60 video output genuinely is not unreasonable.
Still, there’s plenty to like from the Ryzen 7 6800U; excellent power efficiency delivers excellent battery life, and that efficiency also allows the powerful chip to be squeezed inside alluring, ultraportable laptops such as this sub-15mm, 1kg ASUS ZenBook S 13 OLED.
The ASUS laptop is glorious – they’ve done a really good job at deploying high-end hardware that is fitting of the highly-competent Ryzen processor. Ample Type-C connectivity, impending USB4 support, a 2.8K OLED touch display – this laptop ticks many boxes. And many of those features are made possible thanks to the significant SoC and platform improvements brought to the market by AMD’s Ryzen 6000 Series Mobile processors in this low power format.
To summarise, Ryzen 7 6800U is a very good solution for ultraportable laptops, and ASUS has done an excellent job at designing a superb machine to really leverage the processor’s wide range of capabilities.
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Pros:
- Excellent computational performance.
- Very strong iGPU gaming abilities.
- Impressive capabilities for such a low power processor.
- Strong platform features – LPDDR5, PCIe Gen 4, USB4.
- Superb battery life.
- Easy to cool effectively and maintain power delivery and clock speeds.
Cons:
- Media consumption capabilities still well behind Intel, and actually barely tolerable.
- 16GB RAM feels slim (but that’s more of a laptop vendor decision).
KitGuru says: Ryzen 7 6800U is a superb processor and its wide-ranging set of features is exploited extreme well by the outstanding ASUS ZenBook S 13 OLED laptop.
