Asus is putting OLED screens in as many of its laptops as possible. The latest model to get this treatment is the Asus Vivobook Pro 16X OLED. Targeted at content creators, this 16-inch notebook boasts a unique virtual rotary dial on its touchpad for more intuitive adjustments in Adobe creative apps. The Vivobook also has competitive hardware specs to support your creative endeavours and gaming. And of course, its vibrant 4K OLED screen is simply a pleasure to look at.

The Vivobook's OLED screen looks fabulous. It's rich, vibrant and plenty bright (rated at 550 nits). It is basically similar to the one on the Asus Zenbook 14X OLED, but with more pixels. It's a pity the OLED's refresh rate is only 60Hz. But I'll give it a pass as the Vivobook isn't designed for gaming. Like the Zenbook, the Vivobook's OLED screen has a 16:10 aspect ratio that gives you slightly more screen real estate for productivity. The bezels, too, are pleasantly slim, though the lid has some flex and isn't as sturdy as I would have liked. Meanwhile, the 720p web camera is middling with a fair bit of noise, but there's a physical shutter for privacy. It's not an infrared camera for facial recognition. Instead, the Vivobook has a fingerprint sensor embedded in its power button for biometric authentication.

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The Vivobook's key feature is the Asus DialPad, a virtual rotary dial overlaid on the touchpad. You enable it by swiping inward from the small DialPad icon at the top right corner of the touchpad. This DialPad lets you easily adjust the laptop's screen brightness and volume with your finger. But its main appeal is its usefulness in supported Adobe apps (Photoshop, After Effects, Lightroom Classic and Premiere Pro). Using the DialPad, you can adjust settings like the thickness of the brush (Photoshop) or the contrast level (Lightroom Classic). I liked how intuitive it is to bring up the DialPad when needed. But I feel adding haptic feedback will further enhance this experience. You can customise the DialPad settings for these Adobe apps, as well as tweak other system settings like the fan speed, via the ProArt Creator Hub app.

With its AMD Ryzen 7 CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, the Vivobook has more computing power than the average mainstream notebook. This laptop may be targeted at content creators, but it is also handy for a post-work gaming session. Simply switch the creator-oriented Nvidia Studio driver to the Nvidia Game Ready driver before gaming. In Metro Exodus, the Vivobook produced 32fps on average (Ultra,1080p). This is slightly lower than the 40fps by the Asus TUF Dash F15 gaming notebook, which uses the same graphics chip. Switching up the fan speed to its maximum, though, only yielded an improvement of around 1 to 2fps, which doesn't seem worth the extra fan noise. The Vivobook scored 5,433 in PCMark10, which is similar to the Intel-powered Asus Zenbook 14X OLED. But crucially, the Vivobook is far better than the Zenbook in the Digital Content Creation segment.

The Asus Vivobook Pro 16X OLED comes with a massive 96 watt-hour battery to support its power-hungry hardware. Despite that, the notebook only managed an uptime of 4hr 25min in our video-loop battery test. While video playback is not as power-intensive as gaming or encoding a video, the Vivobook's battery uptime is similar to large-screen notebooks with dedicated graphics. In any case, you should be plugged in for such critical tasks to get the best performance possible. At S$2,598, the Vivobook is about the price you'd expect to pay for a mid-range gaming notebook, which is reflective of its hardware, especially with that vivid OLED screen. Get it now from the Asus online store, Shopee or Lazada.

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Note: Review unit provided by Asus.