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ASUS’ weirdly impressive laptop could be about to launch

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The Asus Zenbook Pro 16X is a powerhouse of a laptop with a completely unconventional design. It just released for sale in Europe, which means the Zenbook Pro 16X could be landing in the U.S. soon.

We covered this odd laptop in May, but we weren’t sure then if, or when, the laptop would go on sale. Well, now we know it is on sale at least in the U.K. and other parts of Europe with a starting price of 2,999 British pounds.

Backside of the the Asus Zenbook Pro 16X.
Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Asus is no stranger to innovative designs. The Asus ROG Zephyrus duo includes a screen in the keyboard, for instance. But the Zenbook Pro 16X takes things to an entirely new level.

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For starters, it has a flip-up keyboard. You can adjust the angle of the keyboard to the most comfortable position for your hands and wrists. This has the added benefit of providing greater cooling to the laptop as there are vents under the keyboard, and when it is raised up, hot air can escape. This reduces internal temperature by an 7-degrees Celsius.

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Tweeters on either side of the chassis flip up with the keyboard and point directly at you, providing front-facing sound you normally wouldn’t get on a laptop.

There’s also a massive haptic feedback touchpad that is almost as good as a MacBook touchpad. Then there’s an Asus dial to the left of the keyboard. This provides additional functions for popular apps, such as all the Adobe Creative Cloud apps, and many games.

Innovation aside, the Asus Zenbook Pro 16X packs a punch in performance. The high-end model comes with an Intel Alder Lake-H Core i9 processor, 32 GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and 2 TB of storage. All of the Zenbook Pro 16X machines include a 16-inch touchscreen OLED display with 4K resolution and 16:10 aspect ratio.

You’ll also get a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU with 6 GB of GDDR6 VRAM with the ability to scale from 75 watts to 95W when needed. Asus includes its custom IceCool Pro twin curved-blade fans and a 5mm cooling pipe to keep everything running quiet and smooth.

The Asus Zenbook Pro 16X's keyboard lifts via a new AAS Ultra mechanism to a seven-degree angle.
Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

But this isn’t a gaming machine. Asus is going after the professional video and graphics market with this machine. It includes stable Nvidia Studio drivers for app support, and while gaming will be easy for this machine at 1080p, you won’t want to push it.

Now that the Zenbook Pro 16X is available in Europe, it’s only a matter of time before this high-end performance machine comes to the U.S.

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Nathan Drescher
Nathan Drescher
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Nathan Drescher is a freelance journalist and writer from Ottawa, Canada. He's been writing about technology from around the…
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