The best ASUS laptops

Finding the best ASUS laptop is no easy feat – largely because there are just so many to choose from, whether for gaming, business or studies. There are different form factors and components that can completely change how well these machines will form in different settings.

To help you find the right one for you, our experts have personally tested and reviewed as many ASUS laptops as we can get our hands on, and combined our analysis with results from benchmark tests, external reviews and market research. Using these insights, we've compiled this list of the best ASUS laptops available right now. Right now, our top choice for creatives is the hugely innovative ASUS Zenbook Duo 14 OLED, with its two full-size touchscreens and detachable keyboard offering the perfect balance for almost any creative. However, as everyone's needs and budgets are different, we've laid out a wide variety of choices we can wholeheartedly recommend below.

If you want to look at other brands' laptops, we've included a far wider selection in some of our other guides, whether it's the best laptops for working from home or the best laptops for graphic design.

The best Asus laptops available today

Best ASUS laptop overall

Forget 2-in-1s, this is a 1-in-2: the new ASUS Zenbook Duo 14 OLED a laptop with two OLED touchscreens that allows you incredible flexibility in how you set it up, means you don’t need to carry a portable external monitor around with you, and comes with enough power and storage to make meaningful creative work on the move not only possible but actually enjoyable. 

The dual-screen setup from previous iterations has been taken to the extreme, with two full-size touchscreen displays, a detachable keyboard and a fantastic variety of layout options for any number of creative work, including content creation, photo-editing, publishing and video work. The only thing we'd note is that the Intel Arc Graphics, while easily more powerful than Iris Xe, don't match up with NVIDIA 40-series cards. And while it's not exactly cheap, the Zenbook Duo OLED is one of the few times we’ve looked at the price of a £2,000 laptop, then at our bank balance, and thought ‘actually, maybe it is worth that’.

Read more in our ASUS Zenbook Duo 14 OLED 2024 review.

Most powerful

Packed out with an astonishing number of top-notch components, this laptop is perfect for handling complex and processing power-hungry creative tasks and software. Despite this, it remains cool and doesn't throttle. 

It's pretty gorgeous to look at, to boot - with its luxe design and bright, colour-accurate OLED display which hits 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, the ASUS ProArt Studiobook OLED even has touchscreen functionality. there's even a built-in dial above the trackpad, which is programmable app-by-app; a real boon for creatives. 

Read our full ASUS ProArt Studiobook OLED review. 

Best affordable

The ASUS TUF Gaming A15 is a great laptop. As well as being capable of running today’s AAA games at decent quality, it has enough all-round strengths to make it a good choice for most creatives. Gaming pros will probably want something fancier (but then again probably aren’t too focused on the budget) and professional video editors and animators will want to look at more powerful machines, but most users will find a lot to love in the ASUS TUF Gaming A15’s subtly mecha-inspired frame.

It can run Photoshop and Premiere Pro without difficulty, and with the refresh rate and discrete graphics card, you'll have enough grunt for game development and some 3D processing too. 

Read our full ASUS TUF Gaming A15 review for more details.

Best MacBook rival

If you are looking for lots of power in a fairly lightweight package, but don't need top-level graphics grunt, you don't need a MacBook Air. The ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED has the greatest laptop screen on Earth right now, a brilliant, bright, sharp OLED touchscreen, and the CPU performance is on par with the new, and much more expensive, MacBook Pro. It also offers a big jump in graphics performance over previous integrated graphics laptops thanks to a well-implemented and functioning AI Boost NPU, although it doesn't quite reach into the realms of high-power animation, graphic design or video editing. The only slight downside is its comparative lack of ports and resulting reliance on an external dock or hub. However, at its price point, you'll be hard-pressed to find anything better than this ASUS Zenbook. 

Read our full review of the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED.

Best lightweight ASUS

The ASUS Zenbook S 13 OLED is the ultimate lightweight laptop, and pretty much took our breath away in our review with its fantastic performance, which we felt was good enough to take on bulkier and heavier rivals (such as the Dell XPS 13 and MacBook Air). Of course, that doesn't necessarily go for much more intensive rendering tasks like video editing or 3D work, but it'll do just fine for photo editing and general use.

The screen does look teeny, but thanks to its super-sharp 2.8K resolution it feels far bigger than it actually is. All round, it's pretty robust and will see you through a good few years, though its integrated graphics are a little unfortunate.

Best for creative pros on a budget

The ASUS Vivobook Pro 16 is a fantastic all-around laptop for creatives, including students in design-related industries. Integrating a dedicated GPU alongside a more than capable 13th Gen Intel CPU provides enough processing power to fulfil its mid-range laptop status. The battery life leaves a little to be desired, especially given the hybrid worker target market. As it's unlikely to manage a full day's work on a single charge, you'll want to make sure your charger is never too far away. 

Its OLED display provides the necessary size, colour accuracy, and vibrancy to deliver a perfect solution for those working with photos or colour-grading videos. As far as budget-friendly mid-range laptops go, it's hard to argue with the performance of the Vivobook Pro 16. 

Read our full ASUS Vivobook Pro 16 OLED review.

Best for students

If you're looking for a slightly more affordable model that can still pack a punch for your creative studies, the older-gen ASUS Vivobook S14 is well-balanced and can handle low-demand applications and software with relative ease despite its low retail price.

The specs aren't much to write home about; you can choose between 8GB or 16GB RAM, and it comes with Intel 11th generation processors, but that should be enough to see students, lightweight creatives, and workers through the day. It's also specifically designed to be especially apt at handling creative software like Adobe Photoshop and Clip Paint Studio for any digital illustrator; maybe just save the more intensive rendering tasks for a more robust machine.

Best big gaming laptop

This stylish and svelte laptop is kitted out with some of the most powerful components from recent years, including the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card. It's flashy inside and out with its LED lid display, which is reflected in its hefty price tag, and will work wonderfully both as a creative workstation and for gaming. 

In our review, we praised the "premium feel", noting it's not all style, no substance; however, some of the ASUS ROG Zephyrus M16 proprietary technology, namely the ROG Intelligent Cooling Thermal System, doesn't quite work as advertised. Plus, it's just frighteningly expensive.

How to choose

How we test laptops

Creative Bloq's team of hardware experts bring with them many years of experience using, testing and benchmarking laptops with a focus on running creative applications. All the laptops in this guide have been tested by using real-life creative software and benchmarked to gauge what types of software each one can use without problems, as well as using toher creative tools you'll use, such as Adobe Creative Cloud applications and more. We run different benchmark tests on each laptop depending on its intended use by its maker, but the benchmarks we've run all the laptops in this guide through include the following:

• Cinebench R23/2024 - this assesses the performance of a computer's CPU and GPU using real-world 3D rendering tasks
• Handbrake - we use this free and open-source transcoder for digital video files to render a short 4K animated film, using the same file for all our tests
• Geekbench 5/6 - this tests the CPU's processing power, both by using a single core for a single task at a time as well as all the CPU's core to see its ability to multitask
• 3DMark - this assesses a laptop's ability to run 3D graphic rendering tasks, which is important for both a variety of render-based creative work and gaming

But perhaps more importantly than benchmarking, we evaluate machines in real-world scenarios, pushing them to the limit with multiple applications running to see how they perform in project-like conditions. Power, speed, flexibility, and what a laptop looks and feels like to use are all criteria in our reviewing process. We do much more than simply unpack a test unit, run some benchmarks and then pack it up again; we have lived and worked with all of the above laptops, running them in real-life scenarios and done projects relevant to this guide, otherwise we wouldn't recommend these models to you.