Asus Zenbook Pro 15 Flip OLED (Q529ZA) Review

Big screens always stand out in the convertible-laptop crowd, but this Asus machine has a different, less obvious distinction. A widescreen, 15.6-inch 2-in-1 laptop, the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip OLED (model Q529ZA; $1,199.99 as tested) comes in a snazzy deep-blue chassis but features an unusual component arrangement: a high-power 12th Gen Intel Core i7 H-series processor paired with…integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics. (Most laptops we’ve seen with Core i7 H-series CPUs are gaming or content-creation models with dedicated GPU muscle.) The Zenbook Pro 15 Flip also features a rare OLED panel with a crisp 2.8K resolution along with a 120Hz refresh rate. With no discrete GPU, however, it’s a shame that gamers or even some content creators can’t fully leverage such a fast, sharp panel. This decision and a few other, minor shortcomings keep us from giving this flashy, attractively screened Zenbook a higher recommendation.

The Design: New OLED, Old Size and Shape

Asus' Zenbook Pro 15 Flip OLED is an all-aluminum vision in a hue the company calls “Azurite Blue.” It’s gorgeous, allowing the laptop to stand out from the silver-and-black brushed-aluminum crowd. In certain light, the color looks black, but it flashes blue when the angle changes or the ambient light brightens. The touchpad is a slightly lighter (but still deep) shade of blue and presents a pleasing contrast to the rest of the keyboard deck.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The aluminum chassis is thinner and lighter than most 15.6- or 16-inch models, but it might be a case of being a little too thin and too light. The 0.74-by-14-by-9-inch (HWD) aluminum feels thin and a bit flimsy—it flexes in spots and doesn’t feel as rigid or rugged as other all-metal models. At 3.97 pounds, the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip is lighter than other 15- and 16-inch laptops. By comparison, the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 7 weighs 4.19 pounds, and the HP Spectre x360 16 weighs 4.45 pounds.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The high-resolution (2,880-by-1,620-pixel) OLED display is the star of the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip's show. The panel produces an incredibly crisp and dynamic image with stellar contrast and vibrant colors. It's rated for a substantial 550 nits of brightness, and white levels are quite bright, while OLED’s ability to completely turn off individual pixels results in inky blacks. Colors generated by the screen are accurate and vivid.

Most OLED panels feature the standard 60Hz refresh rate or perhaps 90Hz, but the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip’s display runs at 120Hz and with a 0.2ms response time. Movement in videos—and what games it can handle—look smooth, but the system’s gaming ability is severely limited by its integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics. Gamers and even animators looking to take advantage of the fast OLED panel will be disappointed by not only the system’s integrated graphics but also the inability to upgrade to a discrete GPU.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The speed of the OLED panel is new, but its shape and size are not. While many laptops at this size feature 16-inch displays with a 16:10 aspect ratio, the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip sticks with a conventional 15.6-inch, 16:9 widescreen panel. It’s a more natural fit for watching movies and shows, but the 16:9 ratio can feel a bit cramped when multitasking or just scrolling through a long web page or document, versus a taller 16:10 display. We prefer the extra room and added versatility of a 16:10 display for a general-use laptop and especially for a 2-in-1 convertible. In laptop mode, the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip’s widescreen display feels a bit awkward now—it’s too tall and narrow compared with a dedicated tablet.

Subpar Webcam and Sound

Along with the old-school, 15.6-inch 16:9 panel comes a dated 720p webcam. Many laptops we’ve seen this year aside from budget models feature 1080p cameras that produce finer, better-balanced images. And sure enough, the picture from Zenbook Pro 15 Flip’s webcam is grainy and overexposed, with reddish skin tones and details lacking in bright areas. At the end of 2022, we expect better webcam performance from a laptop at this price.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Many models at this size find room for four speakers that produce fuller sound than a twin set, but the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip sticks with a basic pair of speakers that produce basic sound. Bass response is nowhere to be found, nor any separation between the highs and midtones. With the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip, you’ll want to keep your headphones handy.

The keyboard feels roomy despite the presence of a dedicated number pad, but the key response feels too soft and mushy. And while no keys were shortened to accommodate the numpad, the four arrow keys get the half-height treatment despite there being room for the left- and right-arrow keys to be full height. We do appreciate the keyboard’s three-level backlighting and the ability to dial in the brightness to the ambient light.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

As if to mimic the widescreen display, the touchpad is wide, as well, and features a matte finish for smooth gliding. Moving the mouse pointer on the touchpad feels natural and is accurately recorded. The click response is snappy, too, with the perfect amount of travel.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Asus' Zenbook Pro 15 Flip port selection covers all the bases. On the right side, you get a pair of USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 support, a combo audio port, and the power connector. (The laptop features a barrel charger instead of an increasingly common USB-C charger.)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

On the left, you’ll find a USB 3.2 Type-A port, an HDMI port, and a microSD card reader. The inclusion of a card reader is appreciated but makes us pine all the more for the option to upgrade the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip to a dedicated GPU since it’s a feature most used by media creators and editors. And as you’ll see in the next section, the system’s multimedia performance is pedestrian at best.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Testing the Asus Zenbook Pro 15 Flip OLED: A Mismatch of Power and Features

Our Zenbook Pro 15 Flip OLED (model Q529ZA) test system features the Intel Core i7-12700H processor, 16GB of RAM, integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics, and a 512GB SSD for $1,199.99 at Best Buy. The Core i7-12700H is a member of Intel’s 12th Generation “Alder Lake-H” series of 45-watt (W) mobile chips. The H series is the high-powered chip class in Intel’s lineup with the 28W P series in the middle and the efficient 15W U series at the other end. The Core i7-12700H features Intel’s new hybrid architecture with Performance and Efficient cores; it has six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, and support for a total of 20 processing threads.

To put the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip’s performance in perspective, we compared it with other Core i7-based laptops. What’s notable here is that the Acer Swift 3 OLED (starts at $929; $1,229 as tested) is the only other laptop we’ve tested with the same CPU/GPU pairing as the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip. The other two laptops you’ll see in the benchmark charts—the Dell G16 and the HP Envy 16 (starts at $1,389; $1,809 as tested)—feature the more common configurations of the Core i7-12700H with Nvidia GeForce graphics (here, the RTX 3060). Rounding out the charts is the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 ($1,399.99), which features the Core i7-1260P and Iris Xe graphics. The Core i7-1260P is from Intel’s middle-ground 28W P series, including the same eight Efficient cores as the Core i7-12700H but only two Performance cores and a total of 12 processing threads.

Productivity Tests

UL's PCMark 10 is our main benchmark, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. (See more about how we test laptops.)

Three further benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our last productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window), which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Zenbook Pro 15 Flip’s PCMark 10 score is outstanding but you can see what additional thermal space can do even for general application performance—the Dell G16 and HP Envy 16 are clearly superior on the test. That the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip manages to edge the HP Envy 16 on our HandBrake and Cinebench tests shows it has some multimedia chops. Unfortunately, Asus' laptop is led by the RTX 3060-based pair by such a wide margin on our Photoshop benchmark that it makes the Zenbook hard to recommend to photographers or anyone engaged in image editing.

Graphics Tests

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics), and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Two more tests from GFXBench 5.0, run offscreen to allow for different display resolutions, wring out OpenGL operations.

Naturally, the Dell G16 and HP Envy 16 dominate the 3DMark tests here, a hardly surprising result, thanks to the RTX 3060 GPUs. (The GFXBench test hiccuped on this laptop and would not run; more likely a fault of the test than the laptop.) It’s disappointing that the Zenbook Pro 15 Flip features a fast OLED panel and yet doesn’t include at least an option for a discrete GPU to let gamers or content creators take advantage of it. And, if such a feat isn't possible, then we'd rather see such a high-end screen deprioritized in future editions in lieu of a better webcam and a more hybrid-friendly aspect ratio.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

Additionally, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) at Windows' 50% and peak settings.

The Zenbook Pro 15 Flip lasted for roughly 8.5 hours on our battery-drain test, a slightly below-average result. With its more efficient CPU, the Yoga 7i 16 (Gen 7) ran for more than twice as long, while the HP Envy 16 nearly doubled its runtime despite the presence of high-powered dedicated graphics.

As for the display, the Asus panel hits 100% in the sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts, and 94% of the Adobe RGB spectrum, narrowly outclassed by the Acer Swift 3 and HP Envy 16. The display is also the third brightest of the bunch at 363 nits, which should be plenty for the work it's designed for, but this laptop has bigger bugbears.

Verdict: An OLED Mismatch

This 15-inch laptop wows with its speedy, high-resolution OLED display, but then doesn’t offer the graphics needed by the type of users that would most benefit from it—namely, gamers and content creators. With the Intel Core i7-12700H, it’s halfway to being a suitable content creation convertible, but you are stuck with integrated Intel graphics, which puts a ceiling on its media-editing capabilities.

Plus, despite the cool, deep blue aluminum chassis, we aren’t wild about the chassis or keyboard. Finally, the 720p webcam feels antiquated at this point. Better convertibles are readily available at this size and price, including the HP Spectre x360 16 and Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 7.