ASUS ProArt P16 (H7606WX) first impressions

My trusty workhorse, a Lenovo Legion from 2022 (Ryzen 9 5900HX, RTX 3080 16 GB, 32 GB RAM), died on me on Saturday (the 17th) and has since not started at all. It had been showing signs of issues for a while. It died once before Christmas and wouldn’t start for about 30 minutes. I also had occasional wi-fi drops and Bluetooth that did not work consistently. When I dropped out of a meeting because the wi-fi gave up, my boss said it was time to start looking for a replacement..

I am a support professional in editorial software. The company where I work provides an InDesign-based newsroom solution, so a large part of my work involves InDesign debugging, reproducing issues, and testing different versions and setups. On the side, I dabble in coding, mostly vibe coding and pair programming with AI. For this purpose, I have also tested some local LLMs. I do some occasional gaming as well, but gaming is no longer one of my primary use cases.

I was basically holding out for the new CES 2026 laptops. Although I had the ProArt on a preliminary shortlist, it wasn’t really a choice at first since the marketing clearly positioned it towards creator professionals. That said, the hardware specs and overall aesthetics still made it interesting.

Since things went as they did, we had to make quick decisions to get me back on track. The only laptop in stock with reasonable delivery time was the H7606 lineup. I was able to argue that ROI over roughly four years (expected laptop lifetime) justified going for the top-of-the-line H7606WX.

While waiting for the ProArt to arrive, I read a lot of bad or mixed reviews on Reddit, mentioning things like general stability issues, screen flickering, and wi-fi problems. YouTube provided a more balanced picture from professional reviewers, but those reviews are often short-term (and may be sponsored in one way or another). Plus, the hardware is rarely used extensively over longer periods.

Based on the negative reports I decided to wipe the pre-installed Windows and start from scratch, only installing the bare minimum needed to get up and running. Coming from a gaming laptop, with all the bloat (did I hear McAfee?) and background services that typically ship with a preinstalled Windows image, this also felt like a good way to reduce overhead and potential sources of noise or instability.

My setup process was:

• Installed Windows 11 Pro from Microsoft media, wiping all partitions in the installer
• Ran Windows Update until fully done
• Installed AMD chipset drivers from the official source
• Installed NVIDIA Studio driver using a custom install, unticked the extra telemetry checkbox (the NVIDIA App seems mandatory now)
• Installed ASUS System Control Interface only
• Installed G-Helper instead of Armoury Crate

Right now, I am running the Balanced profile in G-Helper. Fans (CPU and GPU) are hovering around ~1800 RPM. I cannot hear them unless I put my ear very close to the machine. In Silent mode, the fans go to 0 RPM. Compared to my Legion, the fan behavior here is far less aggressive at idle and during light workloads.

So far, I have tested InDesign 2026 and 2025, as I need both for work and customer support purposes. I have also installed WSL and my development environment, including VS Code, and run and tested two of my side projects. In these scenarios, I don’t think I have even heard the fans spin up.

This is still early days, and I am not making any claims about long-term reliability yet, but my initial experience has been very positive.

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