My ASUS ZenBook Pro Creator's machine seems ready to eat itself. Overheating, especially in 100 degrees F heat, is a problem.
For the last three years, it's been used more for gaming than for creating. I did some programming, edited some photos, and created documents, but most of that, I left to my Mac.
I've played a lot of games. I mentioned that I had damaged two or three mice and in the last year, I've been using a damaged WASD area (and the space bar) of the keyboard. It wasn't meant for heavy gaming or aggressive players. I checked with a reliable repair business and got a quick quote of US$150 for a replacement keyboard. That's a lot but perhaps, someone else will want to buy such an otherwise good machine (aside from the heat during gaming) and I'll pay for the keyboard to be replaced.
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The MSI Crosshair A16 HX has an AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX in contrast to my Ryzen 7 5800H. The Nvidia RTX 5060 is only two generations newer than the RTX 3050 Ti, and at about the same level in the lineup. IIRC, the 3050 Ti was a 3060 with 4 GB of GDRAM, instead of 8 GB.
I'll still only have a 1 TB drive, but it's PCIe gen4 instead of gen-3. There is also another slot, which seems to be gen-5. 32 GB of RAM will be helpful, as Windows 11 Pro keeps taking as much as possible, and having Steam and another game launcher, plus a web browser and Malwarebytes, keeps RAM busy when running a game or creative software.
The multi-zone keyboard is a SteelSeries designed product. That gives me hope, since my current mouse is a SteelSeries Aerox 5, which has been amazingly reliable.
I found one warning in my research: Do not let the MSI helper software attempt to install BIOS updates. Download them to a thumb drive and install it through the BIOS controls. No one wants a computer-shaped brick.
I'd been looking at MSI for a while, but most of their laptop computers had VA panels. I didn't think that those were still being used. The last time I considered something other than IPS was in the 1990s. Actually, I believe I bought my first LCD in 2000. Then again, my ASUS laptop has an OLED panel. The documentation actually has "IPS-level panel", whatever that means. I'm glad that the panel is level. (Check your sarcasm detector for good batteries.)
The resolution on the Crosshair is 2560x1440, which is a bit more than the 1920x1080 that I have but those rich blacks and whites will be different somehow. Supposedly, it has DCI-p3 100% compliance but I'm skeptical. The RTX 5060 will be using a MUX design, so graphics won't be routed through the integrated GPU on the AMD APU, more like what happens on a desktop machine in the old days. That will improve data throughput and make it more efficient.
The Ryzen 9 8940HX has 16 cores, twice as many as the Ryzen 7 5800H. It might be slightly better. Did your sarcasm detector alert you? Even the internal GPU should be years ahead. I remember trying to run Unreal Tournament 2004 through the AMD 5800H iGPU and it was not as fast as what I had in 2004. I remember reading about the iGPU in the 8945HX and that was a 780M, I believe. This one has a 610M, which may be good.
It all sounds good, right? My one regret is that I had intended to buy a new M5 MacBook Air. Tuesday can't come soon enough. Should I have paid almost US$60 for Saturday delivery?
Update 2026.05.18: It's here!
UPS is not my favorite delivery company. I had some equipment just not arrive and the store who sent it sent a second product for me. UPS was caught selling merchandise because of a guitar with a serial number. In this case, they did better and it arrived a day early.
Of course, updates took a while and not everything goes as planned. There is a BIOS update and I'm trying to understand how to take care of it. They showed something like 14 or 15 steps.
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It works well. It worked with my mouse from the beginning and gaming half-keyboard, as well. Windows 11 had been making some sort of backup (to what extent, I don't know) and that sped things along somewhat.
Getting the Netmarble game launcher downloaded was the weirdest. The company really needs to work on their user friendliness. Steam, Mozilla, Google, and Malwarebytes wanted me to prove myself. All of that is fine now.
At one point, while I was in a game, it powered off. When I powered on again, it didn't explain why there was a problem, or even that there was a problem. While I'm writing this, it just paused suddenly. I'm a bit nervous.
The keyboard lighting is good, just like the images on their website. The feel of the keyboard is excellent. Steelseries did their part of the project. I'm not sure why they had to stuff a numeric keypad into it, but the alpha keyboard isn't crowded.
Sound is excellent in contrast to my ASUS creator's machine that was weak. That machine has speakers at the bottom. It also has an OLED display, which I found amazing. This IPS-level display is better. The color settings may be set to be more vivid, but the blacks and the whites look great.
The stickers on the palm rest are big and don't provide any useful function, but I doubt that I can remove them.
Having more processing power shows up in games with much more detail. Grass and rain are more impressive with the 5060 versus the 3050 Ti. Older games seem okay and there is a glitch now and then, but I'm not sure whether it's Windows or the machine. It could be the MUX design, bypassing the APU's iGPU. One kind of glitch was that SteelSeries GG was recording clips automatically. It took me a while to get things under control on the last two machines. It might take a while this time.
SSD speed is fine, although I can't tell that it's faster than the PCIe 3rd gen in the previous machine.
Being that this laptop computer is 16 versus 15.6, it's difficult to notice the difference. The only difference I can notice is the smooth plastic, rather than the aluminum of the ASUS.
In any case, I'm happy.
Update 2026.05.20: There is a little light bleed at the bottom of the LCD. While playing Where Winds Meet, there was too much frame rate drop, something that never seemed to happen with the older machine. Turned the graphics setting to Performance. I guess pushing all those extra pixels made a difference, since the 5060 and the 3050 Ti are in the same category, just a difference of graphics RAM.
Maybe, Windows is taking advantage of the AI capabilities, even though they're supposedly disabled. When has Microsoft ever been truthful or straightforward?
Other aspects of the machine are good. The fans run a fair amount of time but they seem to be around 3600 rpm, not 6000 as the other machine was doing.
I should probably disconnect the power and run it on battery for web browsing and videos, just to drain the battery and see how it performs. This APU has a 55 to 75 W TDP, which isn't horrible, but it won't last long on battery at 55 Watts.
Update 2026.05.21: The frame rate drop in Where Winds Meet still happens occasionally. There is an option to use DirectX 12. I'm not sure whether it will become better or worse, but I should give it a try.
Update 2026.05.24: I tried some system updates through MSI Center and it sent me to Windows Update, which handled the drivers but not the BIOS update.
Got part way through the BIOS update but it couldn't show me where the update was and I didn't want to cause a problem, so I stopped.
Also, I tried the Where Winds Meet DirectX 12 option and it's very slow to start, plus it has occasional glitches.
It's strange that occasionally, this machine is not as fast as the older machine.
Update 2026.05.27: Got an idea to go back to 1987 ways and installed the BIOS/UEFI update. I got an older USB type A thumb drive with only 8 GB of storage. Formatted it and only added the firmware update. I removed all other USB devices, and charged the battery to 99%. It was complaining that 74% might not be enough. It would have been interesting to do that with floppy disks. I thought about it. I also considered that we sometimes used a debugger to go into RAM to change certain sequences and then, commit the changes to disk or diskette back then. Remembering my Atari ST around 1989, a BIOS-level update required a new set of (E)PROMs. I had some Russian (in Queens borough, NYC) making a physical change to the motherboard to allow 18 pin DIP RAM instead of 16 pin, and he decided to make some money and duplicate my PROMs and gave me a set of EPROMs instead. Everything worked fine but it was shady.
Then, I got a screen about Bitlocker. I can't say that I ever enabled Bitlocker, but when I was allowed into the recovery information, the previous computer also had Bitlocker enabled. Microsoft needs to stop making decisions for me. They're like the ransom bandits.
Thankfully, I was able to jump through all of the hoops and now, the machine seems much more stable.
Oh, here's something fun. I checked e-mail and found that Newegg reduced the computer price another US$110 since I bought it a little over a week ago. Of course, they won't even think of splitting the difference to give you a partial credit past 7 days.
Besides that, the promotional 007 First Light game e-mail did not have the correct information.
Machine and games are running much better since the update.
Update 2026.05.29: Where Winds Meet went through a large update and it's working okay, and certainly better than the game was before the BIOS/UEFI update. I'm not really noticing too many problems overall. There are some audio glitches, but I'm sure that's a Microsoft problem since the recent updates. If Microsoft is trying to push everyone to Linux, they should just go out of business.
Update 2026.06.07: I went to Newegg to add a review. I noticed some reviews that didn't even seem valid. I wonder sometimes if Chinese companies have their promoters add fake reviews the way they talk down other equipment in Asia on social media.
Anyway, it's still working just fine.
Update 2026.06.14: The 007 First Light promotion finally worked. Apparently, the Nvidia app now takes the code that didn't look like the one in the format they outlined.
Update 2026.06.22: I used the MSI Center app today and there was a driver update for Windows for the motherboard. I went ahead and allowed it to happen, even though those stories of bricked machines was in my mind. Everything is fine.
