Asus Vivobook
A very good all-round laptop that offers impressive portability and reasonable value.
Asus’ VivoBook range is a midrange collection of notebooks that typically offers decent value and an all-rounder feature set without specialising in any one area. This latest S15 model carries the latest 8th gen. Intel chips and Nvidia’s MX150 graphics, but little else has changed.
The Full HD screen is crisp, bright and well-lit but it’s not the most colourful and graphics can feel a bit washed out. However, the “NanoEdge” bezels are super-thin at just 6mm (top and sides) meaning that the large, 15.6in display fits on a relatively-small chassis. Indeed, it’s only 36cm wide and 18mm deep which, when coupled with the 1.8KG weight, makes it highly portable for this category of laptop. The aluminium chassis is generally sturdy but there’s still plenty of plastic trim. Our model was a sober, silver-grey but there are some funky colour
variants available.
When opened up, what Asus calls the “ErgoLift” hinge raises the rear by three degrees. This gives a slightly-more comfortable typing position plus better cooling performance.
Under the hood, Intel’s 1.8GHz (4.6GHz Turbo Boost) quad-core Core-i7 8565U combined with 8GB RAM and a 512GB SATA SSD to score a respectable 4,032 in PCMark 10. However, retail specs will have lesser CPUs and variable-technology hard drives. This is probably a good thing as our test unit kept crashing when set to Windows’ “Best Performance” mode. We’d like to see more than 8GB RAM but we didn’t experience any obvious performance stuttering caused by bottlenecks.
Graphics come via Nvidia’s MX150 GPU. This can’t cope with the latest blockbuster games (it only managed 1,706 in 3DMark’s Fire Strike Extreme test – about 8fps) but it will still happily play popular shooters such as Overwatch and Fortnite.
In terms of usability, the back-lit, Scrabble- tile keyboard is well-laid out and comfortable for extensive typing. There’s a number pad on the right plus (annoyingly) halfheight arrow keys. The large trackpad functions as expected. An HD webcam resides in the top bezel – it provides adequate performance but isn’t compatible with Windows Hello face recognition. Meanwhile, the speakers don’t get particularly loud.
Connectivity consists of two USB 2.0 ports on the left with a MicroUSB slot, while on the right are USB 3.1 ports (Type-A and Type-C) plus a full-size HDMI port.
Battery life is good, but not spectacular. It played our Full HD movie for a modest five hours 15 minutes. However, we were impressed to see that it ran the PCMark battery test for two hours 45 minutes at full power: the previous generation of Intel-based laptops significantly-throttled performance when on battery power.
All in all, it’s a very good, all-round laptop that succeeds in most general computing functions. The build quality and performance will see it fit in well in most environments, including school and office. At $1,488 there are certainly cheaper options at a similar size, but they tend to carry more compromises than what’s available here. Ultimately, there are no worrisome weak spots and it’s a great buy for most types of users.