ASUS VivoBook Max offers high performance within your budget
If you are looking for a budget laptop right away, you will be shown a slew of plastic shells with uninspiring designs, outdated specifications and below average performance boxes. Additionally, you will also be offered a lot of freebies with these machines to help make way for newer models. The issue with these laptops is the overall experience – not satisfying enough.
If you spend less than `35,000 on a laptop, expect your computer to compromise on certain parameters — which is completely acceptable. However, you don’t want an experience from a laptop that leads you to avoid using it and throw it in the trunk. This is something that manufacturers probably don’t understand, or maybe they don’t want to — making up profits could be on their high agenda.
ASUS brings in a new contender in this category, the VivoBook Max X541UA. With a price tag of Rs 31,990, it is pretty affordable and seems to be a good proposition to a budget laptop buyer. We had the VivoBook on our playground for a short while and have a lot of good things to say about it.
Any consumer seeking a budget category laptop prefers a device that looks decent and is easier to tag around.
The VivoBook Max fits the criteria perfectly. The device catches attention from the surroundings, especially with the brushed aluminium finish on the plastic lid.
Open the lid and you will find that brushed aluminium finish carried further onto the palm rests, excluding the matte-finished trackpad. The keyboard’s Chicklet keys sport a good tactility, providing a comfortable typing experience. The speakers are housed well above the keyboard, giving the laptop a look and feel of the multimedia-focussed computer. Overall, the VivoBook looks good for a budget laptop.
However, the same cannot be said for certain areas in the overall build quality. The keyboard keys don’t feel as great as the ones you witness around other laptops. They also lack LED indicators for Caps Lock, something that is a basic standard.
The laptop’s underside plastics and the display bezel seem to have a below-average build quality. The display lid is pretty feeble and slim — subjecting it to additional strength could crack the screen, so you better be careful while handling the same.
ASUS claims the VivoBook Max to be a performance-focused laptop and we definitely agree with that.
The laptop has a 7th Gen Intel Core i3-7100U CPU clocked at 2.40GHz. To assist it, ASUS provides 4GB of DDR4 SD RAM, which is expandable up to 12GB.
There’s a 1TB, 5400RPM SATA HDD available for storage. An integrated Intel HD Graphics 620 does the graphics duties on the laptop. Lastly, it runs on Windows 10 Home, that is pre-installed out of the box.