Asus VivoBook S15
It has weaknesses, but neat design touches and a solid spec make this a fine choice for the home
SCORE PRICE Core i5, £583 (£700 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/298s15
We’ve reviewed a lot of high-end laptops in PC Pro over the past few months, but few that cost £700 or less. The VivoBook, then, makes a welcome change. And while there are signs of compromise compared to laptops costing north of £1,000, Asus is canny enough to keep the quality in almost all the right places.
Wide-awake readers will note the word “almost” there. And I’ll get this laptop’s biggest weakness out of the way first: the screen. It’s a whopper at 15.6in, with a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, and it’s also bright enough for most situations at 260cd/m2. A contrast ratio of 1,252:1 is solid, too. But its colour coverage and accuracy are woeful, with an average Delta E of 3.88 and a maximum of 17.87. It can only cover 60% of the sRGB colour gamut, too.
In practice, that means photos lack the punch you see on top-quality screens and you can’t have confidence that the colours you see will match reality. However, it’s not a terrible display. I watched a few minutes of the dark and moody Altered Carbon on the S15 and, while you lose out on details in the darkest corners, this won’t affect your enjoyment of shows.
Speaker quality is good enough for Netflix, but forget about it for music: in one word, tinny.
That’s where my criticisms end. Sure, the keyboard doesn’t have the cushioned feel of the best laptops, but it’s quiet, the buttons are sensibly laid out, and there’s even a handy number pad on the right-hand side. This isn’t always a good thing on laptops as it can reduce the space available and shove the trackpad too far to the left (it needs to stay central under the main keyboard, after all), but I found navigating Windows and typing on the VivoBook comfortable.
One reason for that is because the trackpad is excellent. Asus might have been tempted to cut corners here, but it’s a precision trackpad – and that means it supports all of Windows’ gestures. Another factor is the slight tilt of the keyboard, which comes courtesy of the “ErgoLift” hinge. While being raised by 3.5° doesn’t sound much, it’s more like the angle of a desktop keyboard and, to me, feels more comfortable.
Asus claims the raised hinge also improves cooling, but that’s tougher to test. Especially because my review sample included a dual-core Core i3-8130U Kaby Lake processor, whereas the S15 now available to buy includes a quad-core Core i5-8265U Whiskey Lake chip. Regrettably, it means that the CPU-dependant benchmark scores I measured are only indicative of what you will see in
“Asus might have been tempted to cut corners, but it’s a precision trackpad – and that means it supports all of Windows’ gestures”
practice, but with all the other core components staying the same – the 256GB SATA3 SSD and 8GB of DDR42400 RAM, in particular – at least they can’t be worse. And, in truth, this Core i3 machine is fast enough for almost anyone. Geekbench 4 scores of 4,020 and 7,992 show it’s capable of handling everyday tasks happily. Likewise, an overall result of 56 in our benchmarks. While sequential read and write speeds of 347MB/ sec and 518MB/sec
look slow in comparison with NVMe drives, they won’t slow you down in practice: I’d far rather have a 256GB SSD such as this than a 1TB hard disk.
I’m also a fan of the VivoBook S15’s design. Our main picture shows the “slate grey” model with yellow highlights, but you can opt for a grey/ red mix, plain slate grey (boring) or an adventurous full-turquoise finish. To a certain extent it’s style over substance, because the chassis is plastic rather than metal, but that’s reflected in a weight of 1.68kg – very respectable for a 15in laptop.
You should squeeze a full day’s use from this machine, too. It lasted almost nine hours in our battery rundown test, where we loop video at 170cd/m2 brightness, and even if you do need to bring the charger with you, it’s tiny – the UK plug will be your main bugbear. There is a USB-C 3.1 port but this is for connecting monitors and external storage, not for charging, and there are three USB-A ports: two are USB 2, with one USB 3.1. Add a full-size HDMI port, combo audio jack and microSD card reader, and this is a well-connected machine.
The Asus VivoBook S15 isn’t a world-beater, and the mediocre screen prevents us from giving it a Recommended award, but it is a fine-value 15in laptop that would make an excellent family machine. And, unlike so many of its budget competition, it looks good, too. SPECIFICATIONS Dual-core 2.2GHz Core i3-8130U processor Intel UHD 620 graphics 15.6in 1,920 x 1,080 IPS display 8GB DDR4-2400 RAM 256GB M.2 SATA3 SSD HD webcam 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.2 USB-C 3.1 USB-A 3.1 2 x USB-A 2 HDMI microSD slot 361 x 244 x 18mm (WDH) 42Wh battery 1.68kg Windows 10 Home 1yr RTB warranty