At Walmart, Asus’ Vivobook S 15, a sleek and lightweight 15-inch laptop with a gorgeous display and ultra-snappy performance. The chassis’ minimalist, all-metal design is lightweight and airy, and it feels more premium than last year’s Vivobook S 14. It’s only 0.58 inches at its thinnest point, and it weighs just 3.13 pounds, making it particularly well-suited for hybrid or remote workers who want a powerful laptop with a nice display that doesn’t weigh a ton.
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Like all of the new Windows on ARM laptops released last summer, the Vivobook S 15 is fast and responsive with nice battery life, and came with new technology that wasn’t fully optimized for all apps at the time of its release, but should be mostly optimized for apps by this point.
For the average consumer, however, this is the epitome of a laptop that looks and feels good right out of the box, and it starts with the brilliant 3K OLED display.
With an 89% screen-to-body ratio and ultra-thin bezels, the screen is brilliant and high-contrast, rocking a max 600-nit brightness and 120Hz refresh rate for some silky-smooth and crisp image quality.
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The display’s 16:9 resolution gives it that premium widescreen feel, lending itself well to both watching and editing media, but it might not be for everyone. Most 15-inch laptops come with a 16:10 resolution, which might feel more “natural” for some, but ultimately the distinction is subtle.
The benchmarking scores in Cinebench reflect that same hierarchy, with numbers above the Omnibook and just below the Galaxy Book4 Edge. In testing the CPU’s performance, I got a single-core score of 106 and a multi-core score of 969. In Geekbench, I got a single-core of 2447 and a multi-core of 14384.
Remember that these scores were recorded while the device was plugged into power. While on battery, I got scores about 30% lower — somewhat more of a difference than I expected. This is in comparison to the HP Omnibook X 14, which had a much narrower gap in scores in my testing, something I noted as I was reviewing it.
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This paints a picture of a laptop that has somewhat variable battery life, depending on what you’re doing and what kind of mode you have the laptop in. There’s no escaping the power this display requires, and if you’re someone who typically ignores battery setting profiles and keeps your machine blasting at “Best Performance,” you may want to adjust the power modes in either the MyAsus software or in Windows (or both) because you’ll see a drastic difference.
That being said, the Vivobook S 15’s 70Wh battery performance is good, but the user must manage it to maximize its efficiency. During the battery test that ZDNET runs on all laptops, I got about 10 and a half hours before it died, but that number fluctuated in subsequent tests with different power mode settings.
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Optimization is the theme here, and this also extends to its performance. The Windows on ARM architecture provides fantastic up-front performance in ways that are immediately apparent to most users. But when you start looking closely at more specialized tasks, things have the potential to get tricky.
For example, the Vivobook S 15’s aforementioned 16:9 resolution OLED screen seems perfect for editing video. While the integrated Qualcomm Adreno GPU is up to the task, its interaction with different apps and their performance in Windows (via Prism) is still a work in progress.
All things considered, the sale price of $713
Source : ZDNet