Asus Vivobook S15 Review: Old-School OLED Laptop Powered by Modern AI CPU

7.8/ 10
SCORE

Asus Vivobook S15

$900 at Amazon

$1,100 at Best Buy

$1,300 at B&H Photo-Video

Pros

• Big, fast and vibrant OLED display
• Solid build quality with an excellent keyboard
• Good overall performance for the price
• Long battery life for an OLED laptop

Cons

• Speakers produce weak, underwhelming sound
• AI features feel like a throwaway

It’s foolish to buy a new laptop because of AI right now. You’re sure to be disappointed by the suite of AI features on even the latest laptops if that’s what’s driving your purchase. Plus, nearly any laptop — even your current one — gives you the ability to use a web-based AI chatbot like Microsoft’s Copilot or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The Asus Vivobook S15 is a Copilot Plus PC with an Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite chip from Qualcomm that helps give it awesome battery life. And there’s a gorgeous 15.6-inch OLED in a sturdy but still very portable design. Its AI features are the least interesting thing about this laptop.

I do have a few concerns, starting with the price. The version I tested is $1,300, which feels a little steep when competing models offering better performance and app compatibility, although those give up the OLED to get there, and that’s a noticeable loss. Compatibility is a concern with any Windows-on-Arm machine, and you may find that particular apps won’t run on this Snapdragon X Elite-based Copilot Plus PC. (I did.) I also wish the laptop’s speakers sounded better.

If you are looking for a lightweight Windows laptop for the basics with a roomy OLED display for movies and media, then the Vivobook S15 won’t let you down. Aside from the different display aspect ratio — it’s 16:9 — the Vivobook S15 is very similar to the Acer Swift 16 AI, another big-screen OLED laptop with terrible speakers. With the Intel-based Swift 16 AI, however, you don’t need to worry about potential app compatibility issues.

The Vivobook S15 (S5507) starts at $1,100 and features a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-64-100 processor, 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD. You can only adjust two specs when building out the laptop and they’re in lockstep. If you upgrade to a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 processor for an extra $200, it also comes with a 1TB SSD.

The version of the laptop reviewed has the beefier Snapdragon processor and the extra SSD storage, putting us at $1,300 total — although you can find it on sale at Best Buy for less.

Each version of the laptop gets the same 15.6-inch OLED display with a crisp, 2,880×1,620-pixel resolution and variable refresh rate that maxes out at 120Hz. I loved having a 2×2 Wi-Fi 7 setup, given how much it sped up downloads from our compatible router, but it was only really applicable when I was in the same room as said router — one of the fun quirks of the range-sensitive technology.

Asus Vivobook S15 performance

Compared to other laptops in its competitive set, the Vivobook S15 didn’t take first place in all the benchmarks we tested it with but it did a decent job delivering strong performance across the various workloads. The CPU’s 12-core, 12-thread design (running at a clock speed of 3.4GHz, with no turbo-boosting) is about a year old at this point but it still helped the Vivobook S15 deliver performance just slightly behind an M4 MacBook Air on the multicore Geekbench 6 test. For single-core performance, however, less-expensive laptops like the Acer Swift 14 AI (Snapdragon version, no OLED) and Acer Swift 16 AI (OLED) performed either just as well or slightly better, and Apple’s M4 MacBook Air blew them all out of the water.

Unexpectedly, the VivoBook S15 delivered top performance on the multicore Cinebench 2024 test I ran and by considerable margins, besting both sizes of the M4 MacBook Air we recently tested by 16% to 17%. Its single-core performance on Cinebench 2024 was merely average compared to the nine other laptops we considered. Although it completed a benchmark run of the more gaming-oriented 3DMark Steel Nomad Lite test, its performance ranked on the lower end. If you want to play some games on the Vivobook S15, be prepared to set your sights on less graphically demanding titles (sorry, Cyberpunk fans).

Anecdotally, the Vivobook S15 felt speedy for everyday use, with little to no choppiness when switching between apps, browser tabs and videos (as one might during a typical workday). It even performed well when we hit it with a monster of an Excel spreadsheet that contained multiple tabs of content, lots of cross-referencing formulas and a complex pivot table running on a 270,000-row dataset. Although it won’t be the best performance you can get for its price, the Vivobook S15 will still be able to handle what most people are likely to throw at it.

While Windows app compatibility on Arm has come a long way in the past few years, having most programs working isn’t the same as having all programs working. And it didn’t take us long to find some problems. Fortnite, for example, refused to run on the laptop whatsoever. We had no issues launching Steam games or firing up VPN apps — issues that have plagued previous Arm PCs in the past — but you’ll definitely want to check some of the community-driven compatibility lists out there to make sure that your critical apps, like Adobe After Effects or VirtualBox, actually work.

As for the AI features, there’s little you’ll be doing on the PC that will tax it — you can only transform so many Paint sketches into «art» using AI-generative techniques before the trick or effect begins to lose its luster. One of the more resource-intensive AI processes you can fire up is real-time translations within Windows Live Captions. However, we could not get Live Captions to work on our brand-new installation of Windows 11; the feature kept crashing after supposedly downloading the English language pack, and no amount of troubleshooting could get it functional. (That’s a bummer, as it’s probably the AI feature you’ll use the most on the laptop, other than firing off random questions to the Copilot chatbot.)

I love how much time you get from the laptop’s 70-watt-hour battery but it’s not the very best we’ve seen from competing AI laptops. Although the Vivobook S15 lasted just shy of 15 hours and 30 minutes on our YouTube streaming battery drain test, that put it right in the middle of the other laptops we compared it against.

Powering a high-resolution OLED display certainly consumes battery resources faster than a laptop with a lower-res LCD panel. Acer’s Swift 14 AI, which costs a little less for a smaller, non-OLED display, managed to hit slightly more than 24 total hours on our test, and it wasn’t alone. The Asus Zenbook A14 and Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 were also in the 20-plus-hour club, and the Inspiron, in particular, generally performed as well as the Vivobook S15 across the rest of our benchmarks. (Although it costs less, it also has a smaller, non-OLED display).

Great daily driver, but not without its quirks

While the Vivobook’s display is its shining star, thanks to the vibrant colors and superb contrast an OLED panel has compared to a typical IPS LCD panel, the laptop isn’t perfect for movies and TV. To start, the awful, downfacing speakers are a letdown. They don’t sound great in ideal conditions, lacking the oomph for bass that you’d expect to get from your favorite songs or shows. Worse, depending on where you’ve placed the laptop, the sound quality can really go downhill. We had the best experience watching YouTube videos with the laptop sitting on a flat desk. If the laptop’s speakers come into contact with anything — your legs, a bed, the couch and so on — the sound gets muddy and unpleasant.

As for the display itself, we love the 3K resolution and overall color accuracy in HDR for grayscales and colors. And we don’t mind the old-school 16:9 aspect ratio. Most laptops now feature a taller, 16:10 ratio, but the less vertical space on the Vivibook S15 doesn’t feel as limiting on its spacious 15.6-inch panel as it would on a smaller display. HDR content looked awesome, and the laptop’s grayscale accuracy in SDR was similarly great but its colors slipped a bit because of oversaturation.

Asus says the 15.6-inch display supports a peak brightness of 600 nits or HDR600 but we measured a maximum of 398 nits in HDR mode. In SDR mode, the laptop topped out at 376 nits. Given the OLED’s deep black levels and incredible contrast, it’s bright enough to be able to use the laptop outside on a sunny day without too much of a challenge. However, you’ll still be fighting the Vivobook’s glossy screen; even in a regular office space, darker parts of any image were practically magnets for annoying reflections.

Despite the big display, the Vivobook S15 feels great to carry around. It might take up a good amount of space but it’s still thin at just 0.6 inches and light at 3.1 pounds for its size. It’s easy to one-hand around your house and you’ll barely feel a drag in your backpack when you’re on the go. Set it up at your local coffee shop of choice and you get a decent amount of connectivity for extra accessories: two USB 4.0 Gen 3 Type-C ports on one side and two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports on the other.

The laptop’s 1080p webcam isn’t as crisp as a 1440p camera but is more than fine for meetings. It gets a helping hand from the Copilot-enabled AI features that let you automatically frame your face in the picture, blur the background and fix your lighting (to name a few). An included IR sensor gives you access to Windows Hello, which means you can log into your laptop with just a glance at the screen. And the physical camera shutter gives you better privacy than sticking a post-it over the lens.

I had no issues typing on the Vivobook S15 throughout the day. The keys don’t have much travel but they’re as firm as they are quiet. The keyboard feels roomy that we didn’t even mind the inclusion of a tiny numpad on the laptop’s right. That said, it could be easily ditched because of its small size and swapped out for speakers mounted directly on the laptop’s keyboard. The keys incorporate RGB lighting, which you adjust via the included MyAsus app. Your lighting options are limited; you only get four effects to pick from and you can’t adjust individual keys. Even at maximum brightness, the backlighting isn’t very noteworthy.

Should you buy the Asus Vivobook S15?

If you’re shopping for a midrange OLED laptop and deciding between it and the Acer Swift 16 AI, we give the edge to the Vivobook S15. Both are extremely similar in that they offer good build quality, bad speakers and a big OLED display powered by a modern AI processor. The Swift 16 AI costs $50 less (although you can find the Vivobook S15 on sale for less) and has a slightly larger display but is also heavier. The Vivobook S15 earns the nod for its better battery life — it ran for 3.5 hours longer in battery testing, and that’s no small amount.