**The Asus VivoBook S: A Fine Laptop for Its Price**

For those who rely on their computer for business or have demanding creative and application requirements, an ex-Elite laptop may not be the best option. However, for everyday users looking for a ultra-portable laptop with great performance, battery life, and a fantastic display, the Asus VivoBook S is an excellent choice.

**Performance: A Mixed Bag**

While the Asus VivoBook S's performance is excellent, it may not keep up with the latest generation of high-end laptops. The chip used in this laptop is not the same as those found in Intel and AMD products, which are considered top-of-the-line. However, it's worth noting that the situation is different for the Mac platform, where the M1 chip offered a revolutionary new level of performance. Despite this, the VivoBook S still offers impressive performance, making it suitable for most users.

**Display: A Real Highlight**

One of the standout features of the Asus VivoBook S is its display. The 13.5-inch OLED HDR display is a real treat, offering excellent color accuracy and brightness. The fact that it supports 120Hz refresh rate is also a bonus, making it ideal for gaming and video playback. While some users may wish for a touch screen, the lack of this feature won't be a major concern for most people.

**Port Selection: A Major Plus**

The port selection on the VivoBook S is another highlight of the laptop. The full-size HDMI port is a welcome addition, as is the presence of USB-A and USB-C ports, as well as a card reader. This makes it an excellent choice for business users who need to connect their laptop to external devices.

**Typing Experience: A Mixed Bag**

The typing experience on the VivoBook S has received mixed reviews. While some users love the keyboard's feel, others have found it difficult to type on, particularly with the Enter key. For UK and International users, this may be a major issue, as they are accustomed to having an Enter key that is horizontal in shape.

**Design: Not Quite Premium**

While the VivoBook S has a good build quality, it's not quite at the same level as Lenovo's Yoga Slim or Apple's MacBooks. The design may seem slightly more utilitarian, which could be a drawback for some users. However, Asus has made up for this with other features and technologies that make the laptop stand out.

**Battery Life: Excellent**

The battery life on the VivoBook S is one of its standout features. Users can expect excellent performance from their laptop throughout the day, making it an ideal choice for those who need to be productive on the go.

**Additional Features: Nice Touches**

Some users may appreciate additional features that are included in this laptop. The presence of a fingerprint reader in the power button is one such feature, although it's worth noting that this is available on other VivoBook models as well. Additionally, the laptop comes with a number of niceties, including a privacy feature that allows users to cover up their webcam.

**Comparison to Other Options**

For those considering purchasing an alternative option, it's worth noting that the Asus VivoBook S offers excellent value for its price. When compared to Apple's MacBooks, which are considered top-of-the-line, the VivoBook S is significantly cheaper. While some may argue that it's not quite premium enough, we believe that it's a fair deal considering the features and performance on offer.

**Conclusion**

The Asus VivoBook S is an excellent laptop for everyday users who need a ultra-portable device with great performance, battery life, and a fantastic display. While it may not be the best option for business or creative professionals, it's still a solid choice for those looking for a reliable and capable laptop at a reasonable price.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enfor the past couple of weeks I've been using this Asus Vivo book s laptop this is one of the new Snapdragon X Elite machines that has been released and it's been quite an interesting experience uh I've made a few notes and I wanted to do a review of this laptop I'm not going to do a specific Deep dive into the Snapdragon X Elite versus say Intel or AMD debate I've already made a video with my thoughts on that which uh we'll put a link to up here so you can watch that if you want to that does actually also feature this laptop and another excelite laptop but let's focus in on this particular Asus model now just as a full disclosure Asus sent me this this is a press sample I don't get to keep it but also they haven't provided me with any notes and they don't get to see this video before it goes live so this is my unbiased review and whilst I'm known for making a bit of Mac content it is true to say that I use Mac and windows pretty much equally in my work so I don't actually have that much of a preference so I can give you a really unbiased opinion of this Windows laptop so let's take you through the specs of this machine now as we said it's got the Snapdragon X Elite it's the 78100 model that is the base model of the X Elite it's a 12 core CPU and it's got the adreno GPU for the graphics purposes and we'll come back to that in a minute so this machine has 16 GB of RAM and I think there is also a 32 GB model just bear in mind that the ram is solded on so you have to make the decision about how much RAM to have when you buy the machine you can't upgrade it later now there's a one tbte SSD inside and that is a standard pcie Generation 4 nvme drive so if you need to change that at some point in the future you can do that fortunately for connectivity we've got Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 and we're running Windows 11 home edition obviously that's the arm version of Windows this is £ 1,299 here in the UK at retail price there might be discounts available if you find any of those we'll link to that in the description and we'll put up the price for the us as well on screen so let me just take you through the ports that we've got on this machine on the left side of the machine we've got a full-size HDMI 2.1 Port then we've got two USB 4 type- C ports both of these ports support display out and you can charge the laptop with them and there is also Thunderbolt support next we've got a Micro SD card reader and then a 3 1/2 mm audio jack on the other side of the laptop it's two full-size type A ports and these are USB 3 .2 Generation 1 so that's 5 gbits per second and I kind of wish that Asus had gone with the generation 2 so that we could have 10 gbits per second on this side and perhaps had another USB type- C Port so that we could charge the laptop then from either side but sadly that's not the case so you can only charge the laptop from the left hand side let's talk about this uh chassis it's an all metal construction at the thinnest point it's 1.47 cm and the weight is 1.42 2 kg and I think that makes it about 90 G lighter than the 15-in MacBook Air which I guess is the kind of other main arm Contender for this kind of size of everyday usage laptop something that some people will really like is the fact that the screen lays all the way flat you've got a full 180° of travel and generally speaking it feels pretty well made there's not a huge amount of flex when you're sort of twisting the laptop it feels like it's well constructed ases claimed that this laptop has been tested to a military standard uh 810h which may mean more to you than it does to me but I guess that means that you can be fairly confident of the durability of the laptop something I'm not so keen on is the fact that we still got these stickers all over the laptop I thought that was something that PC manufacturers were supposed to be moving away from but it seems they just can't help themselves and we've also got this logo on on the deck here that's actually printed on on one side it says Dolby Atmos and on the other it says Sound by Harmon Carden we'll talk about the sound shortly but before we do that let's discuss battery life because that is really one of the things that these Snapdragon X Elite chips have got going for them the battery inside this laptop is 70 watts and Asus claim up to 18 hours of usage under ideal circumstances I haven't quite got 18 hours out of it but in everyday usage it certainly covers all day battery life and it does seem to outperform the MacBook Air in that regard as well so no complaints there it does support fast charging as well you can go from 0 to 6 60% in 49 minutes I did spot a slight bug though when it comes to charging and that is if you're plugged into a USBC charger and you restart the machine when it comes back up it's not charging you got to pull the USBC cable out and then plug it back in again but this isn't a bug that's specific to the Asus it seems to be specific to the X Elite or or Windows itself because the Lenovo laptop that I've been testing does exactly the same thing another thing that I've noticed only with the Asus though is that it can be quite fussy when it comes to the charging cable so I used a 100 WT Gan charger with this and I'm using a cable that works fine with all of my other laptops and when I plug it in I do get a little complaint from Asus saying that it's only able to charge slowly make of that what you will you might have to be selective with your cables the next thing we need to talk about is really the party piece for this laptop and that is the display now I've been mentioning the MacBook Air and the reason for doing that of course is because it's Apple's M chips and everybody's comparing the ex Elite to app's MJ moments I don't think that's entirely fair to put this one up alongside Apple they had a big head start and we're a few years down the road now but again I've covered those thoughts in another video but the MacBook Air is a general purpose everyday computer that's Ultra portable and ultra light and this laptop is firmly aimed at the same users so I think it's reasonable to draw some comparisons between the two models with a MacBook Air you get a standard LCD very nice LCD but nonetheless it is a 60 HZ LCD panel but here we're getting an OLED panel this has the Asus Lumin OLED display in it and it supports a maximum brightness of 600 nits when you're looking at HDR content it's 400 nits for SDR content but I got to say if you run some HDR content on this display it looks absolutely glorious the resolution is 3K that's 2880 pixels by 1620 and it's a 120 HZ panel you can run it in 120 HZ mode or 60 HZ mode in Windows take your choice obviously if you run it in 120 HZ mode you will get a reduction to your battery life but I got to say it's really nice to use it with that high refresh rate Everything feels really smooth and pleasant to use fans of touch screens though are going to be disappointed because this is not a touch panel but if you're going to use your laptop for some creative work maybe some photo editing and uh Photoshop then you'll be pleased to know that this display is color Acura it supports 100% of the DCI P3 color gamma and fans of gaming will be happy to know that the screen response time is 0.2 milliseconds but also fans of gaming will be disappointed because the adreno GPU in these laptops is really not up to running the latest games and then of course there are some compatibility issues as things stand at the moment I'm sure those things will get sorted out but this is not a gaming laptop and if that's your primary motivator for buying a laptop this probably isn't the laptop for you Asus have also thought about the potential for OLED burning and they've created some software tools which apparently mitigate that obviously within two weeks that's not enough time for me to test that so uh we'll have to see how that goes long term of course Asus have been putting these displays into laptops for quite a while now so you'd like to think they know what they're doing when it comes to audio we've got stereo speakers and uh we've got these uh Doby Atmos logos and Harmon Cardon logos on and well I don't think you should read too much into that Haron cardens seem to be willing to put their name on anything these days so it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to get great audio but we should nonetheless test it so let's just load up some Roy free music that we can use I don't know how well that comes across on this studio mic microphone here but I can tell you there's not much bass coming out this laptop which I suppose is what we expect for a thin and light I think the volume is really good and the clarity is excellent so it'll be great for video calls and for watching a bit of YouTube particularly spoken word uh music I guess you probably want to plug your headphones in okay so it's a laptop we need to talk about the keyboard first of all what's the typing feel like from the keys well I actually like the feel of the keys I think they offer a decent resistance is it the best typing experience in a laptop no I don't think so uh I think the Lenovo that I've been testing alongside this has a slightly better keyboard feel but it's not terrible at all and I've been very happily typing for long periods on the Asus it's pretty comfortable to type on as well plenty of space here for your wrists I quite like the fact that we've got a little number pad here on the right hand side as well some people won't like that but uh for me I'm often working in spreadsheets and I quite like that it's a nice little extra to have that makes good use of the laptop space the keys themselves are the same kind of silver color as the laptop and they are back lit but the backlight in some lighting situations creates a contrast that makes it difficult to see which key is which fortunately you can turn it off and change the brightness and this actually has RGB lighting it's a a single zone but you can choose any color you like for the back lighting of your keys and I know some people are going to really like that it's not a huge amount of deck Flex either it does feel premium when you're typing on this laptop it's it's a good experience there are things so that I I don't like so much and that is first of all the enter key layout here now this is a uniquely UK issue but we're used to having a vertical Enter key and what Asus has done not just with this laptop but also my G14 gaming laptop is the same is that they've kind of combined the uh the hash or pound key there with the enter key you can't beat years and years of muscle memory and I find that I'm constantly typing hashes instead of being able to press the enter key so that's a that's a me problem perhaps some of you might not be bothered with that but I think if you're going to sell a keyboard into the UK Market it should be a UK keyboard with an an Enter key oriented the way we're used to something else I'm not so keen on is having the power button as just a key on the keyboard because you might accidentally hit it and turn the laptop off I'd prefer that to sort of be recessed and over to the side somewhere or perhaps on the side of the laptop but but that said I haven't accidentally hit it at all in the two weeks I've had it so your mileage may vary on that one if you're a fan of using the arrow keys you might find these a little bit frustrating as well because they're half size I can understand why the up and down arrows might be half siize keys but the left and right could have been full size but they're not and just next to that of course we've got the co-pilot key so this is the dedicated key and if you press it it brings up co-pilot which doesn't really do much at the moment but uh again I've covered that in my other video basically it launches the co-pilot chatbot at the moment but in the future it will access all of these AI features that Microsoft has been promising maybe next we've got the touchpad which is a Precision Glass touchpad and it does feel very nice to use uh if not quite as nice as the MacBook Air one thing I'm not so keen on is the fact that it is a diving board layout so you can click it at the bottom but not at the top the latest generation of Macs have a a haptic pad so you can kind of Click anywhere on it but Asus does counter that with some interesting additional gestures if I slide my finger slowly up here on the right hand side of the touchpad and up and down you can see I can control the brightness of the display I think that's quite a nice feature uh if I go over to the left side and do the same thing I'm controlling the volume of the laptop you can also do the same thing across the top of the touchpad to scrub through video files something I have noticed with the touchpad is if you're doing the two finger scrolling it's quite sensitive to the zoom gesture you know where you you pull your fingers apart so I found sometimes when I'm scrolling through web pages or say a word document I end up zooming in or out and find that a little bit frustrating I'm sure that's something they can fix with a software update though at the top of the display we've got a 1080p webcam with infrared support so it supports Windows hello for facial recognition and logging in and something I really like is that you have a physical privacy switch here at the top and you just slide it across and it slides a literal piece of plastic in front of the lens so you know that your webcam is off so that brings us to some benchmarks and we've got a couple of comparison machines that we're going to be using here we've got the Lenovo Yoga slim 7x this is a slightly smaller laptop but it's the same specs it's the same xelite processor with 16 gigs of RAM and a 1 TB SSD so it' be interesting to see how the Asus compares to the something that's got a slightly smaller perhaps more thermally challenged chassis and then also for comparison purposes we'll be using the MacBook Air M3 model again this is a 16 GB model let's start with the geekbench 6 CPU scores we've got both of the X Elite laptops plugged into their Chargers and they're set to best performance mode in Windows and on single core the Asus scores 2,429 so basically the same as the Lenovo but Falling some way behind Apple's latest M3 and of course the M4 chip is out now in the iPad Pro and I have test Ted that and it is an even bigger Gap but of course Apple do lead the way when it comes to single core performance at the moment this Snapdragon XLE is actually slightly quicker than Apple's M1 chip for single core performance but what about multi-threaded performance let's have a look at that here the Asus scores 14,270 and we can now see the additional thermal benefits of the larger chassis because it's outperforming the Lenovo and it's comfortably ahead of Apple's M3 and in fact it's also ahead of the bin version of the M4 that's the nine core version but it comes in just slightly behind the 10 core M4 I have also tested these laptops on best power efficiency mode whilst plugged in and unplugged so running on battery with best performance and you do get a slight drop off on each of those but generally speaking it's so close you wouldn't notice it in real world usage so let's just focus on battery mode with best power efficiency selected and here the Asus scores 1,726 on single core the L noo actually managed to score slightly ahead and of course the Apple M3 there's no difference between being plugged in and being unplugged it always delivers the same performance and now if we go to multi-threaded Performance the Asus manages 8,699 of course these scores are plenty enough for great performance in Windows so if you need to run your laptop all day and get the most out of your battery life you can do it if you open the my Asus app and select full speed mode this will allow the fan to run at maximum speed so that you can get the most performance out of your chip possible if we run those tests again in geekbench 6 we can see now we get single Kora 2,462 and it takes multi-threaded performance up to 14,45 and this laptop is actually outperforming machines that have The XLE 8100 chip in so it just goes to show how thermal design can really make a huge difference here let's just switch over to the geekbench 6 GPU benchmarks and again this is plugged in with maximum performance settings we get a score for open CL of 20,666 and you can see that is someway behind Apple's M3 chip which isn't even optimized for open Co if we switch over to metal framework for Apple's chip and the Vulcan framework for the adreno GPU the Asus now scores 24,1 196 and that's about half the score that Apple's M3 is getting of course the MacBook Air doesn't have any active cooling so it will throttle that chip back but even so uh it still has more GPU performance than these X Elite chips do so the GPU is perhaps a slightly disappointing area of the xelite chip it's not keeping up with Apple's MacBooks and it's not going to keep up with the latest onboard gpus from the likes of AMD that doesn't mean it's a terrible GPU though I found this machine to be plenty Snappy and it plugs into 4K monitors and it's really nice to use and it will also play some games if there's arm compatibility but if you're in into gaming again this is not the laptop for you you shouldn't assume though that image editing and creative work is off the table let's have a look at the Affinity photo 2 Benchmark here you can see the scores for the various different things that Affinity tests and these X Elite laptops do pretty well when it comes to CPU tests again the M3 MacBook Air is ahead on single core CPU tasks but the xelite pulls ahead on multi-threaded CPU tasks and of course Falls way behind when it comes to GPU oriented tasks let's now move over to cinebench 2024 this is a sustained test of the CPU each test is at least 10 minutes long so let's start with the single core test so we're just rendering a 3D scene here and the score that the Asus manages is 106 which is basically the same as the Lenovo and is a little bit behind the MacBook Air M3 very much as we'd expect let's do a multi-threaded test though edging out the Lenovo and comfortably beating the MacBook Air M3 and that's all down to the fact that the M3 is thermally challenged it doesn't have any active cooling so it is thermally throttling the Asus has no such hindrance and if we go again to that full speed mode we can get that score all the way up to 1,77 that's almost a 19% Improvement although it does come with a cost because as you can hear the fan noise is fairly loud but I think that's a nice option to have if you've ever got a sustained workflow where you need to export a whole bunch of photographs or maybe compile some software or render a video it's nice to know that you've got that extra performance boost available to you even if it is a bit noisy let's just take a look at USB performance now I used a Samsung t7 USB drive and we use crystal disc Mark just to do a sequential read and write test and the Asus scored 954 MBT per second on read and 832 on right broadly similar to the Novo in this test and outperforming the M3 MacBook Air the M chips do seem to have a slight issue when it comes to USB that's been present since M1 and doesn't appear to have been fixed yet let's go now to Thunderbolt I used an nvme Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with a standard SSD in it and we got 2,16 megabytes per second on read 1,985 on right again the Asus and the Lenovo are very similar to each other uh but here the M3 MacBook Air say ahead these differences could be down to drivers or it could be down to the way that Thunderbolt has been implemented with the exite architecture or the usb4 implementation on these laptops I do have a usb4 drive enclosure which I'm going to test with these laptops in a future video and I expect the speeds to be a bit more comparable between xelite and the Mac with that I just wanted to run a few benchmarks using browser bench this has got a suite of three tools that are used to measure the performance of your web browser for modern web browsing workflows and I'm using Microsoft Edge on the PCS and we're using Safari on the Macs because those are the default browsers I think these scores would be slightly improved if we were using Chrome on the Windows machines so first of all speedometer 3 the Asus scores 22.4 you can see this is in line again with the Lenovo but it's falling behind the MacBook Air M3 and that's much the story for all of these benchmarks because they are heavily focused on single core Performance jet stream 2.2 scored 200 7 5.91 and motion Mark 1.3 it comes in at 26712 finally Let's test the SSD inside this machine to see how that performs again we'll use crystal dis Mark and we'll do a sequential retest that's 5,42 megabytes per second and sequential right at 3,626 that's fantastic performance as you'd expect from a generation 4 SSD let's just do a random read and right test for read it was 76 megabytes per second and right was 262 megabytes per second so these are basically your best case scenarios and your worst case scenarios for this drive and I think that performance is pretty good very happy with that now we do need to talk about software compatibility because of course these are arm chips and although windows for arm has been around for some years Microsoft has not quite got there yet they're not really giving the developers quite enough support and unfortunately that's the case too with the X Elite system still the developer kit from Qualcomm isn't available so developers haven't had these machines to be able to Port their software ahead of time which is what happened with the Apple transition of course so they actually have had to go out and buy these machines these laptops on launch day and start porting their software but that is what they're doing it's nice to see that developers are committed to this and the software situation is getting better all the time as you can see from adobe's web page they already have betas available for some of their apps some of their apps are already fully supported on arm and the others are in development as we speak Da Vinci resolve they're currently working on version 19 of their product and you can download a pretty mature public beta from their website and that supports Windows on arm as well so these X Elite chips work fine although I will say they haven't completed full optimization for this chip yet so don't expect it to equal the M chips for performance again here and for those of you that have left Adobe behind find perhaps you're using Affinity Suite of products you'll be pleased to know that they're all supporting windows for arm and these excelite chips although again optimization with Graphics drivers and things might not quite be there yet and I also noticed that blender had a beta available for Windows for arm so there is a whole bunch of software that is being ported across to the arm platform and some of that has just happened in the past week or so for those apps that are not natively compiled for arm you have the prism translation layer and you will find that a lot of apps that are compiled for x86 will actually work through that translation layer but not all of them as the case may be and again I cover that in my other video my experience has been that I haven't really had many issues at all the odd app that doesn't work properly but I've been able to find workarounds for all of those things and I'm quite happy that these laptops are in a fit state for everyday users if you need a laptop to do your office tasks to browse the web to watch YouTube and to send your email and print documents all of these other things you'll find that these laptops are working just fine so some conclusions then who should buy an ex Elite laptop well I would say definitely not anybody who relies on their computer for their business if you're a creative professional and you're running Mission critical applications on your machine it's not a good idea to go out and buy a first generation product like this everyday users though anybody who's looking for an ultra portable laptop with a great screen loads of performance and great battery life well you are well catered For with these exite laptops now specifically the Asus Vivo book s let me go through some of the things I really like first of all performance I think it's excellent yes okay there may be chips from Intel and AMD that are up there as well and it's not quite keeping up with the latest generation of the mchip it's not the Revelation that the M1 was for the Mac but it's totally unrealistic to have expected that the situation is completely different and the performance on offering these machines is really good if not groundbreaking I really love the display when you're paying £1,300 for a laptop you do expect a good display so to get a lovely OLED HDR display like this that supports 120 HZ really good shame that it's not touch I don't personally care because I don't like touch screens but I know for some of you that will be important I think the port selection on offer on this laptop is really good if you're using it in a business setting having that fullsize HDMI port for starters is a great thing to have plus having fulls sizee USB along with type- c and a card reader excellent I like the typing feel of the keyboard and I love the fact that we've got a number pad present I love this privacy feature where you can just cover up your webcam nice and easily the battery life is amazing and in normal use this thing is really quiet so those are all the things that I really like let's go through the things that I don't like so much about this laptop that Enter key for me makes it difficult to type on but uh again like I said that is probably a UK or International thing USA users you're used to having an Enter key that's horizontal like that there's of course the power key location I think that's going to bother some users and then the back lighting versus the key cap color in some situations there's just not quite enough contrast so I'd like to see that improved in the Next Generation and then there's the one-sided charging so you can only charge a laptop from the left hand side I think it would be nicer to have a port either side for that I think it's fair to say as well the overall build quality although it's very good it's just not quite at the same level as Lenovo have achieved with the yoga slim and it's not quite at the level of Apple's MacBooks at this price point you might expect a slightly more premium feel but Asus has made up for that with some of these other features that the laptop has so those are the things that I don't like and there are a couple of things that I think would be nice to have so with the type A ports on the right hand side of the laptop it'd be nice if they were 10 gbit speed and it would also be nice if there was a fingerprint reader in the power button I know other models of the Vivo book do feature this and some people would like having that extra biometric security overall though I think this is a really fine laptop and it's fair for the price although you have to take into consideration that you are an early adopter of a first generation technology and if you're not prepared to do that then you need to look elsewhere to perhaps offerings that feature Intel and AMD Asus do provide an Intel version that's very similar to this laptop has a very similar display and actually comes in slightly cheaper as well so it is an interesting first out for qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip and granted it's not for everybody but I think it probably would work for more people than you might expect and the support is getting better all the time I found it worked really well with my workflow but of course your mileage may vary so if you're curious perhaps go to the store and try one out I think there is a lot to recommend this Asus Vivo book s some might argue that it is slightly overpriced for a first generation product but isn't that often the way things go when you comp compare the pricing to Apple's equivalently speced MacBook Air it is quite a bit cheaper so I think overall it's probably fair value and again we'll try and find some deals and pop those in the description hopefully you found that interesting or entertaining in some way and if so please let the YouTube algorithm know with a thumbs up or a thumbs down if you prefer and please consider subscribing to the channel we'll see you again soon for some more geekeryfor the past couple of weeks I've been using this Asus Vivo book s laptop this is one of the new Snapdragon X Elite machines that has been released and it's been quite an interesting experience uh I've made a few notes and I wanted to do a review of this laptop I'm not going to do a specific Deep dive into the Snapdragon X Elite versus say Intel or AMD debate I've already made a video with my thoughts on that which uh we'll put a link to up here so you can watch that if you want to that does actually also feature this laptop and another excelite laptop but let's focus in on this particular Asus model now just as a full disclosure Asus sent me this this is a press sample I don't get to keep it but also they haven't provided me with any notes and they don't get to see this video before it goes live so this is my unbiased review and whilst I'm known for making a bit of Mac content it is true to say that I use Mac and windows pretty much equally in my work so I don't actually have that much of a preference so I can give you a really unbiased opinion of this Windows laptop so let's take you through the specs of this machine now as we said it's got the Snapdragon X Elite it's the 78100 model that is the base model of the X Elite it's a 12 core CPU and it's got the adreno GPU for the graphics purposes and we'll come back to that in a minute so this machine has 16 GB of RAM and I think there is also a 32 GB model just bear in mind that the ram is solded on so you have to make the decision about how much RAM to have when you buy the machine you can't upgrade it later now there's a one tbte SSD inside and that is a standard pcie Generation 4 nvme drive so if you need to change that at some point in the future you can do that fortunately for connectivity we've got Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 and we're running Windows 11 home edition obviously that's the arm version of Windows this is £ 1,299 here in the UK at retail price there might be discounts available if you find any of those we'll link to that in the description and we'll put up the price for the us as well on screen so let me just take you through the ports that we've got on this machine on the left side of the machine we've got a full-size HDMI 2.1 Port then we've got two USB 4 type- C ports both of these ports support display out and you can charge the laptop with them and there is also Thunderbolt support next we've got a Micro SD card reader and then a 3 1/2 mm audio jack on the other side of the laptop it's two full-size type A ports and these are USB 3 .2 Generation 1 so that's 5 gbits per second and I kind of wish that Asus had gone with the generation 2 so that we could have 10 gbits per second on this side and perhaps had another USB type- C Port so that we could charge the laptop then from either side but sadly that's not the case so you can only charge the laptop from the left hand side let's talk about this uh chassis it's an all metal construction at the thinnest point it's 1.47 cm and the weight is 1.42 2 kg and I think that makes it about 90 G lighter than the 15-in MacBook Air which I guess is the kind of other main arm Contender for this kind of size of everyday usage laptop something that some people will really like is the fact that the screen lays all the way flat you've got a full 180° of travel and generally speaking it feels pretty well made there's not a huge amount of flex when you're sort of twisting the laptop it feels like it's well constructed ases claimed that this laptop has been tested to a military standard uh 810h which may mean more to you than it does to me but I guess that means that you can be fairly confident of the durability of the laptop something I'm not so keen on is the fact that we still got these stickers all over the laptop I thought that was something that PC manufacturers were supposed to be moving away from but it seems they just can't help themselves and we've also got this logo on on the deck here that's actually printed on on one side it says Dolby Atmos and on the other it says Sound by Harmon Carden we'll talk about the sound shortly but before we do that let's discuss battery life because that is really one of the things that these Snapdragon X Elite chips have got going for them the battery inside this laptop is 70 watts and Asus claim up to 18 hours of usage under ideal circumstances I haven't quite got 18 hours out of it but in everyday usage it certainly covers all day battery life and it does seem to outperform the MacBook Air in that regard as well so no complaints there it does support fast charging as well you can go from 0 to 6 60% in 49 minutes I did spot a slight bug though when it comes to charging and that is if you're plugged into a USBC charger and you restart the machine when it comes back up it's not charging you got to pull the USBC cable out and then plug it back in again but this isn't a bug that's specific to the Asus it seems to be specific to the X Elite or or Windows itself because the Lenovo laptop that I've been testing does exactly the same thing another thing that I've noticed only with the Asus though is that it can be quite fussy when it comes to the charging cable so I used a 100 WT Gan charger with this and I'm using a cable that works fine with all of my other laptops and when I plug it in I do get a little complaint from Asus saying that it's only able to charge slowly make of that what you will you might have to be selective with your cables the next thing we need to talk about is really the party piece for this laptop and that is the display now I've been mentioning the MacBook Air and the reason for doing that of course is because it's Apple's M chips and everybody's comparing the ex Elite to app's MJ moments I don't think that's entirely fair to put this one up alongside Apple they had a big head start and we're a few years down the road now but again I've covered those thoughts in another video but the MacBook Air is a general purpose everyday computer that's Ultra portable and ultra light and this laptop is firmly aimed at the same users so I think it's reasonable to draw some comparisons between the two models with a MacBook Air you get a standard LCD very nice LCD but nonetheless it is a 60 HZ LCD panel but here we're getting an OLED panel this has the Asus Lumin OLED display in it and it supports a maximum brightness of 600 nits when you're looking at HDR content it's 400 nits for SDR content but I got to say if you run some HDR content on this display it looks absolutely glorious the resolution is 3K that's 2880 pixels by 1620 and it's a 120 HZ panel you can run it in 120 HZ mode or 60 HZ mode in Windows take your choice obviously if you run it in 120 HZ mode you will get a reduction to your battery life but I got to say it's really nice to use it with that high refresh rate Everything feels really smooth and pleasant to use fans of touch screens though are going to be disappointed because this is not a touch panel but if you're going to use your laptop for some creative work maybe some photo editing and uh Photoshop then you'll be pleased to know that this display is color Acura it supports 100% of the DCI P3 color gamma and fans of gaming will be happy to know that the screen response time is 0.2 milliseconds but also fans of gaming will be disappointed because the adreno GPU in these laptops is really not up to running the latest games and then of course there are some compatibility issues as things stand at the moment I'm sure those things will get sorted out but this is not a gaming laptop and if that's your primary motivator for buying a laptop this probably isn't the laptop for you Asus have also thought about the potential for OLED burning and they've created some software tools which apparently mitigate that obviously within two weeks that's not enough time for me to test that so uh we'll have to see how that goes long term of course Asus have been putting these displays into laptops for quite a while now so you'd like to think they know what they're doing when it comes to audio we've got stereo speakers and uh we've got these uh Doby Atmos logos and Harmon Cardon logos on and well I don't think you should read too much into that Haron cardens seem to be willing to put their name on anything these days so it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to get great audio but we should nonetheless test it so let's just load up some Roy free music that we can use I don't know how well that comes across on this studio mic microphone here but I can tell you there's not much bass coming out this laptop which I suppose is what we expect for a thin and light I think the volume is really good and the clarity is excellent so it'll be great for video calls and for watching a bit of YouTube particularly spoken word uh music I guess you probably want to plug your headphones in okay so it's a laptop we need to talk about the keyboard first of all what's the typing feel like from the keys well I actually like the feel of the keys I think they offer a decent resistance is it the best typing experience in a laptop no I don't think so uh I think the Lenovo that I've been testing alongside this has a slightly better keyboard feel but it's not terrible at all and I've been very happily typing for long periods on the Asus it's pretty comfortable to type on as well plenty of space here for your wrists I quite like the fact that we've got a little number pad here on the right hand side as well some people won't like that but uh for me I'm often working in spreadsheets and I quite like that it's a nice little extra to have that makes good use of the laptop space the keys themselves are the same kind of silver color as the laptop and they are back lit but the backlight in some lighting situations creates a contrast that makes it difficult to see which key is which fortunately you can turn it off and change the brightness and this actually has RGB lighting it's a a single zone but you can choose any color you like for the back lighting of your keys and I know some people are going to really like that it's not a huge amount of deck Flex either it does feel premium when you're typing on this laptop it's it's a good experience there are things so that I I don't like so much and that is first of all the enter key layout here now this is a uniquely UK issue but we're used to having a vertical Enter key and what Asus has done not just with this laptop but also my G14 gaming laptop is the same is that they've kind of combined the uh the hash or pound key there with the enter key you can't beat years and years of muscle memory and I find that I'm constantly typing hashes instead of being able to press the enter key so that's a that's a me problem perhaps some of you might not be bothered with that but I think if you're going to sell a keyboard into the UK Market it should be a UK keyboard with an an Enter key oriented the way we're used to something else I'm not so keen on is having the power button as just a key on the keyboard because you might accidentally hit it and turn the laptop off I'd prefer that to sort of be recessed and over to the side somewhere or perhaps on the side of the laptop but but that said I haven't accidentally hit it at all in the two weeks I've had it so your mileage may vary on that one if you're a fan of using the arrow keys you might find these a little bit frustrating as well because they're half size I can understand why the up and down arrows might be half siize keys but the left and right could have been full size but they're not and just next to that of course we've got the co-pilot key so this is the dedicated key and if you press it it brings up co-pilot which doesn't really do much at the moment but uh again I've covered that in my other video basically it launches the co-pilot chatbot at the moment but in the future it will access all of these AI features that Microsoft has been promising maybe next we've got the touchpad which is a Precision Glass touchpad and it does feel very nice to use uh if not quite as nice as the MacBook Air one thing I'm not so keen on is the fact that it is a diving board layout so you can click it at the bottom but not at the top the latest generation of Macs have a a haptic pad so you can kind of Click anywhere on it but Asus does counter that with some interesting additional gestures if I slide my finger slowly up here on the right hand side of the touchpad and up and down you can see I can control the brightness of the display I think that's quite a nice feature uh if I go over to the left side and do the same thing I'm controlling the volume of the laptop you can also do the same thing across the top of the touchpad to scrub through video files something I have noticed with the touchpad is if you're doing the two finger scrolling it's quite sensitive to the zoom gesture you know where you you pull your fingers apart so I found sometimes when I'm scrolling through web pages or say a word document I end up zooming in or out and find that a little bit frustrating I'm sure that's something they can fix with a software update though at the top of the display we've got a 1080p webcam with infrared support so it supports Windows hello for facial recognition and logging in and something I really like is that you have a physical privacy switch here at the top and you just slide it across and it slides a literal piece of plastic in front of the lens so you know that your webcam is off so that brings us to some benchmarks and we've got a couple of comparison machines that we're going to be using here we've got the Lenovo Yoga slim 7x this is a slightly smaller laptop but it's the same specs it's the same xelite processor with 16 gigs of RAM and a 1 TB SSD so it' be interesting to see how the Asus compares to the something that's got a slightly smaller perhaps more thermally challenged chassis and then also for comparison purposes we'll be using the MacBook Air M3 model again this is a 16 GB model let's start with the geekbench 6 CPU scores we've got both of the X Elite laptops plugged into their Chargers and they're set to best performance mode in Windows and on single core the Asus scores 2,429 so basically the same as the Lenovo but Falling some way behind Apple's latest M3 and of course the M4 chip is out now in the iPad Pro and I have test Ted that and it is an even bigger Gap but of course Apple do lead the way when it comes to single core performance at the moment this Snapdragon XLE is actually slightly quicker than Apple's M1 chip for single core performance but what about multi-threaded performance let's have a look at that here the Asus scores 14,270 and we can now see the additional thermal benefits of the larger chassis because it's outperforming the Lenovo and it's comfortably ahead of Apple's M3 and in fact it's also ahead of the bin version of the M4 that's the nine core version but it comes in just slightly behind the 10 core M4 I have also tested these laptops on best power efficiency mode whilst plugged in and unplugged so running on battery with best performance and you do get a slight drop off on each of those but generally speaking it's so close you wouldn't notice it in real world usage so let's just focus on battery mode with best power efficiency selected and here the Asus scores 1,726 on single core the L noo actually managed to score slightly ahead and of course the Apple M3 there's no difference between being plugged in and being unplugged it always delivers the same performance and now if we go to multi-threaded Performance the Asus manages 8,699 of course these scores are plenty enough for great performance in Windows so if you need to run your laptop all day and get the most out of your battery life you can do it if you open the my Asus app and select full speed mode this will allow the fan to run at maximum speed so that you can get the most performance out of your chip possible if we run those tests again in geekbench 6 we can see now we get single Kora 2,462 and it takes multi-threaded performance up to 14,45 and this laptop is actually outperforming machines that have The XLE 8100 chip in so it just goes to show how thermal design can really make a huge difference here let's just switch over to the geekbench 6 GPU benchmarks and again this is plugged in with maximum performance settings we get a score for open CL of 20,666 and you can see that is someway behind Apple's M3 chip which isn't even optimized for open Co if we switch over to metal framework for Apple's chip and the Vulcan framework for the adreno GPU the Asus now scores 24,1 196 and that's about half the score that Apple's M3 is getting of course the MacBook Air doesn't have any active cooling so it will throttle that chip back but even so uh it still has more GPU performance than these X Elite chips do so the GPU is perhaps a slightly disappointing area of the xelite chip it's not keeping up with Apple's MacBooks and it's not going to keep up with the latest onboard gpus from the likes of AMD that doesn't mean it's a terrible GPU though I found this machine to be plenty Snappy and it plugs into 4K monitors and it's really nice to use and it will also play some games if there's arm compatibility but if you're in into gaming again this is not the laptop for you you shouldn't assume though that image editing and creative work is off the table let's have a look at the Affinity photo 2 Benchmark here you can see the scores for the various different things that Affinity tests and these X Elite laptops do pretty well when it comes to CPU tests again the M3 MacBook Air is ahead on single core CPU tasks but the xelite pulls ahead on multi-threaded CPU tasks and of course Falls way behind when it comes to GPU oriented tasks let's now move over to cinebench 2024 this is a sustained test of the CPU each test is at least 10 minutes long so let's start with the single core test so we're just rendering a 3D scene here and the score that the Asus manages is 106 which is basically the same as the Lenovo and is a little bit behind the MacBook Air M3 very much as we'd expect let's do a multi-threaded test though edging out the Lenovo and comfortably beating the MacBook Air M3 and that's all down to the fact that the M3 is thermally challenged it doesn't have any active cooling so it is thermally throttling the Asus has no such hindrance and if we go again to that full speed mode we can get that score all the way up to 1,77 that's almost a 19% Improvement although it does come with a cost because as you can hear the fan noise is fairly loud but I think that's a nice option to have if you've ever got a sustained workflow where you need to export a whole bunch of photographs or maybe compile some software or render a video it's nice to know that you've got that extra performance boost available to you even if it is a bit noisy let's just take a look at USB performance now I used a Samsung t7 USB drive and we use crystal disc Mark just to do a sequential read and write test and the Asus scored 954 MBT per second on read and 832 on right broadly similar to the Novo in this test and outperforming the M3 MacBook Air the M chips do seem to have a slight issue when it comes to USB that's been present since M1 and doesn't appear to have been fixed yet let's go now to Thunderbolt I used an nvme Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with a standard SSD in it and we got 2,16 megabytes per second on read 1,985 on right again the Asus and the Lenovo are very similar to each other uh but here the M3 MacBook Air say ahead these differences could be down to drivers or it could be down to the way that Thunderbolt has been implemented with the exite architecture or the usb4 implementation on these laptops I do have a usb4 drive enclosure which I'm going to test with these laptops in a future video and I expect the speeds to be a bit more comparable between xelite and the Mac with that I just wanted to run a few benchmarks using browser bench this has got a suite of three tools that are used to measure the performance of your web browser for modern web browsing workflows and I'm using Microsoft Edge on the PCS and we're using Safari on the Macs because those are the default browsers I think these scores would be slightly improved if we were using Chrome on the Windows machines so first of all speedometer 3 the Asus scores 22.4 you can see this is in line again with the Lenovo but it's falling behind the MacBook Air M3 and that's much the story for all of these benchmarks because they are heavily focused on single core Performance jet stream 2.2 scored 200 7 5.91 and motion Mark 1.3 it comes in at 26712 finally Let's test the SSD inside this machine to see how that performs again we'll use crystal dis Mark and we'll do a sequential retest that's 5,42 megabytes per second and sequential right at 3,626 that's fantastic performance as you'd expect from a generation 4 SSD let's just do a random read and right test for read it was 76 megabytes per second and right was 262 megabytes per second so these are basically your best case scenarios and your worst case scenarios for this drive and I think that performance is pretty good very happy with that now we do need to talk about software compatibility because of course these are arm chips and although windows for arm has been around for some years Microsoft has not quite got there yet they're not really giving the developers quite enough support and unfortunately that's the case too with the X Elite system still the developer kit from Qualcomm isn't available so developers haven't had these machines to be able to Port their software ahead of time which is what happened with the Apple transition of course so they actually have had to go out and buy these machines these laptops on launch day and start porting their software but that is what they're doing it's nice to see that developers are committed to this and the software situation is getting better all the time as you can see from adobe's web page they already have betas available for some of their apps some of their apps are already fully supported on arm and the others are in development as we speak Da Vinci resolve they're currently working on version 19 of their product and you can download a pretty mature public beta from their website and that supports Windows on arm as well so these X Elite chips work fine although I will say they haven't completed full optimization for this chip yet so don't expect it to equal the M chips for performance again here and for those of you that have left Adobe behind find perhaps you're using Affinity Suite of products you'll be pleased to know that they're all supporting windows for arm and these excelite chips although again optimization with Graphics drivers and things might not quite be there yet and I also noticed that blender had a beta available for Windows for arm so there is a whole bunch of software that is being ported across to the arm platform and some of that has just happened in the past week or so for those apps that are not natively compiled for arm you have the prism translation layer and you will find that a lot of apps that are compiled for x86 will actually work through that translation layer but not all of them as the case may be and again I cover that in my other video my experience has been that I haven't really had many issues at all the odd app that doesn't work properly but I've been able to find workarounds for all of those things and I'm quite happy that these laptops are in a fit state for everyday users if you need a laptop to do your office tasks to browse the web to watch YouTube and to send your email and print documents all of these other things you'll find that these laptops are working just fine so some conclusions then who should buy an ex Elite laptop well I would say definitely not anybody who relies on their computer for their business if you're a creative professional and you're running Mission critical applications on your machine it's not a good idea to go out and buy a first generation product like this everyday users though anybody who's looking for an ultra portable laptop with a great screen loads of performance and great battery life well you are well catered For with these exite laptops now specifically the Asus Vivo book s let me go through some of the things I really like first of all performance I think it's excellent yes okay there may be chips from Intel and AMD that are up there as well and it's not quite keeping up with the latest generation of the mchip it's not the Revelation that the M1 was for the Mac but it's totally unrealistic to have expected that the situation is completely different and the performance on offering these machines is really good if not groundbreaking I really love the display when you're paying £1,300 for a laptop you do expect a good display so to get a lovely OLED HDR display like this that supports 120 HZ really good shame that it's not touch I don't personally care because I don't like touch screens but I know for some of you that will be important I think the port selection on offer on this laptop is really good if you're using it in a business setting having that fullsize HDMI port for starters is a great thing to have plus having fulls sizee USB along with type- c and a card reader excellent I like the typing feel of the keyboard and I love the fact that we've got a number pad present I love this privacy feature where you can just cover up your webcam nice and easily the battery life is amazing and in normal use this thing is really quiet so those are all the things that I really like let's go through the things that I don't like so much about this laptop that Enter key for me makes it difficult to type on but uh again like I said that is probably a UK or International thing USA users you're used to having an Enter key that's horizontal like that there's of course the power key location I think that's going to bother some users and then the back lighting versus the key cap color in some situations there's just not quite enough contrast so I'd like to see that improved in the Next Generation and then there's the one-sided charging so you can only charge a laptop from the left hand side I think it would be nicer to have a port either side for that I think it's fair to say as well the overall build quality although it's very good it's just not quite at the same level as Lenovo have achieved with the yoga slim and it's not quite at the level of Apple's MacBooks at this price point you might expect a slightly more premium feel but Asus has made up for that with some of these other features that the laptop has so those are the things that I don't like and there are a couple of things that I think would be nice to have so with the type A ports on the right hand side of the laptop it'd be nice if they were 10 gbit speed and it would also be nice if there was a fingerprint reader in the power button I know other models of the Vivo book do feature this and some people would like having that extra biometric security overall though I think this is a really fine laptop and it's fair for the price although you have to take into consideration that you are an early adopter of a first generation technology and if you're not prepared to do that then you need to look elsewhere to perhaps offerings that feature Intel and AMD Asus do provide an Intel version that's very similar to this laptop has a very similar display and actually comes in slightly cheaper as well so it is an interesting first out for qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip and granted it's not for everybody but I think it probably would work for more people than you might expect and the support is getting better all the time I found it worked really well with my workflow but of course your mileage may vary so if you're curious perhaps go to the store and try one out I think there is a lot to recommend this Asus Vivo book s some might argue that it is slightly overpriced for a first generation product but isn't that often the way things go when you comp compare the pricing to Apple's equivalently speced MacBook Air it is quite a bit cheaper so I think overall it's probably fair value and again we'll try and find some deals and pop those in the description hopefully you found that interesting or entertaining in some way and if so please let the YouTube algorithm know with a thumbs up or a thumbs down if you prefer and please consider subscribing to the channel we'll see you again soon for some more geekery\n"