ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED Review: Unleash Elegance And Power

ASUS has unveiled the latest iteration of its Vivobook S15 OLED laptops by introducing a range of essential upgrades. The ASUS Vivobook S15 boasts an OLED display and is equipped with Intel’s cutting-edge 13th-generation processors. By providing great looks paired with top-tier hardware, ASUS is focusing on both the youth and office professionals. After using the Cool Silver color for three weeks now, I’ll share my thoughts about the Vivobook S15 OLED in this review.

ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED Review

The Vivobook S15 OLED is a premium offering from ASUS. It comes in four beautiful shades; Midnight Black, Solar Blue, Cool Silver, and Cream White. Priced at Rs 1,09,990, the Vivobook S15 can be purchased from Asus’ online store.

ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED Unboxing

Before beginning the review, let’s check out the additional offerings in the retail box.

• Asus Vivobook S15 Laptop
• 65 Watt Charger
• Quick Start Guide
• A few stickers

Design: Classy Yet Stylish

Don’t let the sleek and lightweight appearance of the ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED fool you; this laptop is built with durable materials that can handle the challenges of the real world. Before diving into its resilience, let’s discuss the design. The laptop exudes a premium feel, thanks to its metallic finish that extends across the entire body, including the deck.

While the lid features a matte finish, it differs slightly from the deck’s finish. The lid feels more luxurious to the touch, as the material used here differs from the deck’s. The branding on the lid has been enhanced, which in my opinion, looks better than a simple logo. Additionally, the lid has ample space to place the provided stickers.

Conveniently, there’s a small notch on the lid to easily open it with one hand. Flipping the laptop over, you’ll find a polycarbonate bottom panel adorned with numerous vents. Rubber feet have been thoughtfully included to provide stability and elevate the laptop, ensuring better airflow for efficient cooling. The speakers are also positioned at the bottom on either side to deliver an immersive audio experience.

Ports

The edges of the bottom panel are designed in such a way that the laptop looks thin from the sides. This gives the laptop a modern and stylish look. The ports are provided on either side of the laptop. The left side houses a USB Type-A port and a heat vent. On the right side, we see the rest of the I/O, including a DC port, an HDMI, a USB Type A, a Thunderbolt 4 port, and a 3.5mm combo port.

Upon opening the laptop, you’ll be greeted with a big 15.6 inches OLED display with super thin bezels around it. The top bezel holds the camera with a manual privacy shutter to cover the camera when not in use. Besides the camera are two microphones and a light sensor on the top bezel.

Unlike the bezels around the display, the deck’s paint matches the same color and finish as the rest of the laptop. The black colored keyboard compliments the silver deck, and there is a large trackpad below the keyboard. Overall the laptop looks amazing, and the material choice is again perfect. ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED can easily impress anyone who likes a classy yet industrial look on a laptop.

Build Quality: Built Solid Like A Tank

ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED comes with a build quality that can withstand rough handling. The laptop is designed to work in extreme weather and environmental conditions. It comes with US MIL-STD 810H certification, which means it has gone through rigorous testing in different conditions and still comes out to be working as normal.

ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED has passed more than 10 military-grade tests, including shock tests, vibration tests, and temperature tests. Except for any water damage, you can be a little careless with the laptop without worrying too much about its functioning.

The hinge is pretty sturdy, and it can go all the way to 180 degrees which is useful in various situations. However, I can see that the hinges may get a bit loose over time, as I experienced the same during my usage. When the laptop was brand new, the hinge was pretty tight that the whole laptop was lifted up every time I tried to open the lid with one hand. But after a few weeks of usage, I can easily open the laptop with one hand without any problem.

ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED is a very portable laptop with a thickness of 17.9 mm, and it weighs only 1.7 Kg. A laptop this thin and light laptop can easily be slid into any backpack with ease. With the experience, I noticed that the screen wobbles a bit when adjusting it at different angles. Apart from that, the laptop is built beautifully, keeping durability in mind.

Display: The Best You Can Get

ASUS always brings some of the best displays on the table when it comes to premium laptops. The Asus Vivobook S15 has a large 15.6 inches OLED display with a 2.8K resolution. Without dedicated graphics, a 120Hz refresh rate is not very practical, but it’s good to have.

This display comes with all sorts of certifications, making it one of the best displays that you can get on a laptop right now. The display comes with a glossy finish on top, but even then, the display is perfectly readable outdoors with plenty of light—all thanks to the OLED panel with 600 nits of peak brightness.

Safe For Your Eyes

Even at the highest brightness, this display won’t hurt your eyes as this display is TÜV Rheinland certified for low blue light emissions. This protects your eyes when you look at the display in low-light conditions. This display also comes with DC dimming, which ensures the lowest flickers at low brightness, making it the perfect companion at night.

The display is glossy and not matte making the content look perfect even when looking at it from different angles. When you play any content on this display, it becomes an eye candy with all its amazing color depth and sharp visuals.

True To Life Colors

ASUS got this display fine-tuned by the industry leaders like Pantone, and with this Pantone validation, this display becomes the most color-accurate display on a laptop. This display also comes with 100% DCI-P3 and VESA DisplayHDR™ True Black 600 certification. This ensures the display produces true-to-life colors and deeper blacks when required. Above all these certifications and fine-tuning, this display comes with 10-bit color depth and a million-to-one contrast ratio.

OLED displays are prone to screen burn-in, so ASUS has added a pixel refresh technology that refreshes the pixels ever so slightly to be even noticed by the eyes. But this makes the display safe for longer usage without worrying about getting nasty burn-in. It also has many settings and features to make the display more personal and better according to your usage.

A Few Hiccups

Since not everything is perfect, I found certain things with the display that I think ASUS could have done to improve the experience. Since this laptop also targets people who work a 9 to 5 job, the aspect ratio could have been 16:10 instead of 16:9. This gives a bit more estate to the content creators and professionals to work on. And maybe I am asking too much but adding a touchscreen capability would have made the laptop more productive.

Still Perfect

Brands usually compromise on display to provide better specifications, but that is not the case here. This may sound exaggerating, but this is the best display I have ever experienced on a laptop. This is a no-compromise display for everyday work, movie-watching, and content creation.

Sound Quality

Usually, we don’t expect much from a laptop regarding sound quality, but that’s not the case with the ASUS Vivobook S15 laptop. It is equipped with two bottom-firing speakers to create a wide sound profile. Tuned by Harman Kardon makes, they provide the best-in-class sound quality.

Asus also provided Dolby support with the laptop to get the best surround sound experience when watching movies. This also supports headphones and external speakers so you can get the best surround sound no matter where you are. These amazing speakers, when matched with the gorgeous OLED display, create a cinema-like experience.

Keyboard and Trackpad: Not Impressed

The ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED has a full-size keyboard with a numpad on the right. ASUS went for black chicklet keys for this laptop with a long 1.4 mm travel. This makes the keys more responsive and easy to press with less force. The keyboard comes with a backlight with three brightness levels.

For aesthetics, ASUS has colored the Escape key orange, which gives the laptop a nice touch. The power button is provided on the right side above the Numpad and doubles as a fingerprint scanner. It works great, and it is a quick way to login into your laptop without entering the passwords every time.

The keyboard also comes with a special coating to repel the growth of bacteria and viruses. It’s called “ASUS Antimicrobial Technology” and it inhibits any bacteria to be grown on the keys. This coating is proven to kill bacteria and lasts for about 3 years which is great for people who love to keep their workplace clean and hygienic.

During my testing period, the keyboard was good, but I found the keys to be mushy. The long travel makes the typing experience better, but since I like to have feedback while typing, it’s a hard pass on this keyboard. And if you are like me, who wants the keyboard to be more clacky then you may not like this keyboard at all.

A Large Trackpad

Below the keyboard is a large trackpad with a similar finish as provided on the deck. As far as I can tell, this trackpad is not a glass-top trackpad which is a bummer. The big trackpad is good for places where you cannot use a mouse with it. It’s responsive and supports gestures which is again a plus. The palm rejection of the trackpad is again on point, and I never experienced a mistouch when typing on this laptop.

Webcam and Microphone

The webcam on the ASUS Vivobook S15 laptop is an FHD camera with a Privacy shutter. You get a microphone array with the camera to provide crisp sound during video calls. The camera’s picture quality is decent when used in a well-lit environment. But the quality wears out quickly when used in low light conditions.

It also has smart features like lighting optimization, Background blurring, and Motion tracking. Out of these, Motion Tracking is the feature that I think most people will use. It keeps you in the center even if you move around too much in the frame. This feature works in all video calling apps like Google Meet and Zoom.

Operating System, Features, and Free Stuff

ASUS Vivobook S15 has Windows 11 Home preinstalled with its My Asus utility and no bloatware. The My Asus utility has almost all the features you need to fine-tune every aspect of this laptop. You can fine-tune everything with this one utility: the performance, visuals, audio, or input settings.

You can use more useful utilities like the MyAsus app, Link to Asus, Screen Expert, and GlideX. With this you can connect your smartphone to the laptop using these utilities for better productivity. This way, you can get all your smartphone notifications on the laptop, so you don’t need to switch between your phone and laptop too much.

Windows 11 also comes with the Intel Unison and Phone Link to access your phone right on the desktop. Besides, the Windows 11 experience is pretty smooth, thanks to the powerful hardware. The laptop’s price includes 3 months of Xbox Game Pass and MS Office Student 2021.

Performance: Unmatched Performance

ASUS Vivobook S15 is a powerhouse when it comes to core hardware performance. It features Intel Core i9 13th Gen H series processor. This is the best processor you can get on any laptop. It comes with 14 cores and 20 threads, enough to handle any single or multithreading usage.

With a base clock of 2.6 GHz and a boost clock of 5.4 GHz, this processor can handle anything you throw at it. This processor is best for anything from lightweight office work to full-on video editing using Premiere Pro. Paired with the Intel Iris Xe graphics, you can easily play modern games at low to medium graphics at 60 fps. Some CPU-heavy games like Counter-Strike GO can easily run at more than 100 fps framerates without breaking a sweat.

To keep the laptop running smoothly and handle multiple tasks at once, it comes with 16 GB onboard DDR5 memory. There is no expansion slot on the board which I think Asus should have thought of. But this 16GB DDR5 memory has a frequency of 4800 MHz, which is not the best for DDR5 RAM but is still overkill for anything you do on this laptop.

ASUS has provided 1 Terabyte of NVMe PCIe 4 SSD to keep up with this fast processor and RAM combo. This is again one of the best storage you can get for a laptop, and the size is also perfect for any use case. To put how fast this storage is into perspective, I barely have to wait on loading screens in the games. The numbers on the synthetic benchmarks depict the rest of the story about performance.

Benchmarks

We ran a couple of synthetic benchmarks, and the results are amazing as expected. We ran PC Mark 10, Geekbench 6, Cinebench R23, and Crystal Disk Mark for storage. The results came out to be very impressive in all the benchmarks.

The single-core and multi-core scores in Cinebench R3 are 1411 and 11734 points, respectively.

In Geekbench, the laptop scored 1807 in single-core performance and 8942 in multicore performance.

PC Mark’s score came out to be 4901, which makes it one of the best performers in day-to-day usage.

Gaming

Gaming is not the forte of the Vivobook S15 OLED, but since it comes with powerful hardware, we tested a few games on it. We tested CS GO, Apex Legends, Fallout 4, and Minecraft.

In CS GO, a CPU-heavy game, we got over 100 fps at any given time. We easily got 40 to 60 fps for the rest of the games at low to medium settings. This machine is powerful enough to handle daily office tasks and lightweight gaming easily.

Thermals: Quiet Performer

ASUS Vivobook S15 has a single fan to cool down the power-hungry chip. There are two vents for this fan which removes the hot air faster and sucks in the fresh air to keep the laptop cool. The laptop barely warms up while surfing the internet, working, or watching movies.

When you launch power-hungry software, the temperature jumps up quickly, but only if you use the laptop in Quiet mode. In Quiet mode, the fan barely makes any sound, but you can hear the fan noise when switched to the performance mode. The fan noise is still not prominent enough to hinder your experience.

A Solid Day Long Battery

ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED comes with a 75 WHr battery which is quite large. ASUS says it can easily give you about 8 hours of usage. And being honest, I can easily squeeze out more than 5 hours of usage at any time. Even with a processor with a base TDP of 45 watts and a maximum TDP of 115 watts, these are impressive numbers.

This laptop comes with a 65-watt charger with a barrel plug for charging. This charger supports fast charging and can charge the laptop 100 percent in under two hours. ASUS also provides a Battery care feature that limits the charging to 85 percent to extend the battery’s life span. The laptop can be charged via the provided Thunderbolt 4 port when provided with the needed wattage.

ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED: What’s Good and What’s Not

After spending my time with the ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED, here are the Pro and Cons to summarise my review:

Pros

• Amazing design and build quality
• Gorgeous, bright, and colorful OLED display
• Powerful hardware
• Clean Software experience
• Quiet operation
• Large battery capacity
• Nice set of speakers

Cons

• Keyboard is okay
• Lacks an SD card slot
• A bit expensive
• Lacks upgradability

ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED: Final Verdict

Asus has always been my first choice when it comes to all-rounder computing devices. Maybe the ASUS Vivobook S15 OLED laptop seems a bit expensive, but once you experience the features, you will fall in love with this laptop. Apart from the typing experience, I don’t feel that ASUS has cut corners at any other place while building this laptop. If you want a slim, lightweight, powerful machine and the best-in-class display, this laptop will not disappoint you.

Check out our other reviews:

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