Asus Vivobook S 15 (Snapdragon) Review

The Vivobook S 15 is the first Snapdragon laptop that we’ve seen from Asus. We’ve been devilishly impressed with the company’s Zenbooks and Vivobooks for a long time now, but less so with the Snapdragon platform itself. So, how will the Asus Vivobook S 15 compare to its very impressive siblings?

Asus Vivobook S 15 Specs

Features, Ergonomics & Design

The Vivobook S 15’s ‘Cool Silver’ plastic chassis, with its CNC-milled glossy moniker on the lid, is rigid and robust and it looks stylish without being ostentatious. Opening it up reveals an RGB, Scrabble-Tile keyboard that looks very smart when high-contrast lights are displayed, but you can lose the letters in certain, low-contrast lighting when the fonts can blend in with the key. Still, it we’d rather have it than not and it’s that bit different to most ultraportables on the market.

The keyboard itself is well-weighted and comfortable and accurate to type upon for extended periods. It’s got a number pad and isolated (half-height) arrow keys plus plenty of useful function shortcuts spread around. The trackpad is smooth and accurate and the button actuation is quiet and feels high quality.

I’m a big fan of the large, 15-inch, ‘Asus Lumina’ OLED screen which has an unusual 2,880 x 1,620 (3K) resolution and displays a crisp and clear Windows Desktop. The OLED technology means colours are very vibrant and they’re well-augmented by the HDR compatibility which superbly retains details in both bright and dark areas (while keeping true blacks) at the same time. The peak 600-nit brightness is very high and so bright light sources really pop from the screen to almost blind you. Details can get lost in highlights at the maximum brightness setting but just jabbing the levels one-step down produces a near-perfect picture that also exhibits smooth colourful and monochromatic transitions.

Designers will like that it supports 100 per cent of the difficult DCI-P3 colour gamut. Office workers will like the TUV Rhineland and SGS-certifications for low blue light-based eye comfort.

The 120Hz refresh rate marries with the quick, OLED pixel response time to keep fast-moving objects mostly blur-free when doing fast-and-frantic gaming. The only downside is the glossy reflective surface which becomes a mirror when viewing dark content. I really hope that we see Asus’ excellent reflection-free OLED displays (from some of its gaming monitors) appear on its laptops sooner rather than later.

The excellent, twin speakers get loud and punchy and offer excellent fidelity from top to bottom.

The Full HD webcam, above the screen, is also very good at capturing relatively clear images in low light and the microphone array is excellent – it’s great for web conferencing.

The webcam also has a physical, orange privacy slide. The IR camera next to it facilitates Windows Hello facial recognition log-in.

Connectivity and Ports

Inside there’s the latest Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 4 wireless connections. We can’t fault all this – it’s an excellent complement of top-class connectivity.

We just need to underline the fact that the ARM-architecture is very limited in terms of software compatibility compared to the x86 architecture used in Intel and AMD (and even ARM-based Apple) rivals. It is slowly improving but don’t expect much beyond Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft CoPilot+ Ai and web apps.

Still, the Asus Vivobook S 15 is a joy to interact with on every level. We drop a lot of points because of the compatibility issues and yet this laptop still scored very well here – it’s a very good notebook.

Features, Ergonomics & Design Score: 4.5 / 5

Performance

Inside the ARM-based Asus Vivobook S 15 is a 3.4GHz Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 processor with 12 cores. It’s partnered by 32GB of LPDDR5x RAM and a 1TB hard drive (all laptops use fast, NVMe hard drives nowadays so we’ll only be mentioning if they don’t support NVMe from now on). It also uses integrated, Qualcomm Adreno X1-85 GPU graphics.

It wouldn’t run all of our benchmarks, but it ran enough to enable direct comparisons with rivals on other platforms.

General Computing & CPU Tests

The Vivobook S 15 wouldn’t run our PCMark 10 benchmark, which tests all components of a system. It did, however, run our UL Procyon Office Productivity test (which uses Word, Excel, Outlook Classic and PowerPoint) and scored 6,234 which represents an impressive (for any ultraportable laptop) score of 3 / 5. It shows Microsoft 365 (aka Office) is well optimised for ARM. In the Multi-Platform version of this test, it scored 218,000 (Score: 3.8 / 5).

I was worried about its performance in the UL Procyon Image Editing tests which use Photoshop and Lightroom Classic. Its similarly specified rival, the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q initially performed well here but fell down badly in the Lightroom batch photo-editing test, which took it almost 10 minutes. The good news is that the S 15 scored 5,022 in this test. You’d want something faster for regular image work, but this is actually very good for an ultraportable. The batch-editing test also took less-than three minutes, too. So, it’s fine for casual photo editing.

The Vivobook also ran the Cinebench rendering tests (which list the processor as a ‘Virtual CPU.’) In the rapid, R15 benchmark it scored 2,346 which is very respectable for an ultraportable. In the longer, R30 test it scored 12,727 which is not quite as good. In short, you can perform some occasional rendering on this laptop without wasting too much of your life. Score: 2.4 / 5

General Computing & CPU Performance Score: 2.8 / 5

Graphics and Gaming Performance

The Vivobook isn’t (yet) compatible with Adobe Premiere, so we couldn’t run either the CPU or GPU versions of the UL Procyon benchmark.

Gaming Benchmarks

The S 15 also wouldn’t run the difficult 3DMark Speed Way and Time Spy ray-tracing benchmarks, which are designed for hardened gaming PCs.

In the multi-platform, 1,440p, 3DMark Solar Bay benchmark (which includes ray tracing) the Vivobook achieved a score of 11,049 which is an average of 42fps. This means that similar games will mostly work smoothly, but that you’ll likely need to dial-down the resolution and detail settings to keep everything from stuttering occasionally. Score: 1.2 / 5

In the more difficult, Steel Nomad test (a multi-platform, 4K-resolution, ray-tracing benchmark) the Vivobook managed just 515 which is an unplayable average of 5.2fps. Score: 1.3 / 5

In the much easier version of the same test, the 1,440p Steel Nomad Light benchmark, the Vivobook scored 2,240 which is an average of 16.6fps. That’s still not playable, but again, some hefty quality and resolution reduction should get comparable games running smoothly.

I also ran our legacy 3DMark gaming benchmarks for reference:

The fact it wouldn’t play Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 highlights the compatibility issues once again. Don’t expect much beyond mobile-level games.

At the end of the day, as we expect with ARM-laptops, when software is compatible, the Vivobook S 15 works well. However, the compatibility list is akin to the tip of the iceburg in terms of global software.

3D Performance Score: 1.4 / 5

Cooling

Asus’ Vivobook S 15’s fans are mostly quiet but the laptop can get warm – very warm when under a sustained load. The MyAsus app lets you tinker with the cooling settings to reduce power and minimise noise or force everything to maximum which creates a substantial, robust whoosh. For the most part it’s lukewarm and silent, though.

In the 30-minute version of Cinebench R23, the score only dropped by 1.2 per cent, so there’s no significant thermal throttling at play.

Portability & Battery Life

Despite the plastic chassis, the Asus Vivobook S 15 feels very strong, stiff and robust. It’s also MIL-STD-810H military-grade certified for toughness, which is impressive. I expect it to easily survive life on the road.

It’s only 15mm thick and yet it weighs just 1.44KG which is light for a 15.6-incher. The cables and power supply only add an extra 379g. So, it’s not heavy.

It was difficult to test the 70Wh battery due to compatibility with our benchmarks. Asus cites a battery life of 18 hours but it ran our video-playback test for over 20 hours. Everyone’s mileage will vary, but when you’re approaching three work days away from the mains (in an ultra-light usage scenario) that’s still very impressive.

Portability & Battery Life Score: 3.8 / 5

Price & Value

Considering the limitations of ARM-based notebooks, you get a lot of laptop with the Asus Vivobook S 15. At $2,699 it’s also $1,100 cheaper than the recent HP EliteBook Ultra G1q that we reviewed. I’d still like to see Snapdragon laptops massively undercut the price of Intel Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) laptops to make them more compelling, but there’s still decent value here and it’s certainly one of the better Snapdragon Ai PCs we’ve seen so far.

Value Score: 3.9 / 5

Conclusion: Should You Buy The Asus Vivobook S 15?

I recently walked into a local JB Hi-Fi (mainstream high street store for international readers) and found that Snapdragon laptops were in the most prominent position of all. The staff had recently completed their most recent training and were saying how these laptops lasted 40 per cent longer (for battery life) than all Intel equivalents and that only casual users would have issues with software compatibility.

The latter may be true, but the former isn’t – Lunar Lake laptops caught up with Snapdragon and offer comparable (often better) battery life, CoPilot+ functionality and no compatibility issues. The S 15’s sibling, the Asus ZenBook S 14 is one of them and actually won our Laptop of the Year Award for 2024. Many people will be better served by that.

Still, if you’re a casual user who is determined to buy a Snapdragon-based Ai PC, for whatever reason, this is one of the very best that’s come into our test lab.

Last Updated on 26 April 2025 by Nick Ross