Asus VivoBook S15 S530UA - Review 2022

Here's something nosotros see besides seldom in modern laptops: assuming color! With color choices and highlights that set up it apart from the hordes of ho-hum mainstream laptops, the Asus VivoBook S15 is a thin-and-light winner amongst laptops geared toward students. Given the $699.99 toll for the single configuration that Asus offers, yous might expect middling performance and an uninspiring build, but this laptop surprised us. Information technology ships in a option of five colors, simply the internal components of the Asus VivoBook S15 are a stiff one-size-fits-all: an Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of solid-state storage. Plus, the VivoBook S15 packs an unusual lifting-swivel design outset seen in the Asus ZenBook S UX391, and some impressively thin bezels. All of this combines to make this laptop a commendable all-purpose student machine.

Some Serious Color Scheming

The Asus VivoBook S15 I received for review had a fun Tonka Truck motif. Asus calls this colour scheme "Silver Blue," but it has bold yellow accents around the edges. With a textured gray stop on the lid, the yellow plastic around the periphery, and a similarly gray (merely non-textured) keyboard deck, this model is a study in quirky color contrasts. If you like yellow, you lot might enjoy the sunshiney air that this laptop carries, and the combination of muted colour and saturated accents works. It's a strategy that, to my optics, works even better with some of the other combos, such as the Star Greyness model, which has fire-engine ruddy around the edges.

The color-scheme choices are the Silver Blue and Star Gray mentioned, as well every bit Firmament Green (which has aquamarine accents) and Gunmetal, with a Wheel Gold option (golden contrasting with white edge accents) coming in October. No matter which y'all become, you're in for the same specs and the aforementioned 0.7-by-fourteen.2-by-9.6-inch (HWD) dimensions as the model you lot see here.

The VivoBook S15 is thinner than the 0.76-inch-thick base model of the Editors' Selection Dell XPS 15, though the Dell'due south xiv.1-past-ix.3-inch footprint is smaller than the VivoBook S15's. The VivoBook S15 is marginally lighter, too, at iii.97 pounds as opposed to the four-pound XPS fifteen. Besides, the Asus VivoBook S15 is thinner than the Editors' Choice Acer Aspire East fifteen, some other budget-friendly ultraportable that's also a lot heavier. (It weighs five.27 pounds, in role due to its hefty DVD drive.)

Carrying it around the city in my own laptop bag, I found the VivoBook S15 significantly less crushing than other xv-inch laptops I've lugged with me. It helps, too, that the power supply is nothing more than a small, square Air conditioning adapter with a thin cablevision fastened.

Give Your Typing a Little Elevator

Thanks to its hinge design (Asus calls it "ErgoLift"), the keyboard deck of the Asus VivoBook S15 inclines at a 3.five-caste bending when the laptop is open up. Asus says that past elevating the laptop off a surface in this fashion, the extra infinite underneath the deck allows for more airflow, which leads to more than efficient thermal characteristics and quieter running. The auto never got noisy under stress, nor was the bottom of the VivoBook S15 especially hot. (More nigh the keyboard itself in a moment.)

At a i,920-by-1,080-pixel native resolution, the Asus VivoBook S15's IPS console is no sharper or duller than what I typically see in other laptops in its price range. While its native resolution is standard for the size and price, visuals do popular more on the VivoBook S15's brandish than on, say, the Alexa-equipped Acer Spin 3 I recently reviewed.

Drawing your optics toward the screen rather than the areas surrounding the display, the VivoBook S15'south bezel is a mere vi.3mm thick. And if you're planning on squeezing all of your friends onto the couch for movie night in the dorm, you lot tin take solace in the fact that the IPS screen has wide plenty viewing angles for everyone in your hall to enjoy. Having looked at information technology myself from all sides, the screen is near as bright and clear at an angle as it is from directly on. Moreover, because the display has a matte finish, glare is kept to a minimum.

Meanwhile, the VivoBook S15's bottom-mounted speakers are loud plenty to fill a small room, if not much of a departure from the norm. When listening to the classic "lo-fi hip-hop radio: beats to written report and relax to" playlist on YouTube at maximum book, I could hear familiar samples over jazzy background music without any distortion. That said, I would refrain from using the onboard speakers to, say, entertain at parties; they aren't loud enough to projection over small-scale talk, fifty-fifty if they'll do a decent job of filling uncomfortable silences with ambient audio.

Too, the VivoBook S15's integrated webcam does the chore. It captures standard HD photos and videos at a resolution of 1,280 by 720 pixels; your video-conferencing sessions will be workable, if grainy and unremarkable, even in bright lighting. Withal, 720p is a step upwardly from the 640-by-480-pixel resolution of another budget and mainstream machines' webcams. (The Asus VivoBook S510 is one such machine.)

An All-In Keyboard, and Decent Connections

Also an upgrade from the VivoBook S510 is the keyboard. The VivoBook S15'south keys have one.4mm-deep key travel and a pleasant amount of spacing betwixt each primal. Information technology's a total-size layout, too, with a dedicated number pad to the right of the QWERTY layout, in case you spend a lot of time solving math issues or puttering in Excel for accounting classes. All in all, the keyboard on the VivoBook S15 is punchy and satisfying to use, in improver to being well-lit with a plain white backlight that supports iii different levels of brightness. (You lot can too close off the backlighting entirely.)

The VivoBook S15'due south touchpad, even so, could use some work. Despite the perk of a working fingerprint scanner in its upper right-paw corner, the overall feel needs some tuning, if yous ask my fingers. They much prefer the Force Touch trackpads of Apple's MacBooks, or meliorate nevertheless, a pad with detached, clickable left and correct buttons. Like with most touchpads, tapping menu items on the VivoBook S15's touchpad feels also light on the fingers, while clicking down in the corners requires too much force. Then again, I take the aforementioned quibble with most touchpads on Windows laptops. The exception is those with concrete left and right buttons, which tend to announced more than often in business-centric laptops like the Lenovo ThinkPad series.

The VivoBook S15's port selection is ample, if a piddling dated. On the left edge are two USB 2.0 Type-A ports and, to their right, a microSD card slot...

Information technology's non clear (beyond possible cost savings) why Asus opted for USB 2.0 instead of USB three.0 on the left side, but on the right side is a more contemporary organisation. Here, from right to left, y'all get a single USB Type-A port, an HDMI 1.4 output, a USB Blazon-C port, and a 3.5mm sound philharmonic jack...

The USB ports on this side are USB iii.one Gen i (in essence, USB 3.0). Furthermore, the VivoBook S15 ships with Bluetooth iv.ii, along with 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and comes backed by a one-year standard warranty.

As Powerful as "U" Expected

Clocking in at 1.6GHz, or up to 3.4GHz when Turbo Boost kicks in, the Intel U-series processor in this laptop, the Core i5-8250U, is a typical silicon choice in a mainstream laptop in this price range. That's non a bad thing.

Sporting four cores and eight threads, as well as on-chip Intel UHD Graphics 620 silicon, this processor carries the VivoBook S15 from point A to point B without much delay for everyday tasks. A strong pick for online multitasking and productivity applications, and casual, Web-based gaming, the VivoBook S15's Cadre i5-8250U processor handled everything from photo editing to video conversion in our testing.

Related Story Encounter How We Test Laptops

I ran the Asus VivoBook S15 through PC Labs' usual regimen of tests. In UL's (formerly Futuremark's) PCMark 8 test, the Asus VivoBook S15 rang upwards a score of 3,425, beating out the similarly priced, Intel Core i5-8250U-equipped Acer Aspire E 15 by almost 400 points, though the difference is small-scale. The Microsoft Surface Laptop, another student-focused motorcar in the same price range, scored two,745 in PCMark viii, losing out to the VivoBook S15 by around 25 per centum. Because the Surface Laptop we tested used a seventh-generation, two-cadre/4-thread Intel Core i5-7200U processor, it makes sense that the VivoBook S15—which has a four-core/eight-thread, eighth-generation processor—would outscore it.

The VivoBook S15 also outperformed the Aspire East 15 and Surface Laptop in Cinebench R15 and our Photoshop CS6 test. And although it lost to the Aspire E 15 in our Handbrake video conversion test, it did and then by only 6 seconds. While the Acer Aspire E15 uses the same 4-cadre i5-8250U processor every bit the VivoBook S15, you lot can chalk upward the Surface Laptop'south loss in this benchmark to its dual-core Core i5 once again.

The graphics tests were another story. Whereas the Asus VivoBook S15 relies on the graphics integrated into the CPU, the Acer Aspire East 15 configuration tested hither has a modest discrete Nvidia graphics chip, the GeForce MX150. For that reason, the Aspire E fifteen topped the rest of the agglomeration here in all of our graphics testing.

That being the case, a fairer comparison for the Asus VivoBook S15 is the Surface Laptop. Housing last-generation Intel Hard disk drive Graphics 620, the Surface Laptop also targets students, and it scored six,192 points in the the GPU-intensive 3DMark Cloud Gate criterion, compared with the Asus VivoBook S15's score of 7,876. In the Heaven and Valley tests at Medium graphics settings, the VivoBook S15 scored 21 frames per second (fps) and 26fps, respectively, compared with the Surface Laptop's 22fps and 26fps. The Asus VivoBook S15 volition fare about the aforementioned as other student-focused mainstream laptops using integrated graphics, either for casual gaming or partaking in other graphically demanding tasks. You lot'll desire a dedicated graphics chip (and probably 1 better than the MX150, at that) if you mean to get serious about games.

I and so tested the VivoBook S15's battery, running information technology down by playing The Lord of the Rings trilogy, stored locally, until the battery died. The VivoBook S15 did meliorate than the VivoBook S510 before it, lasting 11 hours and 17 minutes (eleven:17) before running out of juice, versus its sibling'south 8:02. Withal, both models paled in comparison to the Acer Aspire East 15, which lasted a whopping fourteen:03. Given its $100-lower price, and its ameliorate battery life and graphics performance, information technology's clear why the Acer Aspire East xv got our Editors' Choice stamp of approval.

Never Too Late for Grade

At $699.99, the price of the Asus VivoBook S15 is a picayune above that of a typical "budget" laptop; our ceiling for that category is ordinarily $500. Fifty-fifty then, the VivoBook S15 gives you a bunch of worthy features--the functional fingerprint reader, the handy hinge design--that cheaper laptops don't. Add to that the thin, colorful styling, its hardy performance, and the premium-feeling, full-size keyboard, and the VivoBook S15 sums upwards as a fine value for mainstream buyers and students. If the Acer Aspire E xv lacks flair and functionality plenty for you, take the Asus VivoBook S15 for a test drive. Whatever color volition practise.