ASUS Vivobook 15 X515JA 15.6 Full HD Laptop (Intel Core i3, 8GB RAM, 256GB PCIe SSD, Windows 11)

Product Information

There's also a MicroSD slot, which is a nice-to-have and allows adding on storage space, but I would have preferred a standard SD slot to work with my DSLR on the go. Asus VivoBook 15 review: Display inch, FHD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 aspect ratio, IPS-level Panel, 60Hz refresh rate, 250nits, 45% NTSC color gamut, Anti-glare display, Non-touch screen, (Screen-to-body ratio)83% It seems like you can do plenty with the VivoBook 15, but most budget laptops feel this way at first. The VivoBook 15's benchmark numbers show how little the laptop has to start with. It scored 2,399 overall on Geekbench 5, a testing suite that measures everyday computer tasks like browsing the internet and rendering augmented reality effects. That's below the Acer Aspire 5, which scored 2,744, and even further down the graph from the industry average of 2,983.

So, is there a fly in the ointment? According to Asus, the Vivobook is available with three types of display, all 15.6-inch, 1,920 x 1,080, and 60Hz, but in a crucial way, one of them is not like the other two. And that’s the one that came fitted to my review unit. Let’s dive in. Design and Keyboard We estimate Windows 11 support will end in October 2031. However, this laptop may be compatible with a future version of Windows that gets support beyond this date

In This Article

The SSD inside isn’t going to win any prizes for speed with average sequential read and write speeds of 3,044MB/s and 1,643MB/s, respectively but given that the motherboard interfaces are all PCIe 3 spec, that’s not an unduly poor showing for a budget laptop. Software Taking the base off the Vivobook 15 is a painless operation, and once inside, you can swap out the 2280 PCIe 4 SSD and replace the 8GB RAM card in the one free slot, the other 8GB being soldered to the motherboard. The wireless card is also easy to access, and surprisingly, the MediaTek card supports the 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E wavelength. Colour gamuts are very narrow, with just 52.2% sRGB covered, along with 36.2% DCI-P3 and 36.2% Adobe RGB. With so little colour available, the Delta E accuracy score was never going to be good, and it wasn’t, registering at an excessive 6 against the sRGB profile in Vivid mode. In Standard mode, it is even worse at 7.1. The bottom-facing dual speakers on the Asus VivoBook 15 need a little boost. You can listen to music and watch a movie without headphones, but the sound will seem as if it's strained. The Midnight’s Deep Blue’s strong melody, for example, came through clearly enough, while the vocals seemed as if they were coming in from a distance. Bassier genres of music, like house and synthwave, sound just as hollow, and sometimes it's hard to hear vocals even on podcasts. While I was watching Emma, I could barely hear the dialogue with the laptop set down on a table. You're better off pairing the laptop with external speakers to listen to anything.

inch, FHD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 aspect ratio, 60Hz refresh rate, 200nits, 45% NTSC color gamut, Anti-glare display, Non-touch screen, (Screen-to-body ratio)83% The VivoBook 15's 15.6-inch, 1920 x 1080 NanoEdge display offers little bezel on either side of the laptop, with a bit more at the top to accommodate the webcam. But beyond its widescreen look, the display's dim color profile and weird viewing angles make it an underwhelming device for consuming online video. It made episodes of vintage TV shows like Baywatch, already with a worn-in color palette, look older than they are, while movies like the recent remake of Emma were extremely hard to see in dark scenes. The benchmark results underlined that the U-series processors are intended for light workloads on the go, but they were not a million miles off the scores returned by the significantly more expensive LG Gram SuperSlim, which runs a P-series Raptor Lake processor.Thanks to the low TDP of the processor, there were no issues with thermal throttling, and the fan seldom had to spin up to full speed. The noise wasn’t remotely intrusive even when the cooling system ran full-chat. The 720p built-in webcam exists as a failsafe for when you're called into an unexpected video conference. But you'll want an external webcam to pair with the VivoBook 15, as the quality on the included one is comparable to a webcam I had over ten years ago. It's too bad the camera is an after-thought even on budget laptops because there are so many students and professionals who could benefit from the presence of higher quality video. Asus VivoBook 15 review: Keyboard and Touchpad

Our Handbrake video transcoding tests gave the VivoBook 15 another chance to get outperformed. The VivoBook 15 managed to transcode 4K video to 1080p resolution within 28 minutes and 33 seconds. The Acer Aspire 5 and HP 15 were much faster, transcoding at 21:55 and 25:53, respectively. The VivoBook 15 was faster than the 40 minute average for other budget laptops that took this test. Asus VivoBook 15 review: Battery Life The VivoBook 15 is consistent and capable at distributing heat, and it felt temperate enough to use on my lap. In lab tests, the VivoBook 15's keyboard measured about 72 degrees Fahrenheit throughout, while the underside measured higher at 91 degrees. Overall, the laptop never felt too hot to use. I used the VivoBook 15 with low brightness and the least aggressive setting in Windows 10's battery-saving mode and noticed only slightly better numbers than the lab tests. The VivoBook 15 burned through 15 percent of battery after about an hour into a work session. Two hours later, the laptop used up 45 percent at the same setting. That's nearly 50 percent after three hours of use. Perhaps I could have eked out a bit more time by futzing with the power saving settings. It's clear from the numbers that the VivoBook 15 can barely manage six hours of continuous use. Asus VivoBook 15 review: Heat inch, HD (1366 x 768) 16:9 aspect ratio, 60Hz refresh rate, 200nits, 45% NTSC color gamut, Anti-glare display, Non-touch screen, (Screen-to-body ratio)83% Most budget laptops can last well over six hours on one charge of the battery, but the VivoBook 15 struggled to hit this mark. It lasted only five hours and 20 minutes through continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness. Although this beat out the Acer Aspire 5 (6:55) and the HP 15 Laptop (4:57) in lab tests, it's at the tail end of the spectrum compared to the average of other budget laptops tested (6:39).The Core i5-1235U processor inside the Vivobook 15 is a 10-core chip from the Alder Lake 12th generation and has 8 efficiency cores and 2 performance cores, and a TDP of 15W. It is combined with Intel’s integrated Xe graphics chip, 16GB of dual-channel DDR4 RAM and a PCIe 3 512GB SSD.