Photo: Asus
There is absolutely no reason why your everyday-use, run-of-the-mill laptop should be boring. Spruce up your day with the Asus Vivobook 15.
Spoiler alert, it has an OLED screen.
Look, we’ve said it before; once you go OLED, it’s hard to appreciate anything else. OLED tech really is superior in all the ways that matter.
We’ve been waiting years for the industry to catch up to the OLED craze. Not only did Asus come to the table and released a series of OLED devices, but the company is also keeping our budgets in mind.
This brings us to the VivoBook 15 OLED K513, complete with Full HD display and its pretty backlit keyboard with the bright yellow keycap.
Let’s take a look.
The Asus VivoBook 15 is available in three colours – Indie Black, Transparent Silver, and Hearty Gold. I’ve been reviewing the Black model, and I have to say, it may very well be my favourite.
The matte metal lid gives it a premium feel, and the yellow trim around the Enter key really makes it pop.
Weighing only 1.70 kg and measuring 17.9mm, the VivoBook 15 will be your new favourite travel companion.
The OLED screen is, without a doubt, the star of the show. This VivoBook has a 15.6″ Full HD display with an 85% screen-to-body ratio neatly contained in a thin-bezel NanoEdge display.
The IPS (in-plane switching) panel offers a 178° wide viewing angle, which means you will experience crisp colours even when looking at the screen sideways, or from an angle.
These specs – along with an 84% screen to body ratio – make the Asus Vivobook 15 ideal for CAD engineers, graphic designers, photographers, and video editors.
Powered by the latest Generation Intel Core i7 processor with up to 16GB memory and the latest NVIDIA GeForce GPU, the Asus VivoBook 15 offers the performance you need, when you need it.
It also features Asus’ Intelligent Performance Technology, or AIPT for short, which sets the Power Limit 1 value of the processor from 15 to 28 watts. Asus explains:
[The Vivobook 15] uses ASUS exclusive algorithms combined with between five and nine smart sensors, an aerodynamic IceBlades fan design and a 65-watt power supply to intelligently increase CPU performance with improved stability.
This boosts performance by an additional 40% increase. To activate, change the battery settings in MyASUS to ‘Performance Mode’.
With this feature checked, the Vivobook 15’s battery should last the entire day on a single charge. There are three different battery modes to choose from.
The above-mentioned Performance Mode, as well as Balanced Mode to “intelligently optimise performance and thermal”, and Whisper Mode, the “cool and quiet power-saving” option.
I’m happy to report the Asus Vivobook 15 is not a noisy laptop, especially not when Whisper mode is activated.
Thanks to the internal fan, the laptop performs as quietly as possible when not placed under severe strain (read: gaming). For everyday use and web browsing, it’s practically near noiseless.
The Asus Vivobook 15 features a full-size Backlit Chiclet Keyboard with a Number Pad. The number keycaps are regular sized as well; meaning if you work with numbers all day, you’ll get the hang of this layout in no time.
Thanks to the backlit keyboard, you’d be able to work in dim lighting conditions with ease while the key travel (the distance from the key at rest to full depression) is set to 1.4mm.
While a larger key travel tends to be more accurate – and most laptops clock in around 4mm – the 1.4mm distance ensures a comfortable typing experience.
Plus, typing just feels… smoother, you know?
The input and output ports were the most disappointing aspect for me. The Vivobook 15 doesn’t support Power Delivery, so no recharging via another laptop, for example.
It also has an HDMI 1.4 connector, which is not the worst but will still limit the rate of 4K up to 30 fps (frames per second).
Even though 1.4 is designed to handle 4K video, HDMI 2.0 would have been a better option.
As for the other ports, you’ll find two USB Type-A 2.0 ports on the left. The power plug, HDMI port, a USB Type-A, a USB Type-C, an audio jack, and a MicroSD card reader is situated on the right.
The Asus Vivobook 15 is an affordable laptop with a high-end feel to it. The OLED screen makes it worth every cent and the hardware under the hood performs as one would expect.
One doesn’t just find crisp colour panels like this on any old budget device.
That said, if you do want a higher-end model, may we suggest the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, or the Vivobook Pro 14x OLED.
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