A laptop that is not afraid of blackouts: a detailed review of the ASUS Vivobook S 15 on Snapdragon X Elite

I saw the first computer with an ARM processor in October 2012 in New York during the presentation of Windows 8, where the then head of Microsoft’s operating system and device division, Steven Sinofsky, presented his vision of the PC of the future. According to his plan, ARM models, the first of which was the Surface RT tablet, were to exist in parallel with traditional x86 systems, and developers were to gradually port their programs to the new platform. Of course, none of this happened.

Developers did not see the point of rewriting software for one device, and its sales failed. Thus began Microsoft’s long journey to the ARM architecture, which lasted 13 years. All this time, the company has actually been experimenting with ARM devices with varying intensity, including releasing them on processors with its own design, but the real tectonic shift occurred only this year with the release of the first laptops powered by Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus processors. This became possible, firstly, due to a significant increase in the power and energy efficiency of ARM processors, and secondly, due to the development of the Windows operating system itself, which added the Prism emulator, capable of running almost any program on the new platform.

However, can this wave of hardware and software change the way we use Windows laptops forever? The answer to this question will take time, but it is already clear whether ARM processors will be able to overtake the traditional x86 platform. I just got my hands on the Vivobook S 15, the first ASUS laptop with the Snapdragon X Elite processor. So, using this model as an example, I’ll tell you how viable Windows on ARM is and what advantages such a system can have.

ASUS Vivobook S 15 specifications

Package contents

Considering that the Vivobook S 15 is still far from a budget model, ASUS ships the laptop with a slightly wider than standard package. That’s why the box comes with a pretty handy backpack along with the laptop and a 90W power supply.

Design, ports and usability

Unlike the premium Zenbook line, Vivobook models are mostly solutions with a minimalist design that emphasizes their practicality. In this regard, the new product fits perfectly into the Vivobook concept; although the S 15 has a completely metal body, it does not have any bright elements or patterns. The cover of the display unit is completely matte with a barely noticeable ASUS Vivobook inscription.

The laptop has a classic design with the display attached to the base with the keyboard by two compact hinges. ASUS claims that they managed to reduce the depth of the hinges by 54% and the width by 3.4% compared to similar 15.6-inch models. At the same time, the display unit opens 180 degrees and is well fixed in any position. In addition, Vivobook S 15 is easy to open with one hand.

Interestingly, despite the transition of almost all ASUS laptops to a 16:10 screen format, the S 15 has a 16:9 aspect ratio. It’s better for watching videos, but worse for documents and web pages.

Despite its 15.6-inch diagonal, the laptop is very compact and lightweight. Its dimensions are 352.6 x 226.9 x 14.7~15.9 mm, and it weighs only 1.47 kg. This makes the Vivobook S 15 easy to use on the go or to take to meetings.

The laptop has two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports on the right side, as well as HDMI 2.1 (TMDS), two USB4, a microSD slot, and a 3.5 mm audio jack on the left. This is quite enough to connect the necessary peripherals.

The laptop uses an island-type keyboard with a key travel of 1.7 mm and a distance of 19.05 mm between the center of one key and another, which provides a high level of comfort while typing. It’s a very comfortable keyboard indeed, very similar to the one used in the more expensive Zephyrus G16 gaming model. It even has RGB backlighting. However, I have a few complaints about the keyboard. The first is more subjective and is related to the use of a separate number pad in Vivobook S 15. I understand its usefulness for those who actively work with a large number of numbers, but for everyone else it means a keyboard and touchpad shifted to the left, which will take some getting used to.

The second complaint is about the keyboard backlight, which is rather poorly visible on gray keys in low light, but not yet in complete darkness. Even the RGB backlight and the ability to change colors do not always help.

Paradoxically, in some conditions, turning off the backlight improves the readability of characters on the keyboard.

Of course, this will only be a disadvantage if you need to look at the keyboard periodically to type more confidently.

ASUS Vivobook S 15 has a fairly large touchpad, it accurately detects the position of your fingers and can completely replace the mouse. In addition, its touchpad supports not only standard Windows 11 gestures, but also additional ones such as volume control, display brightness, fast forwarding or rewinding media, and launching the ASUS ScreenXpert utility, which helps you manage windows and quickly turn the camera and microphone off or on.

I personally did not find any scenarios for using touchpad gestures, often changing the volume and brightness of the screen is much faster with the usual keys.

Security

The laptop uses a face recognition system based on an infrared camera, which allows you to quickly log in using Windows Hello. The camera is also able to track whether the user is in front of the screen or has moved away from it. Accordingly, the Vivobook S 15 locks as soon as you move away from it and unlocks when you sit down and continue working. It works really well, unlocking is almost instantaneous.

For those who are concerned about privacy, it is also possible to close the laptop’s camera unit with a special mechanical curtain, but in this case, face recognition and quick login will not work, you will have to enter a password.

Display

The Vivobook S 15 has a 15.6-inch OLED display with a resolution of 2880×1620 pixels, 16:9 aspect ratio, 120 Hz refresh rate, 0.2 ms response time, 100% DCI-P3 color profile, and 600 nits peak brightness.

Both in terms of characteristics and real-world experience, this is a top-of-the-line screen with excellent color reproduction, suitable for everyday use as well as for photo and video editing. We should also mention the brightness, which is quite high for laptops. But keep in mind that the laptop has a glossy screen finish, so to work outdoors you’ll have to look for an angle with less glare. Fortunately, this is easier to do thanks to the fact that the display unit lid opens 180 degrees.

Platform and performance

The Vivobook S 15 is ASUS’s first laptop based on ARM architecture, using Qualcomm’s flagship platform with a Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 processor with 12 Oryon cores and a frequency of 3.4 GHz. The built-in Adreno X1-85 accelerator is used for graphics processing, and a separate Hexagon chip is used for artificial intelligence tasks. The laptop is also equipped with 32 GB of LPDDR5X 8448 MHz RAM and a fast 1 TB SSD drive.

Unfortunately, most traditional Windows benchmarks do not yet recognize the new platform, so it is difficult to compare the speed of different architectures directly. However, the Geekbench 6 test shows that the X Elite X1E-78-100 in multi-core mode has performance on par with the Apple M3, AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS, and Intel Core Ultra 9 185H. That is, we are talking about a very fast system, even despite the relatively thin body. The interface and programs work very quickly, and there is a good power reserve.

But it’s worth noting that even though the active dual-fan cooling system is used and the processor has a maximum TDP of 45 watts, the system still loses some performance when disconnected from the power supply. Even at the maximum speed setting for the system, Geekbench 6 shows a drop from 2259 to 1255 points in single-threaded tasks and from 11511 to 8599 points in multi-threaded tasks.

In the Cinebench 2024 rendering speed test, the laptop scored 524 points in multi-threaded mode and 54 points in single-threaded mode without a connected charger.

For comparison, when running on battery power, performance has almost doubled.

This is designed to give the laptop longer battery life, and most users won’t really notice the sag, but it can be important for those who plan to work on more complex tasks in mobile mode, such as editing videos.

The Adreno X1-85 graphics accelerator, when compared in Geekbench 6 in OpenCL, is faster than the already quite outdated Iris Xe built-in graphics, but lags behind Intel Arc and, of course, falls short of even such discrete solutions as the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti.

However, it’s quite possible to play games on a laptop, but not at maximum graphics settings, and not very demanding ones. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 won’t run even with the minimum settings. It’s also worth keeping in mind that when running non-native ARM programs, which are essentially all games, the emulator eats up about 20% of performance.

Overall, I had a good experience playing The Witcher 3 in Full HD with minimal graphics settings, as well as Civilization 5 at native 3K resolution and medium settings. Moreover, playing Civilization was quite comfortable even without a power supply, and I can easily imagine spending several hours playing this game on a train.

Other features of the ASUS Vivobook S 15 platform offer the latest wireless standards: Wi-Fi 7 for internet connectivity and Bluetooth 5.4 for headphones and peripherals.

Heating and stability of operation

Unfortunately, standard system load tests, such as AIDA64, are not yet adapted to the ARM architecture, so it is not possible to conduct a stress test with them. However, considering that I heard the cooling system working only twice while using the laptop, during the BIOS update and when I ran the Cinebench 2024 test, this model is not in danger of overheating and trotting. Even under high load during rendering, the laptop case remains barely warm. If they wanted to, ASUS could have reduced the TDP of the processor and used a completely passive cooling system, but practice shows that having coolers that are almost always off but activate during really high loads and help maintain a high level of performance is a good idea.

The correctness of this approach is also emphasized by the 3Dmark stress test, in which the laptop demonstrates stability at the level of 97.8%, which is a good result.

Windows and ARM

Due to past failures with Microsoft’s attempts to use the ARM architecture with Windows, the concept itself has a rather bad reputation. However, modern developer tools, more powerful hardware, and the availability of the Prism emulator make the Windows 11 user experience on ARM a positive one overall. If you need a laptop specifically for office work, then there are no problems at all. Programs such as Chrome, Firefox, Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams, Zoom, Spotify, OneNote, Notion, Telegram, Slack have either already been ported to ARM or run through an emulator without any problems. The same goes for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, DaVinci Resolve, GIMP, and Canva.

In fact, using a modern Winodws 11 laptop on ARM is not much different from using the same operating system on the x86 platform. However, as always, the devil is in the details, if you need some specific software, there is no other way to know if it will work 100% correctly, except to install and test it. It’s a lottery to a certain extent, and it’s clearly visible in games. Steam installs and runs on ARM without any problems, but some games, even not very demanding ones, may not run. And this can only be checked manually.

However, the good news is that many popular programs have already been ported to ARM, and they can get the most out of the new Windows 11 platform.

The ASUS Vivobook S 15 is also positioned as a Copilot+ PC laptop, with a separate key on its keyboard to launch the Copilot chatbot, Paint has a Cocreator assistant that “finishes” your sketches, but Microsoft has not yet released the Recall feature, which was supposed to save screenshots and allow users to quickly find documents, images, websites, and more. It looks like this feature may not be coming at all due to privacy concerns.

Thus, despite the presence of powerful coprocessors in Copilot+ PC laptops, which are responsible for speeding up artificial intelligence tasks, the integration of AI into Windows 11 itself remains at a level where it is very easy to overlook.

I’ve used the Copilot button a few times just for fun, and to be honest, I wish Microsoft would have allowed me to assign other programs to launch it, such as opening ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. I understand the desire to tie users to their services, but such a restriction will cause negative feedback from users anyway.

Another AI program that comes with the Vivobook S 15 is developed by ASUS itself, called StoryCube, which allows you to import photos and videos from both the laptop itself and third-party cloud services like Google Photo or Apple iCloud. Then you can simply store them locally, edit them using AI tools, and create animated stories. All in all, this is useful software that allows you to build your media library from various sources, especially since it’s completely free. So I’m grateful to ASUS, and I hope it will continue to be so.

Audio and webcam

The laptop has a system of two speakers located on the bottom of the keyboard base, a little closer to the user. They’re loud enough to watch videos, but you won’t find good surround sound or bass here.

My personal favorite in this regard is still the new Zephyrus G16. It has really good sound.

The FullHD webcam is pretty standard, enough for video calls. By the way, Windows 11 offers a whole set of studio effects with background blurring and filters that work well on ARM and don’t load the system at all.

Battery life

The Vivobook S 15 has a 70 Wh battery, which, according to the manufacturer, should last for 18 hours, but this is when playing videos with Wi-Fi turned off, which may be relevant only for those who are flying from Singapore to New York.

In the PCMark test, which simulates working with Microsoft 365 office programs, the laptop lasted more than 15 hours at 200 nits of brightness. In real use, I also never managed to discharge it during the working day. So the autonomy of the Vivobook S 15 is at a very good level.

At the same time, the laptop also charges relatively quickly; it takes 49 minutes to charge from 0 to 60% from the bundled 90W power supply.