The era of Qualcomm-powered PCs is finally here. I know I'm a little late to say that considering the first Snapdragon X laptops launched a month ago, but now I've finally had the Asus Vivobook S 15 in my hands for some time, and I love it.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is everything I wanted in a laptop. It offers excellent performance on battery or AC power, and battery life remains terrific despite that. Battery consumption while in sleep mode is also minimal, and the laptop wakes up from sleep nearly instantly every time. And Asus did a lot of good here too. The OLED display looks fantastic, and its large size makes it great for getting things done, and it has a fairly premium-feeling design.

I don't quite understand why Asus didn't follow other OEMs, though, and decided to make its only Snapdragon laptop part of the middling Vivobook series rather than the Zenbook line. It feels like a somewhat half-hearted effort when this chip easily warrants going all in.

About this review: Asus sent us the Vivobook S 15 for the purposes of this review. The company had no input in its contents.

Asus Vivobook S 15 pricing and availability

The Asus Vivobook S 15 is part of the first wave of Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops, meaning it launched on June 18th, 2024. It's been available ever since, and you can currently find it on Best Buy or Amazon, as well as Asus' own website.

The Asus Vivobook S 15 costs $1,300 and it comes in a single configuration featuring a Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 chip, 16GB of RAM (though a 32GB version was promised at launch), and a 1TB SSD.

Design

It's a mostly premium laptop

Starting right away with the design, the Asus Vivobook S 15 is a fairly average, albeit premium laptop. Nothing here necessarily stands out, but the chassis is mostly made of aluminum and it comes in a nice silver colorway, with the keys being color-matched to the chassis. That may sound small, but I always dislike when silver laptops have a black keyboard, and that's a fairly common trend with some cheaper laptops, so I'm glad we didn't get stuck with something like that despite this being a Vivobook.

At 3.13 pounds, the laptop is decently portable for a 15-inch laptop, especially considering it's made of aluminum. It also comes in at 14.7mm of thickness, so it feels pretty modern.

The Vivobook S 15 does lack some of the design elements you might find on other Vivobook laptops, but I like its subdued appearance. The bottom of the lid is sort of cut off to improve airflow while using the laptop, and it makes for a cool look when the laptop is closed, too. I'd say the cheapest-feeling part of the machine is the display, thanks to the black plastic bezel and a plastic coating for the screen itself. There's no glass here.

A solid selection of ports

For ports, the Asus Vivobook S 15 comes equipped with two USB4 ports, HDMI, a headphone jack, and a microSD card reader on the left side, while the right side houses two USB Type-A ports. It's a solid selection overall, and I always appreciate a laptop that's well equipped with ports and doesn't just expect you to use a USB-C hub.

On the topic of ports, though, I'll mention that the USB4 ports are a bit too picky with charging. Like most review units I get, this one has a U.S.-style plug, so I tried using multiple of my own chargers, including a 100W charger from another Asus laptop I have. Basically every charger I tried resulted in a warning saying the laptop was charging slowly, and in some cases, sometimes the charger seemed to not work at all.

Keyboard and touchpad

Asus continues to deliver a great typing experience

Asus has surprised me in the past with how good the keyboards are in its non-gaming laptops, so this time around, I'm not surprised anymore. The Asus Vivobook S 15 offers a pretty comfortable typing experience, with large keys, a decent amount of space between them to prevent typos, and most importantly, a comfortable feeling when pressing each key.

Asus touts a 1.7mm travel distance, and it feels just right. Anything over 1.5mm is usually pretty good, and that definitely applies here. There's a satisfying feeling when the keys actuate, and I enver feel like they bottom out harshly.

It's worth noting that not only is the keyboard backlit, it also has single-zone RGB lighting, so you can choose the color you like the most. It adjusts the brightness automatically depending on your setting, too.

The touchpad is also pretty good. It's nice and large, and it feels smooth enough, though it's not the best I've ever used. The big problem is that the keyboard has a number pad, and to keep the touchpad aligned with the space bar, Asus had to push it to the left, which makes it very easy to accidentally press the right button instead of the left button. It's a common problem with laptops like this, unfortunately.

Display, webcam, and sound

OLED delivers, as usual

Asus has been using OLED displays in its laptops for longer than most other companies, and it's developed a knack for using great ones. The Asus Vivobook S 15 comes with 15.6-inch OLED panel with what Asus calls 3K resolution, which really means 2880x1620. Yes, you may have seen a lot of laptops with 2880x1800 resolution before, but Asus made this laptop with a 16:9 aspect ratio, which I find very odd for a premium laptop in 2024. The industry has moved to 16:10 basically across the board, so I'm not sure why Asus thought this was a good idea for a $1,300 laptop.

Disregarding that, though, this is a fantastic panel. Not only is the resolution very sharp and the 120Hz refresh rate smooth, but colors look as vivid as you could want them to. Of course, you also get deep, true blacks, as you'd expect from an OLED panel. Running the usual tests using the SpyderX Pro colorimeter, I got these results:

The display on the Asus Vivobook S 15 covers 100% of sRGB and DCI-P3, plus 96% of Adobe RGB and 95% of NTSC. THose are some of the best results I've ever seen on any display, and it's seriously impressive.

As for brightness, I got the display to hit nearly 400 nits, which is in line with what's advertised.

I never really had problems with the display not being bright enough, but that was until I tried to take pictures of the laptop. Outdoors, with sunlight, the reflectiveness of the screen made it nearly impossible to see on camera. It's not as bad in real life, but still not ideal.

The webcam is solid

Above the display, Asus packed a 1080p webcam, complete with WIndows Hello support. Laptop webcams have improved a lot in recent years, and thankfully, the Vivobook S 15 is pretty solid, too. There's a good amount of detail and not too much noise (for webcam standards, anyway), so I can't really complain.

The webcam is enhanced, in some ways, by Windows Studio Effects, especially the new Portrait Light effect that comes with Copilot+, which does alleviate some of the uneven lighting when I'm sitting next to my window.

As for sound, the Vivobook S 15 is fine. The bottom-firing speakers get plenty loud, but they're much muddier than other high-end laptops. My reference has usually been Asus' own Zenbook 14 OLED I reviewed earlier this year, and those speakers still clear the Vivobook's in terms of clarity. The built-in microphones seem to work fine, too, and I've used them for a few work calls without any complaints.

Performance and Windows on Arm

Qualcomm is finally better than Intel... kind of

All of this has really been a prelude to what I really care about with this laptop, and that's the processor. Performance is usually the most boring section of a review, but now that Qualcomm is entering the scene and prmising to shake up the entire industry, things are different.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is the first time Qualcomm is confident enough to compare itself to the best processors Intel is making in terms of performance, but it doesn't sacrifice the power efficiency that Arm is known for. The idea is that you can get the best of both worlds: great performance and great battery life, while also benefitting from things like instant wake and very low power usage while in sleep mode.

The Snapdragon X Elite hasn't struggled to keep up with anything I usually do on an Intel PC

Let's talk about performance first. I never got to try the previous Snapdragon chips for Windows, so this is my first experience with one, and honestly, it's been great. For the most part, the Snapdragon X Elite hasn't struggled to keep up with anything I usually do on an Intel PC. Most web browsers are now native on Arm, and performance feels great on them. So is Slack, which is one of the apps I use the most, and again, it feels pretty good to use. Even Photoshop, Lightroom, and DaVinci Resolve all run negatively and with generally excellent performance. DaVinci Resolve is only running natively on Arm in its public beta for version 19, and my PC did BSOD once while using it, but it is a beta, so I can give it a pass to some extent.

There's also one exception to the great performance in Lightroom, which has to do with the AI Denoise feature. I tried using it once, and it took over 5 minutes to denoise an image, which is much slower than what I would get on an Intel laptop. The AI denoising uses the GPU, and considering the Snapdragon X Elite has a better GPU than Intel's integrated graphics, I think some kind of optimization needs to be done here.

One of my favorite apps, Beeper, is unfortunately still emulated, and there are no plans for a native version right now, which is a bummer. There's a very noticeable lag when running the app on this PC, and I'm sure the emulation layer is to blame (Beeper being a fairly complex app probably doesn't help).

If you're interested in benchmark scores, I ran the tests that could run on this PC, so here's how it compares to some of the competition:

In native benchmarks, the Asus Vivobook S 15 has excellent performance and beats Intel at almost every turn, and it's great to see. It's not as fast as the Surface Laptop 7 though, because that X1E-80-100 configuration of the Snapdragon X Elite has dual-core boost, which this model doesn't, so there's a big difference in CPU performance. You see a big drop in CrossMark due to it being run in emulation, but even then, the score is much lower than you'd expect compared to the Surface Laptop 7. I've found CrossMark can be a very inconsistent benchmark at times, though, so I wouldn't put too much stock in it.

Gaming on Arm is a problem

One of the big hurdles Arm-based PCs are going to have to clear to be truly equivalent to existing laptops is gaming. The Snapdragon X Elite has a significantly more powerful GPU than Intel's latest processors, and it's very evident just looking at the native benchmarks. But that's just the thing, those benchmarks run natively. Most real games don't, so what's it like to game on Snapdragon?

Well, it's a big gamble. My first attempt was to play Rocket League. It's admittedly a game that's very easy to run, but I was still surprised to see it running at max settings and Full HD incredibly smoothly. Then I tried Apex Legends, but that game refused to launch due to not working on Arm (I believe this is related to the Easy Anti-Cheat software).

I then tried The Darkness II, which is another fairly old game, but decently demanding. It ran, but frame drops and stutters were frequent. It was trying to run at the full native resolution of the screen, which is definitely very ambitious. The problem is that when I tried to change the resolution, the game froze and I couldn't launch it again. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, worked up to the title screen, but then resulted in a black screen I couldn't move past, so that was also unplayable.

Bioshock Remastered ran and it felt mostly smooth, though texture quality was horrendous in a lot of places. There seem to be no options for changing that, so it looks like the game automatically scales back a lot to run smoothly.

These were never meant to be gaming laptops, but if you plan to play any games at all, right now, Snapdragon laptops aren't for you. Even if you're a casual gamer, some games may just not run at all, so it's hard to recommend it for that.

Battery life is great

Finally, we turn to battery life, which is one of the more exciting things about the new Snapdragon X laptops. The promises of efficiency and power have been making me want an Arm laptop for years, and it's finally here. And the verdict is positive, albeit not as much as what I've heard in reviews of other Snapdragon X laptops.

I've only had a few days to test the Vivobook S 15, and in those days, the worst on battery life I got was 7 hours and 16 minutes, which included about 50 minutes of testing the aforementioned games. That's very impressive. Otherwise, the best I've had is 8 hours and 46 minutes, and that's a day where I was on Google Meet for over an hour, so it sucked down battery a lot. I was expecting to see some higher numbers considering devices like the Surface Laptop 7 reached over 15 hours in our review. It's also worth noting I've always run the laptop at 60Hz because that's the default setting, and Asus actually locks the option to change it in Windows. You have to use the MyAsus app, which I didn't realize for the first few days of using the laptop.

I've also seen slightly better battery life on the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, which is powered by Intel. You have to remember, though, that laptop didn't perform as well on battery, while this is just as fast regardless of whether it's plugged in or not. I've also not tried as hard to follow a strict set of rules when it comes to using the laptop, so most days involved some task that sucks down more battery, whether it's using Google Meet, editing a video in DaVinci Resolve, or some photos in Lightroom or Photoshop. I haven't exactly had a properly slow day with this laptop, so I believe you could squeeze more time out of it. I'd also wager that constantly running Beeper in emulation might be part of the problem.

Copilot+ isn't worth it

I barely even touched it

I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said before here, but if you're buying one of these PCs based on the promise of Copilot+, just don't. At least not right now. Copilot+ is a set of features unlocked by PCs that have an NPU with 40 TOPS or more, and since the Snpadragon X Elite delivers 45 TOPS of performance, it's the first one to meet that requirement.

The big highlight of Copilot+ was supposed to be Recall, a feature that remembers everything you do on your PC and allows you to easily go back in time to what you were doing at any given point. Essentially, it takes screenshots of everything you do and makes them searchable. But after users found out that all this data was stored unencrypted and that the feature was enabled by default, privacy concerns arose, and Microsoft pulled that feature back. Over a month later, it's still nowhere to be seen.

So, that leaves Copilot+ PCs with the following exclusive features:

• On-device Cocreator in Paint and Photos
• Live captions with translation
• New Windows Studio effects

Unsurprisingly, most of these features really aren't very useful. Cocreator is a feature that can use AI to create images based on a text prompt. In Paint, you can create something completely new, or draw a doodle and ask Cocreator to turn it into a proper image in the style you want. In Photos, you can ask it to apply a new style to a picture you've taken, including a few presets as well as the ability to write your own prompt. It's a cute idea, but I don't think anyone will ever be seriously using this.

Live captions with translation are a great feature on paper. Live captions alone are already a good addition for accessibility, and the addition of translation is welcome. But it only works if you're translating into English, and as an English speaker, how often do you really find yourself trying to watch content in a foreign language that doesn't already have subtitles built in? You might say it's useful for meetings, and yes, that makes some sense, but then live captions are only translated for you. If you speak in English back to the person talking to you, they don't get the same benefit to be able to understand you, so what's the point? To top it all off, it's kind of spotty. I tried watching a Portuguese YouTube video, and the live captions missed quite a few things that were said.

And finally, Windows Studio Effects can be useful. There are a few additions here, starting with Creative Filters, which apply styles like Illustrated or Animated to your video feed. These are totally useless and I don't know anyone who'd ever use these in a call aside from just showing off the feature for the first time. Automatic framing is another one, and it's a bit more useful since it can zoom in on your face and keep it centered if you move around. Portrait Light is also somewhat useful since it can even out poor lighting. I sit next to a window all day, so it does help a bit. Finally, there's a new, more aggressive version of Eye Contact, which makes it so it looks like you're starting directly at the camera, even if you're not. I find this more unsettling than useful most of the time, though I can see why some might want it.

The bottom line is none of these things really matter, though. Nice to have, maybe, but there's not a single thing here that would make anyone think "I should buy a laptop that can do that". The reason why Snapdragon PCs are exciting is the efficiency and battery life they offer while still being very fast. Copilot+ doesn't matter, at least until Recall is available.

Should you buy the Asus Vivobook S 15?

By all accounts, the Asus Vivobook S 15 is a great laptop. It has a premium design, a pretty good keyboard, a fantastic display as far as resolution and colors go, a very good performance and battery life. It's the kind of complete package anyone would love to have in a laptop.

I think the problem with this laptop is that it's just a bit misguided, especially for its price. At $1,300, it's clearly a premium machine, but by making it a Vivobook, Asus treated it like a second-class citizen in some ways. The plastic bezel around the display, the 16:9 aspect ratio, and the good-but-not-great speakers are all signs of that. And for $1,300, you're just $50 away from the Galaxy Book 4 Edge, which has a taller display (with touch support), a thinner and lighter design that's also more premium, and a more powerful version of the Snapdragon X Elite.

That makes the Asus Vivobook S 15 a bit more questionable in terms of value, but it doesn't mean you're getting a bad laptop. It just pays to explore your options before committing.

You should buy the Asus Vivobook S 15 if:

• You want a 15-inch laptop with a 16:9 display (that looks fantastic)
• You want a laptop with great performance and battery life
• You like having a lot of ports on your laptop

You should not buy the Asus Vivobook S 15 if:

• You prefer a taller aspect ratio for the display
• You want a truly premium build quality
• You think Copilot+ is a big factor