ASUS has been on a race to provide OLED fitted laptops across its price ranges for a while now, and the 15X OLED (M3504) is yet another example of the company going all on it. The ASUS Vivobook 15X OLED starts at a price point of Rs. 66,990 and got up to Rs. 74,990. Let’s see if this AMD Ryzenpowered machine is worth it or now.
WHAT WORKS FOR IT
Display: the laptop sports a 15.6-inch full HD (1920x1080) OLED display that support refresh rates of 60Hz. The display is quite bright and has vivid colours that we have seen from ASUS in the recent past. For watching videos or viewing high resolution images, the display does a good job of showing decent colour range across the board. It’s a 16:9 aspect ratio display and not 16:10, which some content creators may have preferred but what you do get is a quality display panel for the price tag. It’s a glossy display and carries PANTONE validation and VESA certification for HDR. There’s also a 2.8K 120Hz OLED variant but that’s not the one I tried.
Performance: Running Windows 11 Home and powered by AMD’s Ryzen 5 7530U chip (up to 4.3Ghz 6-core processor) along with Radeon graphics, the laptop handled daily tasks pretty well without showing any major stuttering. Apps such as Firefox, Microsoft Word, Excel and Edge open and close without any delays and neither took any additional time to perform their usual tasks. For gaming, it can handle graphic intensive games like CoD at minimum settings and can somewhat show its limitation at medium to highest settings, with frame drops and other performance glitches.
Otherwise, the laptop is well capable of handling tasks as it’s expected to. I tried its 512Gb NVMe SSD and 16GB variant and found it a good option for most users, including for those looking to transfer heavy files to and from the device on a frequent basis in terms of read and write speeds.
Connectivity: You get plenty of I/O options as well as WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5 support. On the left side, you have a USB 2.0 type A port along with the battery indicator; while on the left, there’s a USB 3.2 Gen 1 type C port with power delivery support, two USB 3.2 gen 1 type A ports, an HDMI 1.4 port 3.5mm combo audio jack and the power jack. As you can see there are a lot of ports and connectivity options. I would have liked to see ASUS bundle a LAN to HDMI dongle in the box to make up for the missing LAN port but it’s still not a common thing PC brands do these days. The 720p webcam on the front does a decent job for video calling, and comes with a physical shutter for privacy in place.
Battery life: The laptop is powered by a 42WHr battery cell and comes with a standard 65watt charger in the box. I found it to charge from 5% to full while working in about 2 hours or so, and the battery lasting about 8-9 hours on a regular basis, which is pretty good. With WiFi always on, screen brightness at 40%, a lot Web browsing, 40-50 minutes of full HD videos (but no gaming), the laptop usually lasted a working session.
What seemed strictly okay:
Build quality: Even though there is an upgraded metal lid in place, the 15X OLED doesn’t quite seem to have a sturdy enough build in place. With a wobbly lid and a trackpad that struggles to catch your gestures (regular Windows ones) Vivobook isn’t particularly known for its design and build quality to begin with, and sadly it seems to be the case here too. Though the keyboard is spacious and decent to type on, the keys aren’t of very high quality and, if you have used another ASUS laptop with a different keyboard, you can tell the material and finish could have been a little better for something priced above Rs. 65,000.
Verdict: The ASUS 15X OLED seems like a good enough laptop for most uses that’s outside gaming. The device has a good battery life, really nice display and connectivity options to go with it. It could have had better build quality and maybe keyboard but there’s nothing much wrong about it otherwise for a Windows 11 laptop with Ryzen 5 7530U.
