The 130 x 80mm touchpad is plastic but does a good job of feeling like glass. The pad works perfectly but the click-action is just a little on the noisy side. There’s a fingerprint scanner in the top-right corner, which speeds up logging in, but there’s no Windows Hello IR facial recognition.
Speaking of which, the webcam is a rather basic 720p affair and doesn’t come with any of Microsoft’s fancy Studio Effects. However, it does have a manual privacy shutter and performs surprisingly well. Images proved to be colourful and crisp and things didn’t get too noisy when the light fell.
As for the 512GB Micron SSD, it proved capable of fairly mediocre read performance with sequential read speeds of 3,205MB/sec, while the average write speed was a tardy 1,259MB/sec. According to Asus, the RTX 2050 and RTX 3050 models use a PCIe3 rather than a PCIe4 drive, and so may be even slower.
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Asus Vivobook 16X review: Display and audio
- Bright, colour-accurate IPS screen
- Smooth 120Hz refresh rate
- Detailed and spacious speaker system
Asus is a brand increasingly associated with OLED displays and rather good ones at that, but that’s no reason to dismiss the 16in 1,920 x 1,200 IPS screen fitted to the cheaper Vivobook 16X models we get here in the UK.
To start with, it’s usefully bright – I measured it peaking at 350cd/m2 – and it’s able to reproduce 98.8% of the sRGB gamut. Colour accuracy was decent as well, with the Delta E variance (vs the sRGB profile) reaching a highly impressive 0.94 (the lower this score the better).
In addition, thanks to a combination of pretty high brightness and a low 0.2cd/m2 black level, the contrast ratio is a high 1,727:1, which makes for a punchy and impactful viewing experience. The display has a Vivid mode, which plays merry hell with the colour accuracy, but lends videos an attractive, slightly over-saturated look.
The 120Hz refresh rate ensures that on screen action is silky smooth, while the matte finish does a good job of keeping reflections in check. There’s no support for HDR content, however.
The 2 x 2W speakers have been tuned by the bods at audio specialists Dirac and come with a Dirac control panel. The results are rather impressive. There’s volume aplenty, the system generating 75.5dBA measured against a pink noise source and a reasonable amount of bass.
But what really grabs the attention is the amount of clarity and space. I’m listening to Tracy Chapman’s eponymous debut album as I write this, and the immediacy of her voice and guitar is really something.
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Asus Vivobook 16X review: Performance and battery life
- Good graphics and gaming performance
- Some thermal throttling under stress
- Excellent battery life
Shovelling the coal inside the Asus Vivobook 16X you’ll find a 12th-generation Intel chip – the 10-core Intel Core i7-12650H – and an Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU with a total graphics power or TGP rating of 55W. That’s a recipe for solid performance and a system that can take the vast majority of tasks in its stride.
In our standard 4K multimedia test, the 16X scored 267, comfortably above the 200 figure at which general performance is frankly moot: no everyday task is going to tax this laptop.
Generally unlooked for in a machine of this price and category is the MUX switch Asus has fitted, enabling you to get the very best out of the GPU. But even in standard Windows MSHybrid mode, this laptop’s RTX 4050 did well, running the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling test at an impressive 64fps.
It’s not too shabby when it comes to gaming either, running the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark at 53fps at the highest detail setting without Ray Tracing light effects, and Returnal at 63fps in the same circumstances. Of course, thanks to Nvidia’s DLSS 3.5 upscaling and frame generation, there’s plenty of headroom to boost those numbers.
If you want fancy ray-traced lighting effects, the Cyberpunk test ran at the same 53fps using the Ray Tracing: Low preset with DLSS set to Performance and Frame Generation on. That’s not too shabby for a laptop that is not being promoted as a gaming thoroughbred.
One minor caveat needs to be mentioned, however: in prolonged stress testing of both the CPU and GPU, the single fan struggled to keep things as cool as they could be. While GPU utilisation stayed nailed to 100%, CPU usage quickly dropped to between 50% and 60% as thermal throttling reared its ugly head. This isn’t a deal breaker, but it’s certainly something to be aware of.
What’s possibly most impressive about this machine, though, is its battery life. In our standard video run-down test, which involves looping an SD video with the screen at 170cd/m2 brightness, it lasted 12hrs 14mins, which is an excellent showing from the 70Wh battery. I’m inclined to describe it as almost Mac-like. Note, that the lesser RTX 2050 and RTX 3050 machines won’t do as well as they come with smaller, 50Wh batteries.
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source: https://www.expertreviews.com/uk/laptops/asus-vivobook-16x-k3605-review
