Asus Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024) Review

Verdict

The Asus Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024) is a great Windows ultrabook that benefits from a seriously brilliant port selection, comfortable keyboard, solid OLED panel and beefy performance. It’s only the little things that let it down, such as a dimmer peak brightness and slower charging than the competition.

Introduction

The Asus Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024) is the brand’s latest AI-powered laptop designed to fit into the mid-range ultrabook market, with an attractive price tag and solid all-round specs.

At £1299.99/$1299, its asking price isn’t unreasonable for a Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptop with a larger 3K OLED screen, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. This also comes with a seriously excellent port selection, a comfortable keyboard and competent battery life.

The thing is, the Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024) has some serious competition already, with the likes of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (2024) and Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) offering starkly similar spec sheets for around the same price. It means that Asus’ latest contender has to do a fair bit to set itself apart, and I’ve been testing it for the last couple of weeks to see how well it does. Let’s take a look.

Design and Keyboard

• Generic, but sturdy design
• Brilliant port selection
• Tactile keyboard and massive trackpad

As with previous Vivobook releases, the Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024) looks more akin to a functional Windows laptop as opposed to being one that goes all in on a slender frame for lots of style points. It’s a pleasant halfway house for those wanting a handy blend of sleek looks and useful functionality.

A 1.42kg weight is on the heavier side against the slightly smaller-screened Snapdragon X Elite ultrabooks I’ve tested, although the Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024) is wonderfully portable. In addition, with a thickness of 14.7mm, it isn’t exactly horribly unwieldy, either.

Being slightly thicker has a serious benefit for the Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024), though. It means there’s a seriously excellent port selection that beats a lot of the competition.

On the left side, there’s a full-size HDMI 2.1 port, as well as a pair of USB 4.0 Gen 3 Type-C ports with support for both display and power delivery, as well as a Micro SD card reader and a 3.5mm combo audio jack. The right side houses a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports. That’s some serious connectivity.

The metal chassis here feels solid too, with no flex or unwanted creaking. With this in mind though, the pale silver colourway feels a tad generic against other ultrabooks I’ve used. For instance, Lenovo’s choice offers a dark blue aluminium chassis, while the higher-end Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) utilises the innovative ceraluminium – a unique blend of ceramic and aluminium.

As with other Vivobooks too, the keyboard on this new model is a slightly deeper-dish option, lending itself to a comfortable and reasonably tactile typing experience. The layout here is sensible, offering a smaller number pad and dedicated arrow keys, with nav keys on the function row.

It is a backlit keyboard, with single zone RGB lighting, which is quite different for a productivity laptop. The lighting here is pleasant, although isn’t necessarily the brightest. On the other hand, the Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024)’s trackpad is massive for a laptop of its size and feels quite responsive.

Display and Sound

• 3K resolution and 120Hz refresh rate offer great detail with a responsive panel
• Slightly dimmer brightness than the competition
• Excellent colour accuracy, black level and contrast

The Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024), as its name suggests, packs in an OLED panel for its display. It’s a 15.6-inch 3K (2880×1620) 120Hz option that offers a large amount of screen real estate with some excellent detail and responsive output thanks to that higher refresh rate.

It is a 16:9 aspect ratio though, which can lead to it feeling a bit dated against the more modern 16:10 aspect ratio laptops I’ve tested in recent years alongside the slightly chunkier top and bottom bezels.

Admittedly, the panel’s out-of-the-box brightness of just 222.8 nits made it seem especially dim, although that was when the screen was at 20% brightness. Its peak SDR result of 352.7 nits offers much better vibrancy and nearly meets Asus’ quoted figure of 400 nits. This is behind the likes of the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) and Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9, for instance, though.

Being an OLED also means we’re getting deep blacks and excellent contrast, with measured results of 0.03 and 8910:1 respectively. The 6600K colour temperature is also bang-on. While it may not get as bright as some of the competition, it remains a solid display.

The Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024)’s colour accuracy is top-notch, with fantastic results measured with my trusty colorimeter. The panel here measured 100% coverage of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamut, as well as 96% Adobe RGB. This means the screen displays colours for both mainstream and specialist colour sensitive workloads virtually perfectly, which is excellent.

The speakers here are pretty good overall for laptop speakers, with decent volume and body. They are downwards-firing though, so you will be best putting this laptop on a harder surface to prevent audio getting muffled. There is also Dolby Atmos smarts here and Harman Kardon tuning.

Performance

• Snapdragon X Elite offers brisk performance
• Lacks some graphical oomph, though
• Solid RAM and SSD combination, with decent speeds

The Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024) springs no real surprises for an AI-enabled ultrabook in 2024, packing in a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC with 12 cores and threads.

It’s a powerful processor for both single and multi-threaded workloads, as shown in our Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 results, with this particular Asus option sitting right in the mix with the other Elite-powered laptops I’ve tested recently.

Under load, there’s also no real noise from this Vivobook, which is a testament to the Snapdragon X Elite’s brilliant efficiency. It also doesn’t get particularly warm when running through those benchmarks, or when running through productivity workloads, for instance.

As with other Snapdragon X Elite laptops though, the Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024) falls down with its graphical horsepower. The Adreno GPU within this chip isn’t potent enough to compete with even more affordable laptops with discrete GPUs, including Asus’ own Vivobook Pro 15.

The 16GB of RAM here is enough for multi-tasking and more intensive workloads, while the 1TB SSD offers a larger capacity than other models for storing important files, apps and media. It’s also reasonably quick too, with recorded reads of 5095.49MB/s and writes of 3608.45MB/s.

Software

• Reasonably clean Windows 11 install
• Some pre-installed Asus apps
• Also comes with Copilot AI features

The Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024) runs Arm-based Windows 11, and in keeping with other Asus laptops I’ve tested, comes with a rather clean install, too. There isn’t much in the way of bloatware such as unneeded anti-virus trials, although there are some simple but effective Asus software elements pre-installed.

MyAsus comes as part of the Windows taskbar when you first boot up the Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024), though. This s a handy app where you can check on your system’s vitals and change settings including the type of workload that the system’s built-in network card prioritises and even the type of sound mode the speakers run with, be it for games or music for instance.

There is also GlideX, which is where you can manage tasks such as casting or mirroring the Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024)’s screen to other devices wirelessly, or transfer files across the same network. You can also enable remote access to a mobile device, too. The Storycube app is designed as another means of organising photos and videos, using AI to recognise faces and file your photos for you, which is handy.

The Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024) also benefits from Microsoft’s AI functionality. The main thing here is the addition of its Copilot key, which acts as a wake button for Microsoft’s AI assistant. It brings up a window where you can ask the AI all manner of things, such as to write some text, or you can ask it a range of information.

You also get the benefit of generative AI in Windows system apps such as Photos, where you can add filters or an interesting background. The Photos app on a Copilot+ PC also has an Image Creator function, where you can give the system a prompt and it’ll generate an image for you with reasonable accuracy. Microsoft Paint also has similar smarts, where AI can help you add detail to images using the CoCreator tab where it can turn your image into everything from pixel art to an oil painting.

The laptop’s webcam also benefits from Windows Studio webcam effects to keep you in frame, as well as to offer convenient features such as background blur, which works a treat for conference calls. There are also useful extras including a way of adding live captions to videos directly within Windows, which is handy.

Microsoft’s Recall feature is still missing however. This would have taken screenshots every few seconds of use so you could look back and remember things you’ve looked at, even if you didn’t manually bookmark them in a browser or take a manual screenshot using the Snipping Tool. It will be available, although only for Windows Insiders.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 14 hours 49 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for two working days

As with the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9 (2024), this new Vivobook also comes with quite a large battery with a 70Wh capacity. This, combined with the efficiency of the Snapdragon X Elite SoC inside, means the Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024) offers some serious endurance.

In a video loop test with the brightness set to the customary 150 nits and the keyboard’s RGB lighting set to its default mid-level brightness, the Vivobook S 15 OLED (2024) managed 14 hours and 49 minutes before conking out. That’s an excellent result all things considered, and is some of the best battery life we’ve seen in the 2024 model ultrabooks we’ve reviewed.

In spite of coming with a beefy 90W charger though, the battery was quite slow to charge, at least initially. Going from zero to 50 percent took 58 minutes, while going from zero to 100 percent took one hour and 45 minutes. Once past the halfway mark, it picked up the pace, although other laptops will charge quicker if you’re caught short.

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