Between a range of component options, supply shortages, and pricing wars, the budget laptop game is fierce in 2021. For weary shoppers seeking a super-affordable machine, the Asus VivoBook 15 ($399.99 in model F512JA-AS34 we tested) is a low-frills but reasonably priced option. It’s slightly quicker than most of its like-priced competitors and features an above-average selection of ports and decent battery life. The biggest concessions are a display with subpar brightness balancing and sharpness, and a tight (but not unusual in this price range) 128GB SSD for storage. It may not be too exciting, but for the money, it’s a fully functional 15-inch Windows laptop that can get through easier tasks and last through the day. Its larger sibling, the Asus VivoBook 17 M712, is one of our top budget picks.
15 Inches of Windows on a Budget
Simplicity reigns with this design, in just about every facet. It’s a standard 15-inch system with a plain design, certainly not a head-turner but perfect for blending in. The VivoBook 15’s color isn’t too adventurous either, sporting a grey paint job, but it’s not boring thanks to a speckled metallic look.
In terms of portability, the system measures 0.78 by 14.1 by 9.1 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.75 pounds. That’s not super lightweight, but still a far cry from being heavy, and should be able to go in your backpack or bag without much notice. The chassis is made of plastic and mostly feels solid. The texture doesn’t feel too cheap, and there’s some flex if you push around the keyboard or the lid, but nothing that should be noticeable or concerning in normal use.
The keyboard and touchpad just about meet that same quality mark, serviceable but not remarkable. The keyboard is the better of the two, with a good amount of travel on the keys without feeling too mushy (they’re a little squishy) and clean white backlighting. The touchpad is just okay, perhaps a touch small, but it does also include a fingerprint reader in the top right corner.
The One Big Ding: A Subpar Screen
The display is where the quality is a bit of a letdown. The resolution is full HD (1,920 by 1,080 pixels), which is good, but the screen is a bit washed out, particularly at full brightness. The whites and light colors are too bright, while dark colors are not dark enough, and there’s a bit of light bleed, too. It never looks quite right, but lowering the brightness helps matters a little. The panel doesn’t seem particularly sharp, either; perhaps it’s a result of the brightness, but the text lacks a bit of clarity. It’s hard to see any of this in the photo below (and at least the bezels are slim!) but it’s evident in use.
The viewing angles, additionally, are not great—the picture darkens and discolors quickly as you move to the side. Between the whitish sheen and poor viewing angles, the picture quality looks like it does when a built-in laptop privacy filter is active on a business laptop, if you’ve ever used that kind of feature. If not, just know that it’s still usable, but definitely not a good display, probably the biggest concession in the whole build.
Moving on from that relative low point, we come to the ports. The left edge is home to just two ports: twin USB 2.0 connections. The right side holds most of the ports, including one USB 3.0 Type-A port, a USB-C port, an HDMI output, a microSD card slot, and a headphone jack. For a budget laptop, that’s a pretty full complement (and then some, even), so I have no complaints here.
One important thing to note: The laptop ships in Windows S mode, a setting for less-powerful laptops that’s more friendly for running Windows Store apps. If you want to install other applications (as you would on any full Windows PC, and likely desire to do on this system), you’ll have to grab the free upgrade to normal Windows 10 from the Windows Store.
Components and Performance Testing
Nobody is expecting a powerhouse in this price tier, but we still want to see how it can perform. First, let’s look at the parts in this model. There’s an Intel Core i3-1005G1 processor with Intel UHD Graphics, 8GB of memory, and a 128GB SSD. This processor is definitely a budget-grade chip, with just two cores and four threads.
Again, not a workhorse, but it doesn’t need to be. These are modest parts fit for the price, though you may be up against the storage capacity depending on use case. Word documents and similarly simple files won’t fill it up, but too many large local videos, photos, and some (simple) games will add up quickly.
To determine if it’s potent enough for everyday tasks and some light work, we put the VivoBook through our usual set of benchmark tests. Below are the names and specs of the competition we’ll be measuring its results against.
These are all inexpensive machines, as well, falling right in the same price range (with some variation). The Asus Laptop L410 is the least expensive ($264.99) with a low-power Intel Celeron CPU and just 4GB of memory and 64GB of storage. The MSI Modern 14 is priced at $369, and is fairly similar to the VivoBook 15 in terms of components, but of course has a smaller 14-inch screen. The Dell Inspiron 15 3000 (3505) is another 15-inch laptop, also priced at $369 as tested, that serves as a good foil to the VivoBook 15. Finally, the Asus Vivobook 17 M712 is a bit more expensive ($519), and one of our top picks for any budget laptop, albeit at a larger size.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL. The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both tests yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
In case your expectations need to be set even after seeing these specs and price tags, let the scores here tell you: These are not the fastest machines around. We consider above 4,000 points on PCMark 10 a solid score, and the whole field is short of that mark. Some are closer than others, though (and the test kept crashing on the MSI Modern 14), and the VivoBook 15 is one of the better performers.
That means it’s competent on the types of tasks described above, but some delays or slowdown won’t be out of the ordinary. Opening up files isn’t instant but plenty usable, though having a lot of browser tabs and applications open will result in some wait times. That’s fair enough to put up with considering the price, ultimately. This is the most relevant test for this category of laptops (you won’t be doing much media editing or gaming), so leading here is a plus.
On the storage side, this is again one of the fastest systems, though there is far less spread. The Asus Laptop L410 couldn’t finish this test, an exception with pokier eMMC flash storage instead of an SSD. The VivoBook boots up pretty quickly, and most Windows navigation is quick enough.
Next come the media tests, which I’ll analyze all at once. First is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image, timing each operation and adding up the total. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here.
Again not objectively the best batch of results, but also again the VivoBook 15 is the quickest machine in the batch across the three tests. (Note that the Dell and the Asus Laptop L410 lacked the RAM required to run the Photoshop test, and are absent from the results.)
In this very low-cost field, the VivoBook has the least delay and most juice, but the context is pretty important. Using Handbrake as an example, most standard laptops that cost around $800 to $1,000 or so can finish the test in under 10 minutes, with the fastest modern machines doing it in just six or seven minutes. That sheds a different light on the VivoBook 15’s 25-minute time (never mind the Asus Laptop L410’s painful result), demonstrating some severe wait times.
Long story short, these are not machines that you want to use for editing media within the confines of any professional or even hobbyist needs. Save it for some easy photo touch-ups and very short video clips when necessary.
Graphics Tests
We run two tests apiece in two gaming simulations. The first, 3DMark, measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. 3DMark’s Sky Diver and Fire Strike subtests are both DirectX 11 benchmarks, but the former is more suited to midrange PCs with integrated graphics while the latter is more demanding and made for high-end and gaming PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
Another graphics test, Unigine’s Superposition, similarly renders and pans through a complex 3D scene but measures results in frames per second (fps), with 30fps generally desirable for smooth animation while serious gamers prefer 60fps or more. We run the test at 720p and 1080p resolution with low and high visual quality settings respectively.
Similarly to the media tests, these laptops are not meant for 3D tasks or gaming, boasting only the graphics chip integrated into the processor. I recently performed some extensive game testing of integrated graphics, and learned that all hope for gaming on such systems is not lost. However, that doesn’t quite apply to this group of budget-friendly laptops: Integrated graphics can get by when paired with a good processor and plenty of RAM, but these laptops are not providing much of that support, leaving the weak chips to do a lot of lifting on their own. Other than the simplest games, don’t expect to play much on these systems.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the same Tears of Steel short we use in our Handbrake test—with screen brightness set at 50% and volume at 100% until the system quits.
The battery life results are more positive than the other benchmark tests on the whole, with some solid run times here. The VivoBook 15 can roughly last through a work day off the charger (this will vary somewhat depending on use case), so it’s hard to complain much about that. You can step away from the outlet or travel with this system without keeping a constant eye on the remaining juice, which is about all you can ask.
A Low-Frills, But Reasonable, Budget Choice
The Asus VivoBook 15 won’t turn any heads with its performance or design, but all things considered, it’s a decent offering for the cost. If it weren’t for the poor screen, it might well be the standout we tested in this price range, since it is a touch faster than its peers. The storage capacity is also pretty restrictive, but that’s not unique to this machine at this price.
On the positive end, its keyboard is pretty good, the battery lasts long enough to be useful, and it has an above-average port selection. If you need the essentials and won’t be put off by a couple of concessions, this VivoBook 15 model can do the job as an affordable daily driver for simple home and office tasks.
