Asus Vivobook Pro 15 (2025) review: a solid midrange 15-inch performer

Right now, the one configuration of the Vivobook Pro 15 that’s available in the US is $1,500 for an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H chipset, 24GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, a GeForce RTX 4050 GPU, and a 2.8K OLED display.

That seems like a reasonable price for a laptop that can handle some moderately demanding creative tasks and act as a midrange gaming machine. It’s definitely a premium price, but many lower-powered 15-inch machines are just as expensive.

The keyboard includes a numeric keypad, which is less common today and which forces a slightly cramped layout. I’m not a fan on a 15-inch laptop that doesn’t have enough extra space to fit one in. On this one, it makes the keycaps too small, and I found myself having to check where my fingers were when typing this review. That’s unusual lately. The switches are fine, although slightly spongy. The gray color scheme for the special keys on the left and right come across as merely distracting.

The touchpad is mechanical, and it’s large enough. The button clicks are confident and responsive, but a little loud. Asus includes its DialPad, an embedded controller that matches up with software to provide specialized functionality for apps like Adobe’s Creative Suite. It’s a convenient feature that works well enough.

There’s no touch display, which I do prefer to see on Windows laptops. Most people won’t care, I’m guessing.

There’s a 5MP webcam, and it provides good enough image quality. There’s an infrared camera for Windows 11 Hello facial recognition, and that works well. The Intel Arrow Lake chipset doesn’t have as fast a Neural Processing Unit as (NPU) as its Lunar Lake lineup, coming in at 13 tera operations per second (TOPS) compared to the 40 TOPS required for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC AI initiative. Faster on-device AI processing will have to be provided by the RTX 4050 GPU, meaning it won’t provide the same kind of efficiency but might be faster overall than a Lunar Lake laptop with integrated graphics.

The Vivobook Pro 15 is built around the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H chipset for 2025, which is a member of the Arrow Lake generation and uses 16 cores (six Performance, eight Efficient, and two Low-Power Efficient) and 16 threads. It runs at up to 5.4GHz, and consumes a base of 45 watts of power. Asus built in the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 GPU, which is an entry-level discrete GPU that’s significantly faster than Intel’s Intel Arc 140T integrated graphics that are built into the chipset. The RTX 4050 can use up to 115 watts, while the Asus power system provides up to 125 watts total — meaning that the CPU must be powered down a bit to maximize graphical performance.

Asus has built in an impressive thermal system that uses its IceCool Pro technology with five heat pipes, dual 12V fans with 103 Ice Blades each, and expelling hot air through three dedicated vents. In my testing, the fans did spin up and were loud, but not as loud as many gaming machines I’ve tested. Overall, I think Asus did a good job of squeezing out the best performance from both the Core Ultra 9 and the RTX 4050.

There’s a 75 watt-hour battery but also some fast components and a high-res OLED display. Those aren’t the best combination for long battery life with a 15-inch laptop.

Unsurprisingly, battery life was pretty poor. I saw just 7.5 hours of video looping and five hours of web browsing. That falls well short of some other new Windows laptops running Intel’s Lunar Lake and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chipsets, which can last twice as long or longer. It’s also considerably less than the MacBook Air 15 and MacBook Pro 16, which can get three times the battery life. But, it’s in line with other laptops with discrete GPUs aimed at these kinds of tasks, none of which get great battery life.

This is a laptop you’ll want to use when plugged in. If you decide to take it on the road, make sure you’re not doing anything demanding or that you have your (rather large and heavy) power supply in your backpack.

The Vivobook Pro 15 is built around a spectacular 15.0-inch 16:10 2.8K (2880 x 1800) OLED display running at 120Hz. It looks great out of the box, with bright, dynamic colors and OLED’s usual inky blacks.

According to my colorimeter, this is as high-quality an OLED display as you’ll find. It was bright at 410 nits, well above our 300-nit baseline, and it demonstrated perfect blacks with a contrast ratio of 28,640:1. Its colors were extremely wide at 100% of sRGB, 97% of AdobeRGB, and 100% of DCI-P3, with excellent accuracy at a DeltaE of 0.83 (less than 1.0 is indistinguishable to the human eye).

Simply put, you’ll love this display no matter what you’re doing. If you’re a creator, the display matches up well with the performance. Audio doesn’t quite match up, though with downward-firing stereo speakers that are just okay for YouTube videos and systems sounds. For anything, use a good pair of headphones.

The Vivobook Pro 15 2025 doesn’t break any speed records for a 15-inch laptop, but that’s okay. To get much faster, you’ll have to spend a lot more money — and you won’t necessarily get as spectacular an OLED display.

It’s fast enough for the most demanding productivity users, can keep up with moderate creativity workflows, and play modern titles at 1200p with decent graphics. For $1,500, that’s a pretty good deal. My biggest gripe is the plastic construction, but that’s no reason to overlook the Vivobook Pro 15.