At $699.99, the Asus VivoBook S14 costs $200 less than the company’s more upscale ZenBook 14. It has an Intel Core i5 versus Core i7 processor and is half a pound heavier—at 3.09 pounds, it just misses our cut for an ultraportable—but otherwise it doesn’t sacrifice much. It has a handsome, ceramic-like white finish; a 512GB solid-state drive instead of the 256GB of many budget laptops; and up-to-date features like Wi-Fi 6 and a Thunderbolt port. It’s not an extraordinary value or a killer performer, but it’s a little trimmer and a little spiffier than your run-of-the-mill economy laptop.
Sleek and Well-Equipped
Our VivoBook S14 test unit is model S433EA-DH51-WH, the last two letters indicating it’s what Asus calls Dreamy White. The system is also available in Indie Black, Gaia Green, and Resolute Red, though the last two were hard to find for sale online in the US at this writing. The silver keyboard deck is decorated with a yellow stripe around the Enter key. If that’s not garish enough, middle schoolers can deface the lid with some anime graffiti stickers that are, oddly, included in the box.
We haven’t seen many other 14-inch clamshells at the VivoBook’s $699.99 price. Most, like the HP Envy 14, are more expensive, though two convertibles—Asus’ VivoBook Flip 14 and HP’s Pavilion x360 14 LTE—match it, and the Editors’ Choice-award-winning Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 is $100 less.
In the S14’s case, your seven C’s get you a quad-core, 2.4GHz (4.2GHz turbo) Core i5-1135G7 processor with Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, 8GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe SSD, and a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel non-touch screen with medium-thick bezels around it. The aluminum chassis measures 0.63 by 12.8 by 8.4 inches, giving the notebook about the same footprint as the HP Envy (0.71 by 12.3 by 8.8 inches) or the MSI Prestige 14 (0.63 by 12.6 by 8.6 inches).
As with other Asus laptops, what the company calls an ErgoLift hinge tilts the keyboard at a slight typing angle when you open the lid. A fingerprint reader in a corner of the touchpad frees you from typing passwords for Windows Hello logins.
Two USB 2.0 ports join a microSD slot on the S14’s right edge—one might suffice for an external mouse, but having two on a thin laptop seems dated. There’s one USB 3.2 Type-A port on the left side, along with a Thunderbolt 3/USB-C port, an HDMI video output, an audio jack, and the connector for the compact power plug.
Not Quite Bright
The S14’s economy status comes through most clearly with its 1080p display—it’s not bad by any means, but it’s no more than adequate. IPS technology gives it wide viewing angles and fine details, and the edges of letters are reasonably sharp, while white backgrounds are indeed white instead of grayish or dingy. Yet even with the backlight turned all the way up, the panel isn’t particularly bright, and colors are washed out, more muted than vivid. You can certainly live with it, but the screen cost the VivoBook half a star in our rating.
The backlit keyboard, by contrast, earns kudos for a smart layout, with real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys instead of making you pair the Fn key and cursor arrows (which are in the proper inverted T instead of an HP-style row). The Control and Delete keys are puny, but travel is decent and the typing feel is snappy. The buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly and clicks solidly with just the right amount of pressure. That funky yellow Enter key just eludes us, though, despite its attempt at some edgy styling.
The 720p webcam is nothing to write home about, but it captures relatively well-lit and colorful images with just a bit of noise. Bottom-mounted speakers produce loud but hollow sound. You can make out overlapping tracks, but bass response is minimal, and the overall effect is flat. DTS Audio Processing software offers music, movie, game, and custom presets with an equalizer and treble, bass, and vocal boost.
Pressing Fn+F cycles the cooling fan through whisper, balanced, and performance modes. (I used the last for our benchmarks, except for balanced for battery life.) The Windows 10 Home preload is mostly free of bloatware apart from a McAfee trial. MyAsus software lets you fine-tune battery modes, single- or multi-voice microphone conversations, internet connection prioritization, and normal, vivid, anti-blue-light, and video-enhanced screen settings.
Performance Testing: Enough for Getting Stuff Done
For our benchmark comparisons, I pitted the VivoBook S14 against two other clamshells—Asus’ own ZenBook 14, which as mentioned costs $200 more, and the 15.6-inch Acer Aspire 5, which matches the VivoBook’s price. The other two slots went to 14-inch convertibles, the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 and HP Pavilion x360 14 LTE. You can see the contenders’ basic specs in the table below.
Productivity and Media Tests
PCMark 10 is a holistic performance suite developed by the benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). Its primary test 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, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that rates the speed of the unit’s boot drive. (See more about how we test laptops.)
The HP was a whisker under the 4,000 points that indicate excellent productivity in PCMark 10, but the others raced past it with the VivoBook narrowly leading the way. Microsoft Office and Google Docs hold no terror for these capable portables. Neither did PCMark 8’s storage test, considering their speedy SSDs.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, 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 benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better.
The Aspire’s eight-core Ryzen 7 and IdeaPad’s six-core Ryzen 5 set the pace in this battle of mobile CPUs, but the VivoBook S14’s 11th Generation Core i5 was solidly next best while the Pavilion’s older Core i5 brought up the rear.
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. We time each operation and add up the total (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.
The VivoBook took the gold medal in this event. Its screen isn’t outstanding, but its performance and microSD slot make it a capable choice for editing digital photos.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows systems’ relative graphics muscle with two gaming simulations, 3DMark and Superposition. The first has two DirectX 11 subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, suitable for mainstream PCs with integrated graphics and higher-end gaming rigs respectively. The second uses the Unigine engine to render and pan through a detailed 3D scene at two resolution and image quality settings with results measured in frames per second (fps); 30fps is usually considered a fair target for smooth animation while avid gamers prefer 60fps or higher.
The VivoBook’s Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics were good enough to finish at the front of the pack, but it’s a relatively slow pack—none of these laptops is suitable for serious gaming as notebooks with discrete Nvidia or AMD GPUs are. You’ll want to stick with casual or browser-based games and media streaming rather than the latest 3D shoot-’em-ups.
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 into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of SteelTears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50% and volume at 100% until the system quits.
The ZenBook and IdeaPad showed more than 16 hours of stamina, but the VivoBook took the bronze with an honorable 13-and-a-half hours. It’ll easily get you through a full day of work or school, plus an evening of watching Netflix or catching up on emails.
Verdict: You Could Do a Whole Lot Worse
The VivoBook S14 isn’t a landmark laptop, but it’s a capable, likable system at a popular price. We could wish for a brighter, more colorful screen, but its comfortable keyboard and lively performance make it a first-class value—and you can’t deny that it’s easy to find the Enter key.
