Here comes graphics tests: the Arc Graphics of the Core Ultra chip has plenty of performance on tap as far as onboard GPUs go, as evidenced by our benchmark results above. Team Red’s Ryzen 7 7840U in the Acer Swift Edge 16 is only half of its performance – this should give you a good idea of its performance level. Light gaming? Certainly not an issue for the Arc.
Moving on to Novabench, we can see the only loss for the Vivobook S 14 OLED in this 6-laptop matchup, albeit it’s a small one. The Acer Swift Edge 16 edged it out in overall scores thanks to higher memory and GPU scores (a contrast of what the earlier tests represent), though the Vivobook has the highest CPU score of them all.
PCMark tests seems to indicate an interesting quirk of the Intel processors in general. Here, we can see both AMD-powered machines get a substantial lead on Productivity scores, but the Vivobook has maintained its lead despite trailing behind in this category.
Qualcomm, you’ve got competition. We’ve had laptops that last well into 10 hours before, but for the most part it’s usually an exception, not a rule. However, Intel’s Core Ultra processors have confirmed that this is the new status quo: the Vivobook S 14 OLED has clocked a staggering 16 hours 33 minutes on a single charge, the longest we’ve ever recorded from a Windows laptop.
This makes it almost, if not straight up competitive to some of the Apple Silicon MacBooks – you might even get past the 1,000-minute mark (that’s 16h 40m if you’re wondering) given that we’ve tested this on Standard mode with 50% brightness, which is plenty bright for indoor environments.
The Good
I think the biggest selling point of the Vivobook S 14 OLED is easily going to be its power efficiency and the battery life – you simply couldn’t find anything that lasts this long in the previous generation without getting significant compromises in hardware. If you need the performance, the Core Ultra chip is ready to answer too, capable of pulling 45W TDP if you’re willing to turn it up to 11.
The good stuffs don’t stop here: despite pulling upwards of 55W for several seconds, the cooling system is capable of containing the heat, with the chip hovering at 90°C once it stabilizes at the 45W sustained power. ASUS even adds an additional power mode called “Full Speed” that unlocks all 55W of CPU power – I guess they took the idea from the Zenbook Pro 14 OLED and applied it to this laptop. Be advised though, the fans will be very loud.
Another plus in the thermal management is on the subject of keeping humans cool – or rather, not getting burned. Even on the most extreme scenarios, the palm rest is largely isolated from the heat generated from the top half of the laptop, and I didn’t feel the heat getting to my fingers at any point despite the laptop generating significant amounts of it.
All of us at Pokde.NET have a good bit of gamer in ourselves, so to find RGB in a laptop that isn’t designed for gaming is a positive surprise. Of course, Microsoft enabling the new Dynamic Lighting feature in Windows 11 certainly helps laptop OEMs to implement this easier (though ASUS is certainly very experienced when it comes to adding RGB everywhere), and there’s always the white backlighting if you just need the good ol’ classic, right?
Finally, I’d like to commend the engineers from ASUS for the speakers and touchpad – for the price you’re paying for this laptop, the quality is a lot better than you’d imagine. I wouldn’t say they’re on the MacBook levels of nice, but these laptops can easily cost double of what this Vivobook will cost. They certainly don’t have two times the quality level of speakers and touchpads, do they?
The Bad
To find the shortcomings of this laptop, I really had to look for it – there just isn’t much to complain about on this Vivobook, but there’s two minor ones I’d like to point out. The first one relates to the webcam – not the webcam itself, but rather, the physical webcam shutter. The shutter is difficult to push due to lots of friction – you most likely will require more than one finger to move it.
Additionally, and this is specific to this color of the laptop: given its light-colored keycaps, the default blue-purple hue of lighting may end up difficult to read unless you turn the keyboard backlighting off. Reddish hues work better, but having dark-colored keycaps would make the RGB really shine.
Verdict
At RM4,999
Click here to purchase the ASUS Vivobook S 14 OLED (S5406) via Shopee
Thanks to ASUS Malaysia for providing us with the Vivobook S 14 OLED (S5406) laptop for this review.
