This is the first AMD Ryzen laptop that I’ve ever had with an OLED screen. It’s
the Vivobook 16X from ASUS, and I’ve got the maxed out spec version here with 8 core AMD
Ryzen 9 5900HX processor, Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti graphics, 32 gigs of memory and a 16” OLED screen.
Mine has a black anodized aluminum finish, but there’s also a white model,
and there weren’t any sharp edges or corners.
The build quality feels decent, only minor keyboard flex even when pushing hard and not
too much screen flex, but more importantly the screen doesn’t wobble when typing.
The laptop alone weighs about 1.9kg or 4.3lb,
then under 2.4kg or about 5.3lb with the 120 watt power brick and cables included.
The size isn’t too different to a 15” laptop, so still quite portable and on the thinner side.
The 16” OLED screen is excellent for creators. The Color gamut is very
high and there’s basically unlimited contrast as OLED turns off pixels,
so blacks look great, and this also means backlight bleed isn’t a thing here.
The screen also uses a 16:10 aspect ratio, so more pixels vertically compared to standard 16:9,
and the resolution is higher than regular 4K.
I didn’t like the reflections that show up with the glossy screen,
but there’s no denying that glossy does look nicer.
It gets fairly bright at around 400 nits at maximum brightness, so not the 500 or so
I’ve seen from other OLED panels, let alone the 550 nits claimed on the ASUS website.
ASUS have included quite a few options to help prevent OLED burn in through the MyASUS software,
the control panel for the laptop.
By default there’s a special screen saver that turns on after 30 minutes.
There’s a pixel shift option so pixels move,
windows can be set to be transparent, and there’s a shortcut to hide the taskbar.
There’s a 720p camera above the screen in the middle. There’s no IR for Windows
Hello face unlock, but it’s got a physically sliding privacy shutter.
This is what the camera and microphone look and sound like,
and this is what it sounds like while typing on the keyboard.
The chiclet keyboard has mostly black letter keys,
grey keys towards the left and right and the escape key is highlighted orange.
The keys have white backlighting with 3 levels of brightness using the F7 shortcut key, and
all keys and secondary functions get lit up, with the exception of the power button,
and that’s because it doubles as a fingerprint scanner which I found to work fast and accurately.
The keys have 1.35mm of key travel, and I didn’t really like typing on it because my right palm
kept clicking the touchpad. Normally the touchpad is centered with regards to the letter keys,
but instead it’s centered with regards to the entire device despite the numpad, though the
palm rejection was good as it didn’t trigger clicks, it just didn’t feel good while typing.
I don’t use the numpad personally, but my partner does and didn’t like the positioning of the
bottom row compared to a regular keyboard as she often mispressed enter when going for full stop.
Along with the small arrow keys you’re kind of left wondering if this actually is a
16” laptop - you think there’d be space.
The precision touchpad worked fine,
but what’s unique about it is it’s got ASUS’s new DialPad functionality built in.
Basically the way this works is you slide down from the top right corner to activate it,
and this lights it up to indicate it’s on,
and you can still use the touchpad regularly when it’s turned on.
You can check the applications configured to work with it in the ProArt Creator Hub software,
my Adobe apps were enabled and ready to go by default.
Pressing the middle of the dial shows available options on screen.
Out of the box there are a few different options specific to each individual application,
for example in Premiere I can scrub back and forth in the timeline or zoom
on the timeline. I did actually find the timeline scrub useful because I can just
move my thumb in a circle without taking the rest of my hand off the keyboard.
ASUS actually have a great video that does a far better job showing off what the DialPad can do,
I’ve left a link to that in the video description. Basically you can create
custom functions and enable a few more things for different software suites.
ASUS also sent their MD100 wireless mouse, though I don’t think that’s included with the laptop.
It worked fine and while I didn’t like the thinness as my hand can’t rest on it,
the smaller size makes it more portable and perfect for slipping into a bag with the
laptop. The cover comes right off revealing a replaceable battery, an optional USB stick if
you don’t want to configure Bluetooth, and there’s an optional strap for carrying it with one finger.
Back to the laptop. On the left from the back there are two USB Type-A ports,
which are unfortunately the older and slower 2.0 kind, along with some status LEDs.
The right side has a 3.5mm audio combo jack, a MicroSD card slot,
USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-C port, HDMI 1.4 output and a USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A port.
There’s nothing on the back, and this is because air exhausts below the screen, while the front
has an indentation in the middle to help with opening the lid, which is easy to do one handed.
Unfortunately the Type-C port cannot be used to charge the laptop,
and it also doesn’t have DisplayPort support. The product page on the ASUS website is kind
of confusing as it lists two Type-C ports, but the laptop only has one, so maybe some other
configuration like the Intel one has the higher speed Type-C and DisplayPort, I’m not sure.
All I can say is I did try to connect a monitor to the Type-C port and nothing happened.
It’s also worth mentioning that the HDMI port connects to the Radeon integrated
graphics rather than the discrete graphics, so there’s no way of bypassing the iGPU.
Getting inside requires removing 11 TR5 screws, and 4 down the front are shorter
than the rest. It was easy to pry open using the tools linked in the video description,
and we can see that there’s quite a bit of ventilation on the bottom panel for air flow.
Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, the only M.2 storage slot above on
the left and the Wi-Fi 6 card on the right. These are the only upgradeable components.
The Wi-Fi performance was about as expected for a MediaTek card,
right in line with a number of other ASUS results that use the same Wi-Fi.
Unfortunately memory is soldered to the board and cannot be upgraded. ASUS offers 8,
16 and 32 gig configurations, so you’ll have to buy with that in mind as you can’t change later.
The two speakers are found on the front bottom edge towards the left and right sides. They sound
pretty good, above average which tends to be the case from ASUS laptops. There’s some bass and they
sound clear and get fairly loud, though there’s some wrist rest vibration at higher volume.
The Vivobook is powered by a 6-Cell 96Wh battery,
and combined with the AMD processor it’s one of the best results I’ve recorded,
lasting for more than 10 and a half hours in the YouTube playback test. The result with a
game running was the best I’ve ever recorded from any laptop, lasting for nearly 3 hours,
and there was still 5% charge remaining by the time FPS dipped to unplayable levels.
The MyASUS software also lets you charge the battery up to 60%, 80% or 100%, so you don’t
have to leave it fully charged if you’re always plugged in, which helps promote battery longevity.
Let’s check out thermals next.
We’ve got a couple of heat pipes shared between the CPU and GPU with two fans for cooling,
it doesn’t look like much but the 3050 Ti maxes out at 50 watts in this thinner design.
The MyASUS software let’s us change between three different performance profiles,
which from lowest to highest are whisper mode, standard mode and performance mode.
You can also control this through the ProArt Creator Hub software,
but that also gives you the extra option of full speed mode, which sets the fans to maximum.
The internals were cool when just sitting there idle. The other results are from
combined CPU and GPU stress tests to represent a worst case scenario.
The CPU in the blue bars wasn’t getting too hot, 85 degrees Celsius in a long term
stress test in performance mode, while the cooling pad I tested with, which is linked
below the video in the description, was able to lower the temperatures a little.
These are the clock speeds for the same tests just shown. The GPU wasn’t doing too well in
whisper mode, which I can forgive given it’s designed to be a quieter mode with less fan noise,
as you’ll hear soon. The difference with and without the cooling pad was small, as thermal
throttling wasn’t a limitation, however we’re clearly not seeing the regular 4GHz or so over
all 8 cores on the 5900HX that we usually would in a thicker more powerful gaming laptop chassis.
This is because the processor is limited to a 35 watt TDP when the GPU
is also active. I mean we do have a thinner laptop,
so that’s expected. The RTX 3050 Ti has a 35 to 80 watt power range as specified by Nvidia,
so the 50 watts ASUS have allowed the Vivobook to run at is towards the lower end of that spectrum.
Now the CPU can absolutely use more power when the GPU isn’t also active,
54 watts according to ASUS, which is why it’s able to score above 12000 points in the
Cinebench multicore test, putting it in line with a number of other 8 core Intel and AMD
options, granted it is lower compared to other 5900HX results I’ve got data for,
but to be fair those are also generally in thicker gaming laptop designs, razer blade 14 aside.
It’s a different story on battery power though. Generally speaking, Ryzen processors are towards
the top of the graph here as they seem to be more power efficient based on this testing,
however the 5900HX in the Vivobook is the lowest current gen Ryzen result I’ve got data for,
particularly for the single core result.
This might partially be why the battery run time was so high,
ASUS appear to be assigning lower power limits when running on battery power,
so lower performance on battery at the expense of more run time on battery, it’s a tradeoff.
The keyboard was around the normal 30 degrees Celsius I typically see with most laptops at idle,
so cool. It’s only a little warmer in the middle of the keyboard with the stress tests,
the back where air exhausts was hotter but you’re not touching there. In the higher standard mode
it gets a few degrees warmer, the wrist rest area was still cool and the keyboard was only a little
warm feeling. The highest performance mode still only felt warm, not hot or uncomfortable at all,
but the fans also increase to compensate for higher power limits, let’s have a listen.
The fans were barely audible in the lowest whisper mode when idling, and still relatively
quiet with the stress tests going. Standard mode was louder, but still not bad. Performance mode
was louder still, but honestly still lower than most gaming laptops I regularly test, and this is
an absolute worst case when both CPU and GPU have been maxed out for an extended period.
Alright given this thing is designed for content creation,
let’s see how well it actually performs in some content creator workloads.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark, and the Vivobook is
highlighted in red. I mean it’s ahead of the Aero 15 with a higher tier GPU just below it,
I think this test relies more on CPU power than GPU so that may be why.
Adobe Photoshop typically depends more on processor performance,
and the Vivobook was scoring much better now, which isn’t too surprising if you
recall the Cinebench results, the processor can definitely perform well. Interestingly
it’s ahead of the Intel machine just below it with the same GPU but higher power limit.
DaVinci Resolve is usually tested with version 16, but the benchmark kept crashing here,
not sure if it’s due to Windows 11 or what, but the newer Resolve 17 completed fine,
it’s just that I’ve got far less data to compare to as we’re still collecting it.
I’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads.
Now obviously this thing isn’t designed with gaming in mind, but with the RTX 3050 Ti
graphics it should still be capable, so let’s see what it can do! This is the first laptop
that shipped to me with Windows 11 out of the box, and I confirmed that core isolation was
off by default. All testing was also done with a 1080p resolution both because this is just the
resolution I’ve got data for for the purposes of comparing and also because if I ran games at
the native resolution, which is higher than 4K, the 3050 Ti just isn’t going to do that well.
Cyberpunk 2077 was tested the same on all laptops, and I’ve got the Vivobook highlighted in red.
Despite being a 3050 Ti, it’s behind the 3050 non Ti in the XMG Core 17 just ahead of it,
simply because of the power limit difference. Anyway it’s at least beating GTX 1650 machines,
so at lower settings it’d probably do well enough.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the game’s benchmark, but this time the other 3050
machines I’ve got data for are further ahead. Again it’s still ahead of the 1650 machines,
and with lower settings pushing up to 60 FPS might even be possible.
Control is quite heavy on the GPU, and the other 3050 Ti in the Core 17 is reaching 39%
higher average frame rate, so it just goes to show that there’s more to determining
laptop performance than simply reading the spec sheet, because on paper both have the same GPU.
Despite not being a gaming laptop and having a 60Hz screen, the input lag was
a middle of the pack result, as generally OLED panels have great response times,
so that’s probably helping out. Unfortunately I can’t test that,
as the panel also uses PWM to adjust brightness and that messes with my tools. There’s also
no MUX switch or anything like that here, again it’s a creator laptop, so no problem.
The 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD has decent read and write speeds, at least for PCIe gen 3. If you’re after
faster storage though you’ll need to look at an Intel model, as 11th gen has faster gen 4. The
MicroSD card slot isn’t very fast, personally I still use larger SD cards with my cameras,
and given the larger 16” size of the machine that may have been nicer.
There’s not a whole lot of customization available through the BIOS,
just your usual basic settings like boot order and secure boot.
Linux support was tested by booting an Ubuntu 21 live CD. By default the keyboard, touchpad,
speakers and camera all worked. The Wi-Fi didn’t as MediaTek seems to need additional
drivers with this distribution, and the touchpad DialPad didn’t turn on at all,
but the key shortcuts for keyboard and screen brightness and volume adjust worked fine.
Normally I would discuss pricing at this point, but I haven’t been able to find
the Vivobook 16X for sale anywhere. I guess because it is still a relatively new model,
so keep an eye out on those links in the description which I’ll keep
updated. Without knowing this key piece of information it’s kind of difficult to say
where this fits in and if it’s a good deal, so putting price aside for the moment we can
still discuss the positives and the negatives to help you decide if it’s worth considering.
Generally speaking, from my own testing I have noticed that Intel processors tend to
do better compared to AMD Ryzen in content creator workloads, at least the ones that I
test including Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve. That’s not to say that
Ryzen can’t handle these workloads, it’s just that generally Intel 11th gen performs a little better.
In addition to that, Intel does also offer faster PCIe gen 4 storage,
something that might actually be more important for creators, and of course Thunderbolt 4,
but I suppose that one will depend on what devices you want to attach to your machine.
Now there is actually also an 11th gen version of this laptop,
but unfortunately it only uses the quad core Intel H35 parts. At first I thought it seemed
a little weird that the Intel model was quad core while the AMD one can go up to 8 cores,
but then I also remembered that the Ryzen 9 5900HX is fairly power efficient, so I’m guessing that’s
why they’ve been able to use an 8 core AMD processor and not an 8 core Intel processor.
Because based on my own testing in applications,
generally Intel just needs more power to actually perform better. So in a thinner machine like this
where you have to have lower power limits a more efficient chip is probably the way to go.
Now I know I just said Intel is generally better in creator workloads,
but when we’re talking about quad core processors? No, forget it. I definitely
wouldn’t recommend buying the Intel version of this machine with a quad core, if you are after
an Intel creator laptop then I’d probably look elsewhere like say the Gigabyte Aero 15 series,
which also has an OLED screen and despite being a 15” laptop it still manages to fit
a full size SD card slot unlike this one, but that’s just one of my personal preferences.
Now with that in mind, if you are after an AMD based creator laptop
with an OLED screen there aren’t a whole lot of options out there,
and the screen on this is pretty good and the battery life is also quite excellent.
The DialPad is a cool and unique feature, but other than that there are a few negatives to
be aware of. In particular, I didn’t really like typing on the keyboard because my right hand kept
on pushing down the touchpad. In most laptops the touchpad is centered with regards to the letter
keys rather than the whole machine, so basically it should be moved over to the left a bit to avoid
those presses, but hey I guess the aesthetics of a centered touchpad just look better.
There’s also minimal upgradeability on this laptop. We can only change the M.2 storage slot
and the Wi-Fi card, that’s it, RAM is soldered to the motherboard and there’s not even a second M.2
slot despite this being a 16” machine. Now I know that it is on the thinner side, but still come
on. I’d rather just have something like a slightly thicker Aero 15 which isn't quite as big in terms
of like length and width but you still get that extra M.2 slot, not to mention upgradeable RAM.
Also kind of a rough for late 2021, I mean we’ve got two USB 2.0 Type-A
ports and only one Type-C port. One Type-C port is the minimum,
but yeah I think two would have been idea and bump up the USB 2.0 to version 3.
Assuming those are things that you can live with then by all
means check out the ASUS Vivobook 16X OLED model.
Check out these videos next if you want to see how the 8 core Intel and AMD processors
actually compare against each other. I’ve also tested content
creator workloads so you’ll get an idea of how AMD and Intel stack up,
so I’ll see you over in one of those next, and if you’re new to the channel, thanks for watching,
and make sure you get subscribed for future laptop reviews like this one.