Asus Vivobook 16 (Snapdragon X)

MSRP $800.00

“The Asus Vivobook 16 (Snapdragon X) is a regular-looking budget laptop with a striking performance and battery life.”

Pros

• Reliable build, even with plastic
• Two Thunderbolt-4 ports
• Convenient USB-C charging
• Runs quietly
• Goodish battery for budget laptops

Cons

• Bad display colors
• Limited upgrade options
• Not for gaming

2024 witnessed the emergence of Snapdragon-powered thin-and-light laptops but at steep prices. This year, the technology is flowing down to the budget segment with Qualcomm announcing a stripped-down Snapdragon X chipset, while it prepares to launch more high-end chips next year. The low-powered chipset is opening the gates to a new category and adding to some of the best value for money laptops, such as the Asus Vivobook 16 (X1607QA).

The Vivobook 16 comes with traits that seem unflattering at first glance. But its performance in line with Intel’s entry-level laptop chips as well as a decent battery put make it pretty desirable for a budget laptop.

Specs and configuration

The Asus Vivobook 16 (X1607QA) comes with two storage sizes, with the 512GB variant starting at $800. Asus also lists a 1TB model on the product page, but it’s not immediately available to buy on online retail sites.

Design

Let me begin with honesty. The Vivobook 16 with a Snapdragon X chipset lacks any special features to help it stand out in a sea of budget laptops. Rather, its specialties include good performance, respectable I/O options, and an excellent battery that I will discuss in the later sections.

The body is made of plastic; shiny materials cover the top case and display’s lid while body-colored matte finish drapes the bottom, with two color options: bright silver and dark blue. The bottom plate gets two elevated ridges along the breadth, with rubber feet at both ends.

Despite the materials used, the Vivobook 16’s body flexes only under significant pressure. Asus boldly claims that the laptop snags a MIL-STD-810H certification. The accreditation process involves testing in extremely high and low temperatures, at high altitudes, and subjecting the laptop to shock, such as from a sudden unexpected drop. Of course, these tests must be treated like assurances and not guarantees, and Asus will not cover any damage under warranty.

Meanwhile, the body feels resistant to everyday instances of mishandling and carelessness. Scratches from fingernails are not visible from my four weeks with the machine, but the shiny bits are prone to sweat prints. Wiping it with a microfiber cloth — or in certain cases, rubbing alcohol — should clean it considerably.

The bezels around the display use a plastic shell with a dotted patten. Its quality is suited to the price, though the slimness on the sides worries me about potential cracking or peeling off over extended usage. The top bezel nestles the Full HD webcam with a physical sliding cover. On the side, there is an infrared projector and an infrared camera for facial authentication with Windows Hello. Another circular cutout appears to shield the ambient sensor responsible for adjusting the screen’s and keyboard’s brightness.

The hinge tends to shake when you type quickly, when there are subtle vibrations on the table, or under the overhead fan, which I found a bit distracting.

On the positive side, the lid opens up to fill 180-degrees, allowing for more flexible setups, or postures. The bottom half stays glued to the table when you’re lifting the lid with a single hand, which is another plus.

While the design isn’t truly awe-inspiring — or as premium as some of Asus’ smaller 14-inch notebooks in the Zenbook series, it does not feel lacking much. Yes, a metal case would be more exciting but would also add to more weight. Overall, the design feels practical even while lacking the glamor of some of the similarly priced laptops. Instead, it makes up for those shortcomings with other strengths that I will discuss below.

Display and audio

As implied by its name, the Vivobook 16 gets a 16-inch display. This is an LED-backlit IPS-level panel with a WUXGA (1920 x 1200) resolution, a 16:10 aspect ratio, and a 60Hz refresh rate. It also gets an anti-reflective coating to diffuse intense beams of light.

The display doesn’t waver much from other 1200p LCDs in a 16-inch format. It gets the job done, but is uninspiring in terms of sharpness. The colors aren’t impressive either, and while they don’t necessarily seem dull, they are nowhere as striking as on the M4 MacBook Air. At the time of this review, I did not have a colorimeter handy, which is why I can’t share the exact color gamut coverage this display offers. However, if I were to believe Asus’ words, the display covers only 45% of the NTSC gamut, which is not very exciting.

Despite that, the display is sufficiently bright for indoor usage. While Asus claims a 300 nits brightness, my light meter read 267 nits at max. There are inconsistencies in whites, leading to different brightness, across different spots on the panel, which can be ignored easily. The sensors automatically adjust the brightness with ambient light, while the IR scanner for face unlock also serves as a proximity sensor that dims the display when you’re not around.

It’s hard to recommend the Vivobook 16 for creative endeavors, primarily because of the of colors. This is a shame because the internals have sufficient power to run apps, including ones from Adobe. You may also find yourself yearning for better visuals while playing video content, especially at lower brightness levels.

For audio, the Vivobook 16 gets two bottom-firing speakers. Asus doesn’t specify the power ratings, probably because the audio quality isn’t worth lauding over. The speakers are fairly loud and filling, and you can utilize Asus’ Smart Amp tech to make the sound even louder.

However, quality is another aspect altogether. The speakers primarily focus on upper mids and highs, while severely compromising bass and lower mids. Vocals and dialogues are audible but not very crisp.

I could salvage some of the sound by using EQ presets from the MyAsus app and make it usable for watching YouTube videos. Music, on the other hand, felt a touch soulless.

Keyboard and touchpad

The Vivobook 16 gets a full-sized chicklet keyboard with a white backlight. There’s plenty of key travel; 1.7mm to be precise, and the keys tend to bounce back in a spirited fashion. Whether you will enjoy that or not will depend on your previous experience with keyboards.

Asus uses slightly dished keycaps that let your fingertips land more naturally, especially if you tend to type faster. However, the small size of the keycaps can counter that effect. The numpad, with even smaller keys, feels especially crammed. These traits could translate to some challenges, at least initially, especially if you are coming from a laptop that lacks a numpad altogether.

During this review, I switched between this laptop, my 14-inch MacBook Pro, and a Keychron K2 with stock keycaps, and often found myself hitting keys on the periphery. You may be less prone after spending some time training your fingers to type on this keyboard.

Despite my discomfort with the keyboard, I did not feel the same about the touchpad. It’s expansive and feels fairly responsive, especially while using multi-finger gestures.

While the Asus uses plastic here as well, I did not feel any stickiness, even while using the touchpad with damp or sweaty fingers. The large size also allowed my palm to easily navigate to the usable area, and did not require any tussle getting used to.

In addition to the standard gestures, Asus also dedicates the left and right edges for sliders that can be used for increasing or decreasing the volume and brightness, while the top edge can be used to scrub the progress in a media player. These gestures are highly optimized, and I never toggled them accidentally when I did not desire to.

Webcam and connectivity

The Vivobook 16 gets a fixed-focus camera up top with a Full HD resolution. This feels like a run-of-the-mill camera, sufficing for video calls as long as you remain adequately lit. Being a Copilot+ PC, it receives Windows Studio Effect for better frame position, improved lighting, and background blurring, all of which are powered by the dedicated neural processor. Without these features, I wouldn’t truly use the webcam, and instead rely on my Android phone.

I adore the fact that Asus offers a physical shutter to block off the webcam when it’s not in use. However, you may need you keep the webcam open to use applications, such as automatic approach detection or screen dimming.

For these functions, as well as for unlocking, the Vivobook 16 gets an infrared camera setup, including a projector and a receptor that work in tandem with the main camera. This is also useful in sensing when you look away or move away from the screen, so the screen is automatic dimmed or locked after a certain time. The screen automatically lights up when it detects you come nearer, and face unlock sets into action.

While the unlock mechanism is reliable, it is not entirely perfect, and often rejects my face unless I am staring dead into the camera. It can be useful for automatic logging into online accounts using your passkeys, but a physical fingerprint scanner would definitely make it simpler.

For I/O, the Vivobook 16 gets the essential ports, including two USB-C with Thunderbolt 4, two USB-A Gen 1 ports with 5Gbps speeds, an HDMI 2.1, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Performance

The Asus Vivobook 16 drives a Snapdragon X ARM64 chipset, which is designed for power efficiency above everything else. The CPU comprises eight Qualcomm Oryon cores, including four performance and four efficiency cores. All cores can clock a frequency of 2.96GHz, though the “LITTLE” cores tend to fall back to lower frequency when in Balanced or Power Efficiency modes, for better battery life. Besides fewer CPU cores compared to the 10-core or 12-core Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite SKUs from Qualcomm, there’s no boost available for the Snapdragon X, which can be limiting if you were hoping to use this for tasks beyond web browsing or office work.

In terms of GPU, the Snapdragon X also gets the slowest integrated GPU in the Adreno family with an output of 1.7 TFLOPS (teraflops) according to Qualcomm. This positions the chipset beneath the least powerful Snapdragon X Plus variant which powers the Asus Vivobook S15 or the thin-and-light Zenbook A14.

To quantify how the Vivobook 16 performs, I ran our staple benchmark tests and compared them with the existing results.

The Vivobook 16 does surprisingly well, especially in CPU-related tests, scoring almost as well as the Vivobook S15. Compared to Intel chips, it performed better than the Core Ultra 5 125H on the Lenovo ThinkBook 13x in Cinebench as well as Geekbench multi-core tests and got much closer to the Core Ultra 7 155H powering the HP Spectre x360 14.

Of course, both of these are from last year, and the gap widens when compared to Core Ultra 200 series “Lunar Lake” chips in Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i or the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360. But I couldn’t help but be amazed by this lowest-order Snapdragon chipset giving much more pricier machines a tough competition.

The Vivobook 16 lets you toggle the various fan modes using the MyAsus utility or by pressing Fn+F key combo, which can also be synced to Windows’ power modes. However, despite setting the fan to “Full Speed,” it rarely revved hard enough, even with intensive tasks, except while running the Cinebench tests. I’m not quite sure if that is by design, and Qualcomm wants to limit power delivery to prioritize better battery.

Admittedly, the GPU felt significantly weaker in comparison, scoring far below than any other device in the table, with the only exception of Vivobook S15, which uses the same GPU.

On the positive side, the Vivobook 16 gets the same neural processing unit or NPU capable of 45 TOPS (trillion operations per second). Some applications of the NPU include functions including Windows Studio effects for webcam, such as improving video calls with better background bokeh, eye contact, and automatic framing, as well as noise suppression during video calls. Since this is a certified Copilot+ PC, the more promising application will remain in on-device processing while using inbuilt Copilot features on Windows or Microsoft Office once they are fully unleashed — Windows’ Recall that records all your activity using screenshots could be a feature that utilizes it — though the applications, as well as ways to measure the NPU’s impact, are limited at the moment.

The chipset’s support for Thunderbolt 4 is splendid, and the Vivobook 16 utilizes it on both USB-C ports.

Finally, the Vivobook 16 gets 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, which is soldered onto the board, and, therefore not upgradeable. There are options between a 512GB and a 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD, with brilliant read and write speeds.

Gaming on Asus Vivobook 16

The Vivobook 16 will be a choice far from ideal for gaming, and Asus isn’t to blame for this. ARM64-based Windows PCs are not optimized for gaming and instead positioned to be thin and portable laptops, despite sufficient gaming chops.

You can, theoretically, run games on an ARM machine, but there will be hiccups. I managed to run popular games, including Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered, It Takes Two, Anthem, Counter-Strike 2, and Team Fortress but had to lower down quality to 768p while still getting only 20-30fps along with an inexcusable delay in registering key presses. Other titles, including Valorant, Battlefield 1, Apex Legends, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare installed but did not run.

Battery life

The Asus Vivobook 16 packs a 50 watt-hour battery, which isn’t sizable by any means. However, the low-powered ARM64 chipset ensures the laptop delivers a reasonably good battery backup — at least when compared to others of its price — and, thus, the targeted market segment — as well as caliber.

For each charge, the Vivobook 16 easily lasted six to seven hours of basic web-based usage, which includes browsing the web for research, checking emails and work chats, and occasional visits to YouTube, all while setting the keyboard’s backlight and display’s brightness to automatic and the Windows power mode set to Balanced.

I ran Digital Trends’ standard battery tests, and here’s how the Asus Vivobook 16 fared in comparison.

Asus doesn’t claim the same exceptional battery as other thin and light Snapdragon laptops, but we see some respectable battery backup in our web browsing test. The Vivobook 16 seemed to score lower than other 16-inch LCDs in video playback, but I suspect the poor color calibration is to blame.

For charging, the laptops get a 65W brick charger with a USB Type-C connector but can also be charged with a regular USB-PD (Power Delivery) brick. Charging typically takes 1.5 to 2 hours before the laptop, which isn’t something I would necessarily grind my teeth over, though faster charging would be exciting. It also works with slower chargers, which means you will be able to use your phone’s power brick or power banks with adequate output in emergencies.

Asus Vivobook 16: A great budget laptop, with quirks

The Asus Vivobook 16 has its benefits and drawbacks, but I’ll start with the former list first. The entry-level ARM machine is ideal for folks who want to run the basic software or get most work done online without exhausting the battery quickly or without spending much on a new laptop. Its toughness ratings make it equally good for students, allowing them to be somewhat careless once in a while. Charging over USB-C is another advantage and lets you forget about carrying a separate charger always.

The Vivobook 16 compromises on the productivity front, and is unsuitable for creative professionals, unless they treat it as a backup machine only. For a little extra, Asus itself has exciting options, such as the Asus Vivobook S15 or the Zenbook A14. If you’re looking for good battery life, portability, and excellent performance without breaking bank, the base MacBook Air M4 is the laptop to consider.

While the Vivobook 16 is not the most powerful budget laptop, it balances value for money, reliability, and battery backup quite well, while cutting back on less important features, such as a vibrant display, a high-resolution webcam, or even very plush keyboard-touchpad combo. It, however, does not skimp on good connectivity options, and offers Thunderbolt 4 for speedy connections alongside HDMI 2.1 for high-refresh rate display, and is a great option if you are on a strict budget.