Tech Review – ASUS VivoBook Go 15
ASUS VivoBook Go 15 – Here’s a hard thing to do: Make a laptop with a great screen, decent keyboard and acceptable trackpad. It’s harder to spec out the laptop with a power efficient CPU, good amounts of RAM and well-sized SSD. Doing all this while maintaining good battery life makes it even trickier. Last and most complex, is to keep the price down. That is, at least, what I’ve seen ASUS achieve with their Vivobook 15.
Here’s the thing I like about the VivoBook 15: It doesn’t pretend to be a high end laptop. The spec is modest:
- Ryzen 5 7 series APU
- 16GB RAM LPDDR5
- 512GB SSD
- 15″ 1080p Full HD OLED display
All this, for R12999. For me that is a bargain. At the same price point, you’d look at paying around R2000 to R3000 more for a similar specification.
As expected, the VivoBook comes with Windows 11 Home. Whether Microsoft has resolved the performance issues on AMD CPUs or not, I was not able to get clarity. The Ryzen 5 7th generation mobile CPU performed great. There were no bottlenecks running day to day tasks but that’s no surprise. You’re not going to get high end performance but it’s not going to slow you down.
That means you could do some basic video editing, some graphics work and be able to play some eSports titles. Anything above that and the VivoBook will begin to heat up and throttle.
Where it does succeed is in the battery life and productivity. It’s good a 42Wh battery. That means you’ll get 6-8 hours of run time. The actual design size of the battery is 50Wh, but I suspect that’s to cater for a longer lasting battery. Since you’re only going to charge once a day or twice a day, I don’t see the battery losing life being a major issue.
I’ll also applaud the brightness and quality of the OLED screen ASUS gives you with one of these. At the price point it’s the best-looking screen I’ve seen. It’s also got a lay-flat hinge, which is a decent bonus.
I’ll also applaud the keyboard. ASUS have been making some of the most comfortable keyboards in the market and this is no different. There’s adequate travel and good key responsiveness. The trackpad is also very useable and has a responsive click. There is also a Windows Hello compatible fingerprint sensor on it if this is something you want to use.
ASUS provides a standard 2-pin charger, and you will not be able to charge with USB-C which is a bit of a shame. The VivoBook Go 15 will charge in around 50 minutes which is a great feature but to be fair, there are many laptops at this cost offering this feature.
The chassis of the VivoBook Go 15 is not as premium as you would expect it to be at the cost of the laptop. There’s plenty deck flex and plastic all over the place so if you’re going to buy one take care of how you open and close it.
It is clear that ASUS had to make compromises to reduce the cost of the VivoBook Go 15. They have maximised the value of the laptop by providing premium features, and I’m happy for it.
