Asus Vivobook 14 X403 Review: Insane Battery Life, Impressive Performance

Sep. 5, 2019

Before we jump in to the review, here’s a specsheet for the laptop that Asus sent over to us:

Design and Build

It’s not the sturdiest of laptops I’ve seen and used, but then again, at this price point, it’s one of the sturdiest ones I’ve experienced. Thankfully, I didn’t drop it, so I’m not sure how that would’ve gone (and I hope you don’t have to find out for yourself either), but Asus claims that the laptop comes withmilitary grade durability and reliability standards(MIL-STD 810G) and can, Asus claims, handle drops from as high up as 10cm with ease. It’s definitely a good rating to have, but once again, I didn’t test this out, so I can’t confirm whether it holds up to that claim or not, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.

The Vivobook 14 basicallygets the design and build perfectly right. I honestly can’t seem to find anything really wrong with this laptop. It’s only slightly infuriating because I love being nitpicky about these things and Asus has done such an amazing job with this, that there’s really nothing to complain about.

I digress though, let’s circle back to the display. So this panel in the Vivobook 14 is a decent display to have.It’s not the brightest, by far, but it’s not so dim that you wouldn’t like using it. Plus, it has a matte finish which I suspect makes the brightness levels worse. However, the thing I find weird on this display, is the contrast. Honestly,colours just look a little dull on this screen. Now I’m not sure why that is, and I tried everything I could to fix this, but that’s just how the display is. It basically turns every colour into a flat colour, which sounds like a good thing in theory, but can quickly get annoying because it just doesn’t look satisfying enough.

Still, get past that contrast issue, and the display is definitely not a deal-breaker. It does look good, it has decent viewing angles, and thanks to the matte finish, it reduces glare by a lot, which I love because there’s a light right behind where I sit and it drives me crazy with glare on a glossy display… like the one on my MacBook Pro.

That translates to great performance that doesn’t let you down. Sure, the 8th-gen processor is a weird choice from Asus, but in practice, it wouldn’t make the kind of difference that would push this laptop to the bottom of the barrel, so to speak. Especially for the kind of workflow this laptop is meant to be used in. In my week-long usage of the Vivobook 14,I didn’t experience any lags, freezes, or annoyancesof any kind. The laptop handles multiple Chrome tabs paired with a Photoshop session with ease, and doesn’t let up if you try to push it.

Still, if you’re hell bent on playing something on this,games like CS:GO run fine on the laptop, albeit at a mix of low to medium graphics settings if you want playable frame rates. CS:GO assumed High graphics by default and then got frame rates of around 20FPS, which is just plain sad. However,switch the graphics to low, and you easily get around 50FPS on CS:GO. If you’re a gamer, you’re probably annoyed that 50FPS on CS:GO is acceptable to me, and you’d be right, but on a laptop that’s clearly not aimed at gaming, 50FPS in CS:GO means you can take breaks at work and get some AWP kills in Dust 2, which is what I did.. or at least tried to do.

Speaking of awesome, the keyboard on the Vivobook 14 is mighty good. It’s a backlit keyboard, with a standard white LED backlight that’s bright enough, and bleeds out from under the keys, but that’s not really annoying. Using the keyboard is fun, the keys have ample travel, the response is a little bouncy, but not so much as to fatigue your fingers, just enough to make typing feel like playing a game — Imassivelyappreciate that because I type alot.

The keys arelaid out with a good amount of spacingin between, which is great because these keys aren’t even slightly curved to help guide your fingers, but I didn’t find that to be a problem at all, at least on this laptop.

The arrow key layout is compact on this laptop, but at least it’s still laid out in a way that you won’t accidentally hit the side arrow keys when you’re trying to hit the up arrow key. That’s something that happens to me often on my MacBook Pro, but it doesn’t on the Vivobook 14 and I love that.

My complaints arise with the trackpad. Asus has used a precision touchpad on the Vivobook 14, which is great. It brings handy and intuitive gestures, it responds quickly and well, and it would be a great touchpad… but, it’s just tiny. It really is.It’s a small trackpad and that means I can’t use the gestures as naturally as I would like toon this. Add to that the fact that there’s a fingerprint scanner on the top right corner of the touchpad, and things get even worse. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a terrible experience, or even something I’d call a deal-breaker, but it’s mildly infuriating at times.

The fingerprint scanner though, that’s amazing. It’s a perfect size, not too small or too big, and it’s ridiculously fast. To be fair, I don’t have anything to compare this to, since I’ve not used laptops with fingerprint scanners enough to remember what that experience was like, butas my first true experience with a fingerprint scanner on a Windows laptop, this is heavenly fast. Unlocking the laptop is easy, and I don’t need to type in pesky passwords or PINs. You don’t understand how important that is to me, because I set some of the longest, most complicated passwords on my laptops (don’t judge me, they have all my personal stuff on them), and having a fingerprint scanner means I can keep my files safe, but not have to go to the trouble of typing that long, complicated password every time I unlock my laptop. Yay!

For a thin laptop, Asus sure packed in quite a lot of ports on this thing. There’s aUSB-C port, two USB 3 ports, an SD card reader, and a headphone-mic combo port. That’s not too many ports, but it’s more than enough for what you will be doing on this laptop. Plus, the addition of a USB-C port is always a plus.

In my usage, at least, I didn’t find myself looking for ways to add more ports to the laptop, but if you do need to, there are a ton of USB-C dongles that will easily bring more I/O options to your laptop. Plus, there are a lot ofUSB-C accessoriesthat you can use with this laptop as well, thanks to the USB-C port.

So, the battery. I don’t know how Asus did this, but it managed to put ina massive 72Wh battery inside the sleek, tiny chassis of the Vivobook 14, and that big battery brings along a great battery life. I’m not talking 9 to 12 hours of battery life here, I’m talking “this laptop will get you through your work day, and have juice left over for watching Netflix back home without charging” levels of battery.

Asus claims a whopping 24 hours of battery life on the laptop. I know what you’re thinking “That’s insane”. I thought so too, because, like, how!? Then I read the 72Wh spec, and yeah it makes sense.

I wanted to test that out, obviously, so I left my charger at home and brought this laptop to work with a full 100% battery. I used it, all day, the way I use my personal daily driver, with varying levels of brightness depending on where I was sitting. It lasted through it. I got back home, watched Friends on Netflix (for the umpteenth time), and it lasted! In total, I got around 15 to 16 hours of battery life from the laptop, and that’s amazing. I love it.

The Vivobook 14 has no trouble keeping up throughout the day, and that’s exactly what I would want in a laptop I intend on using every day for work.

Pros:

Cons: