Asus VivoBook X505 Review: Ryzen-Powered Versatile Machine

Dec. 21, 2018

Just like the budget smartphone category that’s cluttered with so many confusing options, the budget laptop market is no exception. If you hop onto any e-commerce platform right now, you’ll find a multitude of options and it’s easy to be overwhelmed, especially since you don’t want to buy a laptop with dated specs or inferior performance.

The charging port and battery LED indicator are placed on opposite sides, that doesn’t make sense to me from a design point of view. I’d love if Asus places the LED indicators above the keyboard, which is the ideal place to put them as they’re easily visible there.

It’s a slight improvement over the Nanoedge display we had seen on the VivoBook X507, however, you still get sizeable top and bottom bezel to hold the webcam, sensors, and the Asus branding. Apart from the bezels, Asus sweetens the deal byoffering a Full-HD display, with a 1920×1080 pixels resolution, in an attempt to outshine many similarly-priced competitors. It also comes with an anti-glare coating, which feels like a matte finish, and that’s a great added touch.

Asus is known to sprinkle its own software into the mix and here also it enables you to choose between 4 different display modes, namely Normal, Vivid, Eye Care, and Manual. The display is set to normal by default, but you can pick Eye Care to apply a night light filter.

While I was mostly in favor of the comfy layout from the get-go, thecheap plastic build of the keys was a big turn offfor me, especially since I use a MacBook Air every day. While got used to their quality over a few days of usage, but there was another thing that troubled me.

While the keys here did offer me a good amount of travel, something I love on my older MacBook, and didn’t need too much force to register a key press, however, thekeys are wobbly and the keyboard deck has some flex to it. Each time I went a little too fast and hard with my writing, the keyboard wasn’t really stiff enough to handle the pressure.

Also, there is no LED indicator in the Caps Lock key, nor does the laptop show when the function has been activated with an on-screen toast, so it was a huge pain to write uppercase letters. You can’t know when you accidentally hit the Caps Lock key.

The overall typing experience is okay-ish here and I would surely have to give a budget keyboard a pass, in my opinion, because it is certainly good enough for the price you’re paying, especially the base model with Ryzen 3.

The touchpad has afair amount of travel, which I appreciate, and the clicks don’t feel empty. Coming from a MacBook Air though, thetouchpad was a little rigid for my likingand I also had to adjust the sensitivity multiple times, but that’s something which can be toyed around with, for a personalized experience.Decent-sized Touchpad with Windows Precision drivers

Asus has evenly distributed the ports on both sides, instead of heavily packing them on any one side. The left, as you can see above, packs the DC port, an RJ45 Ethernet port, an HMDI port, a USB Type-A 3.0 port (also referred to as SuperSpeed USB port), and a USB Type-C port.

It’s really good to see Asus adopting the USB Type-C standard, even though it may have included just one port, and even if it’s not a Thunderbolt 3 version. You can also use the USB Type-C earphones, as I did. I tried the Google Pixel USB-C earbuds and Xiaomi’s Type-C earphones with the USB Type-C port and they both worked just fine.

Moving our attention to the right side, there’s the Kensington Lock, coupled with 2 USB-A 2.0 ports, a combo headphone jack (will support an earphone with an in-line microphone), and a multi-format card reader.

Though we might have already come across a few hardware kinks, it’s the performance that I was secretly excited to check out with this laptop. This is the first Ryzen Mobile laptop that I am testing out, so I was really excited to see how it performs. So, let’s not waste more time and dive in.

To thoroughly test out the Ryzen 5 2500, I decided to install Photoshop CC on this laptop as we tend to use at Beebom to edit images on a regular basis. I then tested the opening time of the software, which was about 12 seconds, and edited images all day without any hiccups. The system didn’t hang or stutter, which is a positive sign.

I was running Photoshop, the browsers, and streaming music through YouTube, so there was a fair amount of load on the laptop but it managed to power through – even though it stumbled a couple of times and my browser crashed. I am pretty satisfied with its performance and wouldn’t mind recommending Ryzen PCs to people in the future.

PUBG is one of my favorites and I started off the testing with it. Even though all settings were punched down to very low (720p) but the game couldn’t deliver over 20fps. I then moved on toPUBG Mobile, which I played using the Tencent Gaming Buddy, and well, I don’t have the numbers to prove it, but the title (automatically set to low graphics settings)runs smoothly and you can enjoy some battle royale actionwith friends using the same.

We also tried our luck some other popular games, including Fortnite, which seems to be well optimized as the game was playable, as well as enjoyable, at 720p low settings. We were able to get an average of 36 fps, with a peak of around 44 fps, which is just great.

So, the laptop may not be a gaming beast but it can surely handle some casual gaming. I believe the low-frequency DDR4 RAM and the spinning hard disk could be creating a bottleneck here and if you plan on upgrading it, the gameplay could be improved by a wee bit. I’d, however, suggest you use a cooling pad to regulate the heat and not play hours-on-end.

Like we always do, I ran the standard set of benchmarks including Geekbench 4, PCMark, 3D Mark, Cinebench R15’s OpenGL test, and more.

So, as you can see, the quad-core Ryzen 5 processor is able to handle the taxing load of the benchmark software and offer results that are on par with 8th-generation Intel i3 U-series mobile processors. However, I would like to point out that the Intel processor will have more ease in handling CPU-intensive tasks whereas the AMD chip on board here is going to come in handy for GPU-intensive tasks.

Asus hasequipped the laptop with its proprietary IceCool technologythat should keep the temperatures low using smart fan control, internal heat pipes, and the fan design. All this means palm rest should be at room temperature even while gaming, and it worked.

After playing Fortnite for about an hour, I found the external temperature to be around 44-45 degrees but thehigh-temperature zone was concentrated around the top, above the keyboard. The keyboard deck and the palm rest, however, stayed cool and didn’t meddle with the experience. The heat didn’t reach the keyboard during the gameplay and that’s awesome.

Considering the price point and slim build of this laptop, I’mnot going to fret over the picture qualityas it would mostly be used for work-related Skype calls and it’s decent enough for it. However, if you’d like to click some personal photos and videos, then the Microsoft Camera app will come in quite handy.

The Microsoft Camera app shows what you’re recording on the screen in real-time (up to 480p @ 30fps) and it’s good to see that the webcam on board has a decent refresh rate. There are no stutters in the video recording when you move your head around. You can also play around with the app settings, enable Digital Video Stabilization, to make it just slightly better.

Asus may like to boast about the SonicMaster audio tuning and technology, but theaudio output here is just average. The poor placement of the speakers could be a big factor.

The SonicMaster branding may excite users at first, but the speakers are pretty average and nothing close to what Asus boasts of.

You can certainly jump into the Audio Wizard software on board to choose from among 5 different audio modes, such as movie, music, and gaming, to tweak the audio output, but that doesn’t affect sound quality too much.

During my week-long time with this laptop, I mostly used it at 90 percent brightness and was able to squeeze out somewhere between 3-3.5 hours from the battery during a usual day at the Beebom office, which sees me using the Wi-Fi, Photoshop, and multiple Firefox tabs open at the same time.

Just like VivoBook X507, this laptop also comes backed by Asus’ fast-charging technology that it boasts will help juice up the laptop to 60% in just under one hour (49 minutes, if you want to be precise). Well, these claims are essentially true as the laptop charges very rapidly in the initial run when the battery is almost depleted, but slows down later in the charging process.

This makes it an ideal laptop for college students and professionals, who usually need to carry out their work in word processors, browse the web, Netflix and chill, and also have some fun game time – if they need to. Asus has built a perfectly fine laptop in its sub-Rs 35,000 price segment but there is a possibility that you don’t want a 15.6-inch screen, so I’d suggest you go for the Lenovo Ideapad 330S (Rs. 34,990) for its simple build and smaller 14-inch Full-HD screen.

You can even check out the VivoBook X507, which is priced slightly lower and has dated Intel internals right here. However, if you want to explore more Ryzen-powered options, then you can check out the Ryzen 3-backed HP 15 (Rs. 27,990) or the Ryzen 5-backed Acer Aspire 3 (Rs. 39,990) as well.

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