Below are my testing notes for a video review I did on this laptop. If you're interested in the video, it is on youtube with the same title as this review summary. Testing Notes: The Overall build is the first indication of what tier of laptop you’re getting here. It’s constructed from plastic and overall it looks nice, but there is a ton of flex everywhere! On the top of the lid, the bottom of the laptop and the keyboard is the worst offender as there is a ton of keyboard and palm flex. So if you’re sensitive to this, then you may want to skip this outright because it’s here in spades. The lid cannot be opened with one hand and the hinge feels nice. There is actually two rubber feet on the bottom of the lid itself and this lifts the base of the laptop at an angle. This is Asus’s ergolift design and it’s been around for a few years now and this has two benefits. First one being increased circulation into the laptop itself. The intake vents is on the base of the laptop and the exhaust is at the top of the topcase and under the screen. The second benefit is my favorite and that is the benefit of angling the keyboard. This angles the keyboard ever so slightly but it allows for a more comfortable experience. Speaking of which lets talk about the keyboard. The overall layout is perfect for me. You have a full size keyboard and a number pad. The number pad itself is a bit cramped and I would have preferred it to be separated a bit more from the keyboard itself, but it still works without a hitch. The keyboard itself is excellent. It has nice travel. It reminds me of Lenovo’s keyboards and the new macbook pro. It’s not overly tactile but it’s not mushy either. I’d say it’s somewhere inbetween and it takes a bit of travel before actuation takes place, which I understandable at this pricepoint. The trackpad is pretty good and It’s a windows precision trackpad. It is incredibly accurate and all the gestures work without any issues but I had some issues activating it while typing. Whenever It type, the cursor moves and I’ve even had it click on a different section of the document and it made me prone to errors while typing. The feel of the trackpad is nice and smooth and it has a great click to it. The hinge mechanism on the trackpad does depress rather deep however and this is noticeable along the bottom edges. If you tend to click your trackpad along the bottom edge, this may annoy you and actually I have some concerns that particles may get wedged along that edge, which may cause some issues down the road. Surrounding the keyboard you can see this dotted pattern, initially I thought this was speaker grills, but it’s just purely aesthetic. The speakers are actually located on the bottom of the laptop and we have two dedicated speakers for stereo separation. They are your average laptop speakers and they don’t have any depth to them in terms of sound quality and they don’t get overly loud either as they only reach a maximum of 79db’s. I would definitely recommend using headphones or external speakers if you’re serious about audio, otherwise they should be fine for most. The display is a 17” matte display and it has a resolution of 1920x1080. There’s a few negatives to this display and I’ll get them out of the way real quick. This isn’t a touch display and out of the box it’s poorly calibrated. You can correct this with a calibration tool, but honestly 99% of you probably don’t have a calibration tool, but on the positive side it still looks nice. All of the footage shown here is before the screen was calibrated and it still looks great. Color accuracy isn’t great. Again this won’t impact the average user and the naked eye won’t detect these inaccuracies but you’ll want to skip this altogether if you’re looking to do any photo editing or color grading. Viewing off-axis is actually pretty decent. There is a drop in saturation in the overall color pallete but the matte coating does a nice job keeping reflections at bay, but if you are in direct light, it’s still going to show, but overall it’s good. One last thing about the display is my panel has some backlight bleed in the corners. This isn’t noticeable at all until you have a black background, then you’ll see it and this could turn some people off, it honestly doesn’t bother me, but it was there and it had to be mentioned. The web-camera is a 720p camera and overall it is average. There is some grain in the background and colors don’t look natural. In a well-lit room, it’s not bad. But in a poorly lit room it’s atrocious as the aforementioned grain and color inaccuracy is amplified and the overall image is poor. Even though the build, keyboard, trackpad and display have some minor negatives if you’re nitpicking, the internals is the real sell here. Accessing the internals is fairly easy as there is 10 screws on the bottom and then you must release the clips around the edge of the bottom case and that is it. Looking at the internals we see some amazing things we haven’t seen for a while and that is upgradeability. The SSD, RAM and even the wifi card are all removable. Before I touch on that further, I want to cover the overall spec sheet real quick: o AMD Ryzen 7 3700u processor here. This is a quad core processor with a base clock of 2.3ghz. o We also have AMD’s Vega 10 Graphics o 12gb’s of RAM, 4 of which is soldered on to the motherboard and we have an 8gb stick installed o Adjacent the RAM is a 512gb Solid-State Drive o At the base is our battery, which is a 32Whr battery. o Interestingly enough, adjacent the battery there is a slot for a hard drive but there is no sata cable or mounting hardware. I’m assuming this is for models that have a hard drive and not an ssd drive and it’s a bummer that one cannot be added after the fact. Okay lets talk about the Ryzen 7 and it’s great. Single core performance is good and multicore performance is excellent. By the numbers this is...in real life situations it will handle your regular day to day tasks without any issues. The built-in Vega graphics can handle some light photo editing and even video editing is doable but it will be very sluggish. Proxies did help, but 4k editing was still pretty unbearable and if you’re looking to use this for editing, I would definitely avoid it as it’s a very trying experience. Gaming isn’t great but it is doable….at 720p and medium settings that is. Anything more than that is going to tax this machine too much and it won’t work. During my gaming tests I like to try different games and I usually pick a few older AAA titles, indie titles and some newer AAA titles. Bioshock infinite and Tomb Raider both ran great at 720p and Tomb Raider specifically was very fluid. Sekiro was pretty janky and there was a ton of stuttering going on and even Ori and the Will of Whisps was unplayable as it stuttered pretty much at all times. Like I said gaming is doable, it’s not great and that shouldn’t be expected as this is not what this laptop is made for. The fan kicks on pretty hard while gaming and reaches a maximum of -db’s and thanks to the ergolift design it is silent during normal non-intensive use. Battery life is honestly poor as I only got 5 and a half hours at minimum brightness and just under 4 hours at maximum brightness. Asus includes a proprietary charger and charging from 0 eprcent to 100 percent takes 2 hours. A usb type c port is included but it cannot charge the internal battery and it is only capable of data transfer. The rest of the port selection is great. Along the left side we have 2 usb 2.0 ports and we have 1 usb 3.2 port on the right side. Along with the type c port there is an HDMI port an a headphone port. And for some reason we have a micro sd card slot in place of a regular SD card slot. Overall the Vivobook is a budget tier laptop and this particular model is no exception. And as a budget tier laptop it has some compromises. The overall build quality has some concerns for me, the display is inaccurate and has some backlight bleed, the trackpad feels great but is oversensitive and activates while typing and battery life is subpar. All of this makes it difficult for me to recommend even though it’s very affordable at $599. Having said that the internals are very impressive and I love the keyboard on this laptop. If you’re looking for a large laptop with a great keyboard and you only plan on doing basic stuff like web-browsing, watching Netflix or youtube and working on word documents, then this is a good buy. But if you need anything more than that, I would look elsewhere.

I bought this because I was looking for something that had a bit more storage and RAM than my old laptop had, but didn't want to pay more than $600. This does not disappoint for performance at this price! The hard drive is large enough to satisfy my needs and most of my wants, and with 12GB of RAM, it will handle multitasking easily. The Ryzen 7 is a nice touch, as well. It offers better performance than a lot of the Intel options in the $600 or less range. Not that I dislike Intel, but I DO like saving money! It will also handle casual gaming with no issues. The display is very good, with good color and clarity, and I have no complaints. You also get 3 standard USB ports, and a USB C port, plus a memory card slot. I've had no need to bring a hub with me anywhere! Sound is also decent for something that doesn't boast having speakers from an audio specialty brand (think HP and their use of B&O audio). For the cons? There aren't many. Some complain about the case and the feeling it has, but I don't think of it as an issue, because it really isn't so bad. I wouldn't call it "rugged", but what are you doing with a laptop that it would need to be? I didn't buy it to throw at a wall. It's survived a fall without incident for me, and that's rare in and of itself as I almost never drop it. I'd rather pay for better performance than a fancier case. And yes, at this price, you may not get both. It's not flimsy feeling to open though, and it does its job.

i thought that i would have issues with the keyboard. it is a very easy keyboard to type on and see. even in the dark, i can see the reflection of the characters on the keys. i am 70 years old. i have had a dozen or two computers in my lifetime, this is the nicest one i have experienced. i like the 17" size. it enables me to zoom in on text books i am using for my study of oceanography at NSU. it works well with the ZOOM classroom. unfortunately i do not have experience with CPU intensive applications so i can't say how it stacks up in that respect or with respect to GPU intensive applications. i have cast natively to my Samsung TV without issues. Edge does not work with Chromecast! i have used it with memory intensive applications like having 20 windows open in Chrome and a dozen in Edge at the same time. it performs very well in those situations. it will work well with a mouse as i am not a fan of track pads. i have disabled the pad which is very easy to do. it runs super cool and no noticeable fan noise. i can't report durability and longevity as i have only had it for a week. i keep it plugged in all the time, so i like the battery saver option of keeping it 60% charged which is optimal for a lithium battery. the batteries on my other laptops self-destruct after a year or so. if i had my druthers i would have a removable battery, a door on the bottom so you could easily access memory and install an additional drive, an Ethernet port and a second type A USB 3.1 port. i don't know what to do with the Type C USB port yet? i have a Night Hawk WIFI router and it screams at max 300 MBS5g so i don't really need an Ethernet port any more. this is my second ASUS and the first was a netbook 10 years ago which was slow and reliable, this one screams........... you won't be sorry you purchased it. I was really lucky to get it at .550KUSD at Best Buy. Does anyone know where to get a disk drive cable and mounting hardware cheap?

I bought this computer knowing it wasn’t a flagship. People are complaining about the backlit keyboard (which they fixed in the description btw) and the plastic build, but you have to take a hit somewhere if you want that Ryzen 7 and extra 4gb ram. Also, I was told the cpu wouldn’t like the ram not running dual channel but it’s reading at full 2666htz as advertised by the spec sheet so all is great. You buy this laptop anywhere else and you get an i5 with 8gb ram. Great deal for $600. I say get it while you can if you’re looking for something to handle a workload on the go

Great laptop for the money. The 17” display is great for multitasking and working on school work or multiple projects at a time. So far, the Lao too has done great for what I use it for, which is school work and personal use. My only complaint is that I wish the keyboard was backlit. The keyboard is more spread out due to the face this is a larger laptop which makes it sometimes hard to type as well, especially in poorly lit rooms. But overall this a good looking and good quality laptop.