ASUS Vivobook Pro 16X OLED review: excellent display

The ProArt Studiobook OLED and ASUS Vivobook Pro 16X OLED are two other laptops I recently reviewed that have stickers on their covers proclaiming them to be "The Best ASUS OLED Laptops for Creatives". The Vivobook, which is similar in specs to the ProArt, is a few hundred pounds cheaper and lacks a real trackpad dial.

This computer, like its stablemate, is a well-specced computer that will appeal to anyone looking for something for gaming, artistic endeavors, or anything else that requires a lot of computing or a lot of pixels to be pressed.

Because laptops of this size are often bought as replacements for desktops and rarely used on laps, factors like long battery life and cool operation are often neglected in favor of processing speed and graphics performance, which the Vivobook has in abundance.

Features

The 3.2K HDR OLED display with a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz is the main attraction outside the laptop's shell. Although it lacks a touchscreen, it has all the features of an OLED panel for 2023: bright, clear and colorful, Pantone certified for color accuracy and capable of displaying 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut.

It also has a 16:10 aspect ratio, which is slightly taller than a 16:9 widescreen and a superior form for managing many windows and documents.

There is a trackpad of the appropriate size, offset to the left and distinguished by the absence of the ASUS dial on the Studiobook Pro. A circle is simply placed in the corner of this trackpad, encouraging you to rotate the tip of your finger there to mimic turning a dial. The Chiclet keyboard has full-sized, 1.4mm-travel keys that are softly illuminated. It feels silky under your fingertips and typing is a pleasure. A privacy shutter joins the webcam at the top of the screen and there's a sliding switch to hide it. The numpad is small and tucked to the side.

The Vivobook has excellent connectivity with two Thunderbolt 4 ports that can be used to charge the laptop or connect it to monitors, as well as a full-size HDMI 2.1 socket, USB-A and combo headphone socket on one side and an SD Card reader, USB 3.2 Type-A port, Ethernet and a dedicated charging connection (which it prefers you use) on the other side. There's a Bluetooth 5.3 radio that will work well for wireless keyboards and headsets, and the Wi-Fi is of type 6E, ready to take advantage of the latest wireless transmission technology.

Design And Build

The Vivobook model we received for review is silver (black is also an option), but before being forcibly lowered to the ground by security, a madman approached with a can of bright orange paint and left his business card on the Esc key, the shutter covering the webcam and the rubber feet. So even if the key in question is quite small, you're unlikely to forget to press Esc to close unwanted dialog windows.

The orange paint maniac is prevented from splattering his business card all over the silver case, which otherwise looks tastefully restrained. We do, however, like how the Vivobook nameplate is raised on the left side of the lid, along with some platitudes encouraging you to "go further and beyond" and "explore the possibilities". While the Dell Latitude 7330 Rugged Extreme might not be our first choice for a trip down the big gray-green, oily Limpopo River full of fire trees, the words "Ready to explore" are subtly written on the back of the display section next to the hinge, and its aluminum chassis looks like it can take a few knocks.

But not too much. If you put pressure on the back of the screen, the case tilts significantly and you can even bend the edges of the screen. We can't say the same for the base, which is solid and adds weight to a laptop that is neither thin nor light, but not the worst thing we've seen.

Performance

You'd expect considerable performance from the Vivobook 16X OLED given the type of components it has inside, and it didn't disappoint us. This laptop will perform perfectly in Baldur's Gate 3, Blender, Photoshop, Lightroom and other programs.

At the time of writing, the CPU is a 24-core processor from Intel's Raptor Lake architecture, making it fully up-to-date. It can run at a maximum turbo speed of 5.6GHz and is suitable for a desktop workstation.

The multi-core Geekbench ratings were higher than the ASUS Proart Studiobook, a laptop from the same manufacturer that uses the same components and should give comparable scores overall. Whether the difference is due to a change in the cooling system or the necessity to run the ProArt once more in the Creative Bloq benchmarkeriser, we can only guess.

Battery life is more or less what you would expect from a laptop with this level of processing capacity. Only the MacBooks really stand out in this comparison, with the advantage of the more energy-efficient silicon architecture lurking beneath their aluminum chassis. The Vivobook is portable but you won't want to use it away from an outlet for long periods of time, especially if you're pushing the chips harder than our tests. Our battery life result of just under five and a half hours using a test that kept the screen on constantly and running an office workload, including video calls and spreadsheets, is what you'd expect from a creative workstation laptop in 2023.

Also, the underside also heats up. The CPU and GPU are located inside, probably for thermal insulation reasons, in two specific positions: in the middle, behind the vents, and to the center-right of the base. The weight further emphasizes the fact that this is a computer that should be placed on a desk.

Should I Buy The ASUS VivoBook PRO 16X OLED?

Any laptop purchase costing more than $2,000/£ should be carefully considered. While the ASUS Vivobook Pro 16X OLED is built with high-quality parts, there are many expensive laptops that can compete with it in terms of computing power, some of which are made by ASUS.

Despite this, the Vivobook is actually in excellent working order. Its OLED screen is attractive, it doesn't get hot and it has plenty of connectors to use instead of a desktop. While it lacks a special highlight, it's a jack of all trades, making it a good option if you just want to buy one laptop at a time. It's overkill for web browsing and simple office work, but if you start using creative apps, you'll be glad you bought it.