Asus VivoBook S510 review: Weak battery life hobbles this capable ultralight - estradabeemeart

With its thin-and-light shell, jumbo display, Intel Core i7 mainframe and middle-range price tag, the Asus VivoBook S510 aims to be a sleek-yet-spacious ultrabook for folks who like to get things cooked. Just while we're impressed by its looks, feel, and agility with day-to-day office tasks, the S510 waterfall painfully short in a key area: battery spirit.

Toll and specifications

We tested the $799 version (SKU S510UA-DB71) of the VivoBook S510, which measures 14.2 x 9.6 x 0.7 inches and weighs just 3.7 pounds (or 4.1 pounds with the compact power brick). That's amazingly light for an ultrabook with a 15.6-inch reveal—typically, we'd expect an ultrabook of this size to outdo four pounds.

Ben Patterson / IDG

Weighing in at just 3.7 pounds, the VivoBook S510 is much flatboat than we potential.

Inside the case sits a 2.7GHz Intel Core i7-7500U, a dual-core processor optimized for comparatively low-magnate mobile performance. Also on dining table: 8GB of DDR4 2133MHz store, a 128GB solid-state drive and a 1TB heavily hard drive. Patc in theory you could upgrade the S510's memory board operating room storehouse, there are zero easy-approach panels; as an alternative, you'll have to remove 10 screws to crack open the laptop's can shell.

The VivoBook's integrated Intel HD Nontextual matter 620 core is designed to treat everyday display tasks the like web browsing, video streaming and general productivity. (We'll undergo many to say about its real-world performance in a moment.) If you're looking to force out in the lead whatsoever games, a slightly pricier version of the S510 (SKU S510UQ) with distinct Nvidia GeForce 940MX graphics recently appeared in retail channels.

Presentation

The VivoBook S510's 15.6-inch display looks reasonably bright and razor-sharp, in particular for standard Office and desktop tasks. Shift concluded to Netflix, the dark-greenish world of The Matrix lacked the inky bootleg levels you power consider along a pricier laptop, but the noir-drenched images didn't look distractingly gray, either. And while the VivoBook's 1080p resolution won't deform some heads in today's 4K-concerned reality, you tin can't carry much much given the S510's sub-$800 price go after.

The S510's wake angles weren't too shabby. Yes, the screen dims perceptibly when viewed from active a 30-degree angle from the center, side to side or overstep to bottom, but charts, documents and images are still well visible, and colors don't invert when you tilt the screen up.

While I'm well-chosen with the VivoBook's viewing angles, the screen as a entirely is happening the dim side. The S510's display brightness peaks at astir 257 nits (or candelas), a figure that skims our minimum standard for a comfortably bright laptop display indoors. Outdoors, ambient light could easily overwhelm this expose, flush if IT's only partly shiny.

Keyboard, trackpad, speakers and webcam

The S510 boasts typical chicklet-style keys on its roomy, backlit keyboard. The keys themselves are pleasingly fashionable, with decent travel and an ever-so-slight concave feel. That aforementioned, typists with a tendency to pound the keys (I'm raising my hand) may notice that the keyboard feels a tad bendy in the middle.

VivoBook S510 keyboard and fingerprint reader — The S510's roomy keyboard makes for comfortable typing, and the trackpad's build-in fingermark reader is a polite bonus.

The keyboard boasts function keys for putting the S510 into sleep surgery airplane mode, plus a few other function cay-enabled shortcuts that disable the touchpad, turn inactive the showing, and change your external display settings. The laptop's power button is integrated into the top-right corner of the keyboard itself, although thankfully non right close to the Backspace. Search and settings shortcuts are lost in action, as is a dedicated numeric keypad.

The waxlike, responsive trackpad on the S510 comes with a bonus: a built-in, Windows Hello-compatible fingerprint lecturer in the top-right corner, which lets you unlock your Windows user profile every bit well as log in to any Windows Hello-enabled apps. Once the S510's fingerprint reader scanned my fingermark, the sensor established my fingertip in less than a second, and it never failed during my examination.

Asus VivoBook S510 speaker — The VivoBook S510's speakers sit on the bottom of the laptop, near the front.

The S510's stereo speakers sounded a little cleaner and crisper than supposed for a laptop, with a welcome wind of bass (and I do mean a "hint" of bass, as opposed to "mega" bass). Cranked at full volume, the speakers were hit-and-overlea; "Last and LET Perish" by Apostle Paul McCartney & Wings measured loud and clear, but the left speaker crackled observably during a Deutsche Grammophon recording of embryotic Mozart symphonies.

The S510's VGA webcam is…well, a VGA webcam, delivering grainy, blotchy video that's passable for basic video conferencing just little else.

Ports

The VivoBook S510 comes with a solid selection of ports, starting with ii USB 2.0 Type-A ports and an SD card reader on the left side.

On the right, you'll find USB 3.0 Type-A, USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gbps) Type-C, a full-size HDMI interface and a headphone jack. No mini-DisplayPort, VGA or ethernet, but that's not terribly surprising for the slim chassis of an ultrabook.

Asus VivoBook S510 right-side ports — USB 3.1, USB 3.1 Gen. 1 Case C, HDMI, and a phone jack comprise the VivoBook S510's right-minded-broadside ports.

General performance

The Core i7-7500U powering the VivoBook S510 performed predictably for a dual-core chip: lively for the everyday stuff, simply sluggish at the much demanding, CPU-intensive chores that quad-kernel ultrabooks perform with informality. We didn't wait to be so discomfited away the S510's bombardment life, unfortunately—more on that below.

PCMark 8 Work Conventional

Forward, we set back the S510 through its paces with PCMark 8 Work 2.0 Conventional, a test that simulates such office chores as web browsing, word processing, and spreadsheet-based number crunching. Generally speaking, a laptop needs to sunshiny a score of 2,000 to perform office duties swimmingly.

With its score of 3,239, the VivoBook S510 many than makes the grade, posting unitary of the faster scores compared to similarly configured laptops.

HandBrake

Next up: our HandBrake benchmark, a more demanding, CPU-modifier torture test in which we encode a 30GB MKV video file. The Handbrake test tells us a lot about how a laptop handles crushing CPU loads: Does it spin up its fans and dissolve the case? Or does it tap the brakes to keep things nerveless?

As its middling HandBrake score suggests, the VivoBook S510 splits the divergence betwixt excessive heat and performance. Yes, the S510's fans began to whir and its chassis warmed up during the Handbrake test, but after a quick CPU burst at its top speed of 3.50GHz, the S510's duple-effect i7 central processing unit leveled off at about 3.05GHz, advantageously shy of its maximal.

Cinebench R15

The S510's HandBrake results were mirrored in our Cinebench R15 test, other CPU-intensive benchmark that pushes a laptop's processor to its limits as it renders a 3D project.

Once again, the VivoBook S510's dual-core i7 processor briefly gunned to its top 3.50GHz speed (and yes, its fans revved up to compensate), and erst again, it soon dialed itself down to well-nig 3.05GHz. The S510's Cinebench score is pretty much in subscriber line with other recent dual-core i7 laptops we've seen, but none could compete with a quad-nitty-gritty laptop.

3DMark Pitch Loon

We didn't expect the VivoBook S510 to rattle any cages in price of graphics performance surrendered its Intel co-ed graphics core, and its test results with Futuremark's 3DMark Sky Frogman benchmark confirmed our suspicions.

asus vivobook 3dmark skydiver overall — Discrete artwork makes the difference in tests like 3DMark Skydiver. The Asus VivoBook S510 could handle low-end to moderate gaming, but that's about it.

With an general score of 3,769, the VivoBook S510 is (again) in line with competing laptops using Intel HD 620 graphics, but far short of quasi-spec'ed ultrabooks with one cardinal difference: distinct graphics. Soh no, it won't follow spouting Portion 2 or Overwatch at a silky-smooth 60 frames per bit on max settings, but some dialed-refine Diablo 3 or Minecraft isn't out of the question.

Battery life history

Battery life is where the Asus VivoBook S510 gets interesting, not to honorable mention disappointing. We examination a laptop's battery life story aside looping a 4K video file using the Windows 10 Movie &ere; TV app, with the volume on central (we kept a distich of earbuds plugged in) and the expose tuned to about 250 nits. In the S510's lawsuit, that substance the brightness setting was almost fully cranked.

asus vivobook battery life2 — The Asus VivoBook fell far behind its closest challenger in our video rundown test, lasting a shockingly scant five hours rather than the foretold eight Oregon nine.

Unremarkably, we ask a laptop of the VivoBook's size and system of weights socio-economic class to survive our battery drain test for a goody-goody eight or nine hours. Unfortunately, the S510 conked unsuccessful merely shy of five hours.

What gives? According to the Windows Tax Manager, the S510's Central processor speed seldom rose wine above 1.5GHz during the examine (which is in reality much lower than the Central processor's 2.5GHz-ish idling speed), indeed a hyperactive central processor isn't to blame. A more in all likelihood perpetrator is the 15.6-inch 1080p expose, which must be dialed all the way up to come across our stripped standard for indoor brightness.

Conclusion

The $799 VivoBook S510 looks enticing, given its 15-inch expose, peppy productiveness and solid excerption of ports, all crammed into a sleek 3.7-pound shell. Unfortunately, the S510's regular shelling life means you'll be searching for a power socket very much rather that you should be.