The Vivobook 16X, part of a lineup of powerful laptops by Asus aimed at creators and artists, is an absolute beast.

My review unit came packed with the 12th generation i9 CPU, a whopping 32 GB of RAM, a terabyte of solid-state drive storage and a massive, 16-inch 4K OLED screen with vibrant colours and punchy visuals. The studio-quality speakers also add to the experience. Given these impressive specifications, the hefty price tag of nearly Rs 1.6 lakh seems surprisingly reasonable. In fact, I would argue that this laptop falls into the affordable category, given its specifications.

But, as anyone who has ever used a piece of technology knows, impressive specs aren't worth the sheet of paper they're printed on if they are not backed up by a suitable user interface. And in this regard, Asus knocks the ball out of the park.

I have had my review unit for about three weeks now, and during these three weeks of mixed (light, medium and heavy usage) testing, the laptop has yet to miss a step — it took everything I threw at it and more like a champ. Even during my heaviest sessions — at least 20 open Google Chrome tabs, multiple applications running in the background, all the while playing The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt on Steam — the laptop's heat sink barely had any work to do; I can count on my 10 fingers the number of times the fan was called in for cooling duty.

Considering this, a professional use case certainly can — and should —be made, especially as this is aimed at content creators.

The hardware

experience

The laptop's body is made of metal, which contributes to its beefy feel — the laptop weighs in at just about 2.3 kilograms, which puts it on the heavier side of laptops these days. But you're hardly going to be putting this on your lap if you're into professional-grade work.

There are ports enough for everyone and their aunt here — the Vivobook 16X OLED has two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, one Thunderbolt USB Type-C port that supports both external displays and power delivery (for charging), one HDMI 2.1 port, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, an ethernet port and an SD card reader.

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The keyboard is one of the best I've typed on — the keys have good travel and it makes a pleasant clicky sound as your fingers fly over the keys. It's a backlit keyboard too, so you're not confined to working only in well-lit places. Further, the touchpad has a customisable iPod-style circular 'DialPad' that can be enabled or disabled with a finger-swipe. Neat.

And the screen. Oh boy, the screen. I went straight from my 13.3-inch MacBook Air screen to the Vivobook 16X and I kid you not, for the first couple of days, I felt like I was working with a miniature IMAX screen. It's massive, even by most professional laptop standards. The colours are crisp, and thanks to the OLED technology, watching videos is an immersive experience with true, deep blacks.

The Vivobook 16X is equipped with Harman Kardan speakers which are surprisingly loud — and bassy.

The laptop is powered by a 90WHrs four-cell lithium-ion battery. It lasted me just over three hours with screen brightness on full, which is not bad at all. I suspect the battery life would have been shorter had it been an LCD screen instead of OLED.

In conclusion

The Vivobook 16X OLED makes light work of the heaviest of tasks and I'd easily recommend it for professionals who are shopping for a laptop in this price range and do not want to pay for a Mac.

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(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)

First Published:Sept 20, 2022 4:04 PM IST