Asus is well known for their best premium and gaming laptops around the world, they have their budget series as well and in addition to that they have expanded their laptop portfolio with its VivoBook X505 laptop.
It’s a budget device but it leaves you with a good impression after the first glance. With starting price at Rs. 30,990 You can’t consider expecting a lot from it but when you spend some time with it you might start to like it.

First lets the specifications list

• 15.6-inch FHD (1920 x 1080) NanoEdge display
• AMD Ryzen 5 2500U Processor, 2.0 GHz (2 M Cache, up to 3.6 GHz)
• AMD Radeon Vega 8 Graphics
• Up to 16GB DDR4 2400MHz RAM
• 1TB 5400RPM HDD
• 2 x stereo speakers with ASUS SonicMaster technology
• Windows 10 Home
• Dual Band 2X2 MIMO
• 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2
• 42Whrs Lithium-polymer, 3-cell battery

So lets start the review

Design and build

The new VivoBook 15 is styled more like a traditional laptop but with thin bezels. The VivoBook 15’s case is a blend of premium and budget materials. The lid is made out of aluminium with a brushed finish. The hinges don’t allow the lid to be pushed all the way back to 180 degrees but you can get a wide enough angle as per your convenience. The slim borders of the display give the VivoBook 15 (X505Z) a modern look, and this also helps shrinks the overall footprint of the laptop a bit, compared to most 15.6-inch models.

This laptop is only 18.9 mm thick and weighs only 1.6Kg, we dont see such type of thin and light weight laptops at this price range. Asus claims 81 per cent screen-to-body ratio on this laptop.

All the essential ports are present in this laptop which are (Two USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0 (both Type-A), a USB Type-C 3.1 (Gen1) port, HDMI, a headphone and microphone combo port, Gigabit Ethernet, and a full-sized SD card slot). The palm-rest area is spacious enough for even the largest hands, which is good. Key travel is also decent with good tactile feedback.
There’s no backlighting for the keys, and no number pad either. The trackpad is spacious and works well with Windows gestures.

As far as display is concerned it has a 15.6 inch FHD with 60Hz refresh rate. Display is good because at this price range other brands five only TFT display which lacks details and has dull colors. The screen also boasts good viewing angles

Performance

The VivoBook 15 is powered by an AMD-based Ryzen processor. There are two VivoBook 15 configurations, one with the low-end Ryzen 3 and the Ryzen 5. They also differed in terms of the RAM and storage. Although this laptop doesn’t have ssd so its that fast. The 1TB Toshiba hard drive isn’t very quick, and this shows in benchmarks such as SiSoft Sandra’s File System test. The laptop returned a sequential read bandwidth of 106.4MB/s, random read bandwidth of 57.1MB/s and sequential read and write bandwidth of around 83MB/s. 

In my case, I used this laptop for basic tasks like editing a story on Google Doc, streaming movies on Netflix, and playing light games. It really depends on what tasks you will need the VivoBook 15 to handle. AMD’s Ryzen 5 2500U CPU is more or less similar to Intel’s Core i5-8250U CPU in most of the synthetic benchmarks we ran and in OpenGL graphics test saw a dip in framerate at 37.8fps for the integrated Radeon Vega 8 GPU, compared to 52fps with Intel’s UHD Graphics 620 GPU.

So in your day to day usage this light weight laptop is easily could be your primary notebook and you are going to be doing browsing, typing, emailing, watching movies and light gaming.

Coming to the benchmark scores here are some of the benchmarks i got in some of the tests e.g in Pc mark 10 it scored 2392 , in 3D mark it got 1688 in fire strike and in Time spy the score was 620. For Pc mark 8 it got a score of 4002

In Cinebench R15 the open GL frame rate was 32.43

Battery

After testing about a week the 3-cell, 42WHr battery it lasted around three-and-a-half hours with browsing and streaming YouTube videos over Wi-Fi
, battery is not enough for a 15.6-inch laptop. In work conventional 2.0 battery life test we got a score of 2599 and 3h 38min time

Keyboard and Touchpad

In Asus laptops keyboard has always been good, they provides good quality keyboard and this time well we aren’t disappointed by them. The keys are large and feels solid not loose.

The design is also good but it doesn’t have a number pad on it just because of its light weight and compact design and the keys aren’t backlit as well but the typing experience is good i would say.
The touchpad, on the other hand, seems responsive enough and fairly accurate and it comes with smooth finish

Final Verdict

This is a budget laptop priced at Rs. 35,990, it’s tough to find anything that matches the model we have in terms of specifications, the one we find was
Acer Aspire 5 (A515-51) but it has 4GB of RAM and a lower resolution display for a bit more money.

The VivoBook 15 (X505Z) launched in December with a 1-month exclusive tie-up with Paytm Mall, the battery life could have been better, but otherwise the versatility of this laptop is unmatchable.

If you are thinking to buy a budget laptop for your daily normal tasks with light gaming then this one is for you as you get a decently powerful CPU, plenty of storage, Windows 10 preinstalled, and a good set of ports. All of this makes the VivoBook 15 (X505Z) still worth considering for casual use.

Ratings (out of 5)

• Design: 3.5
• Display: 3
• Performance: 3
• Software: 4.5
• Battery life: 3
• Value for money: 4
• Overall: 3.5