ASUS Vivobook 14X OLED Review

The ASUS Vivobook 14X OLED is a mid-range laptop aimed at creatives and business professionals. It boasts some great CPU power along with some rather formidable technical specs but does it stand up to other laptops in its price range and should you consider picking this one up?

First up, the technical specifications. You can see these below:

• Intel Core i5-13500H 4.70GHz Processor (18MB L3)
• Up to 4.70GHz Boost Clock
• 12 Cores, 16 Threads
• Intel UHD Graphics
• 14″ 2.8K (2880×1800) OLED Display
• 8GB (1x8GB On-Board) DDR4 Memory
• 512GB M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD
• 1x USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-C Port (Power Delivery)
• 2x USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A Ports
• 1x HDMI 2.1 TMDS Port
• 1x 3.5mm Combination Audio Jack
• WiFi 6E 2×2 MIMO Dual-Band Adapter, Bluetooth 5.3
• 720P HD Webcam with Privacy Shutter
• 63Whr Integrated Li-Ion Battery
• Windows Hello Fingerprint Reader
• Backlit Chiclet Keyboard
• MyASUS Software
• Colour: Silver
• Windows 11 Home 64-bit
• 1 Year Warranty

Upon unboxing the ASUS Vivobook 14X OLED, the first thing you’ll notice is how shiny the laptop is. It’s sporting a shiny silver metallic finish but unlike its pricier brethren, this laptop is a fingerprint magnet. Amusingly, the laptop has a fingerprint reader which can be used to log into the device. This is located on the trackpad in the right hand side corner.

The laptop being 14 inches in size means that some keyboard real estate had to be culled. There’s no numpad here unfortunately and this can be a deal breaker for a lot of people. If you use numpads a lot or you’re heavily invested in Microsoft Excel as a work tool, the lack of the numpad keys is quite a significant handicap to productivity.

The overall build quality of the laptop is great though, with the metallic chassis holding up really well when pressed. There’s little to no flex here and the keyboard keys themselves feel great to type on. Acclimatising to the keyboard didn’t take too long and after a few minutes with the device, typing on it was a breeze. The chiclet keys might not be to everyone’s taste but personally I thought that they were perfectly fine.

The laptop’s overall aesthetic is pretty plain and straightforward with the only prominent feature being the “ASUS Vivobook” branding on the lid. This is a fairly subdued plain and straightforward 14 inch notebook without any flashy embellishments. The bottom of the laptop features vents which will help with airflow and keeping it cool under load. Surprisingly, there wasn’t an ethernet port on this laptop but it did feature a Type-C port with Power Delivery.

When it came to performance, the ASUS Vivobook 14X OLED model held up pretty well despite the severe lack of a dedicated GPU. Only having Intel UHD Graphics here is quite a significant problem and we recommend that users try to find the version of this laptop with a NVIDIA laptop GPU (RTX 3050) inside it. The fact that the laptop’s screen is 2.8K and is running with onboard Intel UHD graphics does not bode well for its performance when under heavy workloads.

To test the laptop’s performance, Cinebench R23 was run and the following two scores were obtained for the Single Core benchmark test and the Multi-Core benchmark test:

The 13th gen Intel Core i5-13500H is quite powerful by modern day standards and was able to produce decent scores but this is by no means a powerhouse of a laptop. It will struggle with more creatively intense tasks, especially video editing or rendering. This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that it only has 8GB of DRR4 RAM. The laptop also tends to get rather warm when under load and a better cooling solution is definitely needed here to prevent thermal throttling or user discomfort when typing.

ASUS have pre-installed the “MyAsus” app on the device which allows users to choose different colour profiles for the display as well as different battery and fan settings from one easy to access location.

The laptop is Pantone certified and features 100% Display P3 colour coverage as well as 100% sRGB coverage so if you’re an artist, you can rest assured that your artwork will be colour accurate on this device. Additionally, the ASUS ProArt Creator Hub app is also available on this laptop which lets you create custom colour palettes as well as monitor the laptop’s performance. The 2.8K OLED display looks fantastic and is 90hz too which is a big plus point, especially in this price bracket.

The battery life of the laptop came in at roughly around 5 to 6 hours when using Firefox and looping a 2K resolution YouTube video with full brightness and 50% volume. Your mileage will vary though depending on what programs you’re running and what brightness level you’re using but users will be glad to know that the laptop charges up really quickly and has a small power brick. The laptop is also really thin and light so lugging this around will be a breeze and won’t break your back or strain your arms too much.

Given the fact that there wasn’t a dedicated GPU on this laptop and it just featured onboard Intel UHD Graphics, gaming is out of the question. You should be able to run some fairly basic looking games that aren’t graphically demanding but this isn’t a laptop that’s aimed at gamers anyway so don’t waste your time here. If you want to game on a device like this, be sure to purchase the version that contains an RTX 3050 or better yet, buy a laptop that’s actually aimed at gamers like one from the ASUS ROG Strix or ASUS TUF Gaming range.

Given the laptop’s hefty price tag of around R15,999, there are far better options available with much better performance both from ASUS themselves and their competitors. The bottom line is, this is a work orientated laptop that gets the job done but could have been so much more with just a few design changes. A better CPU, DDR5 RAM and a dedicated GPU would have made a world of difference here but alas, this isn’t the case. If you’re looking at purchasing the laptop, be sure to weigh up the pros and cons of choosing this particular model over some of the others out there. The OLED display is definitely a massive pro but the lack of a dedicated GPU is the real kicker here.

Find out more about the ASUS Vivobook 14X OLED here.

Reviewed by Sahil Lala