ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED Review

ASUS sent through one of their flagship Vivobook laptops, the Vivobook Pro 15 OLED, and I put it through a series of tests to see if it lives up to its “Pro” moniker. The ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED is quite an impressive laptop. It boasts a hefty lineup of technical specs that seemingly solidifies its position as a high-performance device – but how does it perform in a real-world scenario?

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

• AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS .520GHz Processor (16MB L3)
• Up to 5.20GHz Boost Clock
• 8 Cores, 16 Threads
• 15.6″ 2.8K (2880×1620) 120Hz OLED Display
• 100% DCI-P3, Pantone Validated
• 32GB (Onboard) LPDDR5X-5500MHz Memory
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 8GB GDDR6 Graphics
• 1TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD
• 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A
• 2x USB 2.0 Type-A
• 1x USB 4.0 Gen 3 Type-C Support Display / Power delivery
• 1x HDMI 2.1 FRL
• 1x 3.5mm Combo Audio Jack
• WiFi 6E 2×2 MIMO Dual-Band Adapter, Bluetooth 5.3
• 1080P HD Webcam with Dual Array Microphones
• 70Whr Integrated 3-Cell Li-Ion Battery
• Fingerprint Reader
• Backlit Chiclet Keyboard
• Colour: Quiet Blue
• Windows 11 Home 64-bit
• ASUS Armoury Crate
• 1 Year Warranty

The first thing you’ll notice upon unboxing the Vivobook Pro 15 OLED is how sleek and downright beautiful it looks. It has a premium metal chassis that surprisingly, barely picked up fingerprint marks in my time with the laptop. ASUS claims it has an anti-bacterial coating and I’m inclined to believe that. The bottom of the laptop has some standard-looking vents cut into it and these are for better airflow when under load. The side of the laptop features the I/O ports which includes a Type-C USB port and a microSD card slot but shockingly, there’s no Ethernet port here.

Upon booting up the laptop, you’ll immediately appreciate how quick it is to start up. This is due to the onboard 1TB NVME in addition to the rather powerful AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS and 32GB of DDR5 RAM.

The laptop’s screen will also grab your attention since it’s a 120hz 2.8K (2880×1620) OLED display and even with the default ASUS Vivobook wallpaper, it looks fantastic. Colours on this laptop are extremely vivid and colour accurate. If you’re a designer or artist, you will absolutely love the fact that it features multiple colour profiles and has full 100% DCI-P3 coverage.

On top of this, the laptop is Pantone-verified and features the “ProArt Creator Hub” software which lets users create colour palettes in addition to monitoring the laptop’s performance.

To test the laptop’s performance, I ran a series of benchmark tests using 3D Mark and obtained the following scores in TimeSpy, Port Royal and the CPU Profile test respectively. You can see these results below.

From the above scores, you can see that the laptop is no slouch when it comes to performing under load. Most notably, the CPU temperature peaked at around 90 degrees and never went higher, which means that the cooling in the laptop was doing a fantastic job of keeping things under control. The high scores in both TimeSpy and Port Royal also indicate that even if you throw a modern 2023 game at the device, it will perform ridiculously well. This is thanks to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 8GB GDDR6 Graphics featured in the laptop.

If you want to save power, users can opt to use the onboard Radeon 780M built into the CPU instead as this is also quite a capable GPU but your performance will take a knock if you do so.

To further test the laptop’s performance, I ran Cinebench R23’s single and multi-core benchmark tests and obtained the following scores:

The laptop yielded some exceptionally great scores and what really stood out was the fact that the renders were completed really quickly. If you’re going to be using this laptop for creative purposes, it will certainly meet your expectations and can easily compete with desktops in the same price range.

Running Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s benchmark with the highest settings with Ray Tracing enabled and disabled yielded the following two results:

I also ran Ghostrunner 2 with all settings maxed out and got quite high framerates in this title too as you can see below:

It should be noted that the laptop’s resolution is 2.8K which is significantly higher than the standard 1080p resolutions we’re used to seeing on devices. For it to consistently put out more than 60FPS in a modern game like Shadow of the Tomb Raider is not an easy feat but it did it anyway. Ghostrunner 2’s performance was slightly different with the framerate ranging from 40 to 70 FPS depending on what’s going on on the screen at the time but if you drop the resolution down to a slightly lower value (2K), you’ll easy hit a stable solid 60FPS.

Typing on the Asus Vivobook Pro 15 OLED was extremely satisfying and users should also note that the trackpad is quite large. For creative users this is great since the extra real-estate here really does feel great to use if you’re not using a mouse with the laptop.

The ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED also feels incredibly light to carry. Coming in at 1.8kg, it feels almost unreal how powerful this laptop is as well as how light it is. We’ve really come a long way in terms of portable technology and performance being able to be packed into lightweight packages. The laptop also feels rather sturdy and there’s no flex at all even when pressing down on the keyboard quite hard. That metal chassis really makes it feel strong. Asus have done a great job here and should be commended for it.

The battery life of the laptop will of obviously vary depending on what programs you’re running and if you’re using it at full brightness and with WiFi enabled or not. A full charge lasted me more than 7 hours with heavy usage of Firefox and YouTube. Gaming will obviously drain the battery way faster since both the CPU and GPU will sapping large amounts of power continuously. The laptop has a relatively large power brick so do keep that in mind if you plan on travelling with it as this will add to the overall weight of what you have to lug around.

One quirk that I picked up on while reviewing the laptop is the fact that it froze up a few times while I was using it. This apparently seemed to have been a problem with the AMD drivers linked to the CPU and onboard GPU and resolved itself after an update. Users should take note of this if they run into any issues. Always remember to keep your hardware up to date, folks!

Ultimately, the ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED is an excellent laptop for daily use if you’re a student or a creative. The RTX 4060 combined with the 32GB of DDR5 RAM and the powerful Ryzen 9 CPU means that it can handle pretty much everything you can throw at it. Coming in at around R34,999, you’re effectively getting desktop level performance here in a portable form factor along with a gorgeous 2.8K resolution 120Hz OLED screen. ASUS have crafted a work of art here and if you’re in the market for a new laptop, I can safely recommend picking up the Vivobook Pro 15 if it falls within your budget. There isn’t much else out there in this price range that can compete with it and especially not in this thin and light form factor.

Find out more about the ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED here.

Reviewed by Sahil Lala