ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55 Review - Quick Verdict
The ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55 is an inexpensive laptop that comes with some excellent features. The laptop is powerful enough to engage a mid-range user and even some heavy users can get by with this machine. The device is great for media consumption, thanks to its gorgeous 1080p screen. In this price range, you’d be hardpressed to find a better laptop with the same feature set. Highly recommended.
- Excellent laptop for the price
- Gorgeous display with super thin bezels
- Impressive battery life
- Not great for gaming
Author's Rating
Welcome to this ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55 review. Here, we take a look at this new mid-range laptop from the house of ASUS that targets people who want power without spending a lot of money. Finding a durable, powerful laptop with a budget can be a challenge but this model might present a solution to this problem.
The ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55 laptop comes loaded with a good set of specs even for this price which is impressive, to say the least. In fact, you find some premium feature that you usually don’t see even in most highly-priced laptops. But how well does this laptop perform on a day-to-day basis? Is it worth your money? Let’s find out.
Design
There is nothing fancy when it comes to the design of the ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55. We have a plastic build but it is not that cheap, for both touch and feel. You have multiple color options such as Peacock blue, Coral crush, Transparent silver and Slate gray.
The ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55 is easily one of the most portable laptops out there. You can feel how light this device is as soon as you pick it up. It weighs just about 3.5 pounds which is super light, and you can carry this laptop anywhere without any problems.
There are a few design elements that stand out in this laptop. For example, the ErgoLift hinge is a small improvement over how the hinge works but it makes such a good impact on everyday usage. This hinge lifts the keyboard by 2 degrees and makes typing easier.
The keyboard on this device is also pretty good. The keys have a key travel of 1.4mm which isn’t that bad for a laptop. You get backlighting on the keyboard and that’s always handy. You even get a number pad which is a nice addition. The touchpad is a Windows precision touchpad so you get all the gestures without any issues.
ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55 Specs
The ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55 has a 15.6-inch display that comes with a full HD resolution. The display gives you colors that pop and is excellent media consumption and gaming. This is not an IPS display so you’re not going to get very good viewing angle, but that’s okay for the price.
One of the better things about the display is how they’ve managed to shrink the bezels around it. We have a super-thin bezel that makes this laptop look much premium that is is. Thanks to these bezels, we have a screen-to-body ratio of 88% and that’s pretty neat.
The multimedia experience on this laptop is neat. We’ve already talked about the display, but the audio department is also good at what it does. Though the sounds might get distorted at maximum volume, you get a decent experience with anything less.
You can store a whole lot of media on the laptop’s 1TB hard drive. In addition to the hard drive, there is also a 128GB SSD which is super fast. The SSD brings a lot when it comes to the performance of this device. The operating system is installed on the SSD so it boots in just a few seconds. The same can be said for any application or game that is installed on the SSD.
Raw Performance
The ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55 comes with an AMD R5 4500U chip. This one here is a quad-core processor that comes with a base clock frequency of 2.1GHz and a turbo clock speed of 3.7GHz. This poses as a mid-range processor and does exactly that.
When it comes to benchmarks, the processor gets a CPUMark score of 8161 which is not too shabby. Being a mid-range processor, it does a pretty good job in running everyday applications like browsers, media players and office applications. You can even run some high-end apps without any problems.
The 8 gigs of DDR4 RAM in the memory department support the processor and makes sure that you get a consistent performance everywhere. It allows you to do a bit of multitasking which is impressive. Thanks to the multithreading capacity of the processor, you can run some heavy applications on this machine.
Gaming on the ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55
The ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55 is not a gaming laptop. The Radeon Vega 8 is the integrated graphics card here and there is no discrete graphics card in this laptop. As a result, gaming on this device is a bit crippled. You might be able to do some light gaming, but anything other than that might result in a disappointing experience.
Connectivity and Battery life
The ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55 gives you a ton of connectivity options. There is a couple of USB 2.0 ports, a USB type C port, a USB 3.0 port, an HDMI port, a headphone jack and also a micro SD card reader. The laptop also comes with support for wireless connectivity options like WiFi and Bluetooth for easy connectivity.
The battery life is one of the best selling points of the ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55. With light usage, you can get more than 8 hours of battery which is fantastic. When you’re doing some heavy lifting, you can expect the battery life to drop to about 3 to 5 hours depending on what you do. But overall, an impressive battery life.
Bottomline
The ASUS VivoBook 15 F512DA-EB55 is a budget laptop that comes with some excellent features. You can work on this device, enjoy media, and even do some light gaming if the integrated GPU permits that. We see this machine as a perfect fit for users who need a bit of power and also does a lot of media consumption. If you’re one of those users, then you’ll find good value in this laptop.