ASUS Vivobook 15 F512DA-EB55-SL Review

Flagship laptops usually take all the spotlight when you’re searching for a new laptop. If you’re in the market for a mid-range laptop, then you’re going to have to go through tons of models before you finalize the one that suits your needs the best. The ASUS Vivobook 15 F512DA-EB55-SL is a mid-range laptop that promises to be a good one for those who need a mid-range notebook.

In this ASUS Vivobook 15 F512DA-EB55-SL review, we take a good glimpse at this new notebook from ASUS that claims to be the perfect mid-range laptop. The pricing of the laptop also makes this a very attractive offering. With the right specs, this seems to be a good choice on paper. But how good is this laptop when it comes to real-life performance? Is it worth the price tag? Let’s find that out.

Design

The laptop we have here comes in a shade dubbed transparent silver. There are other color options like blue, slate gray, coral and normal gray. ASUS laptops usually have a distinct finish on the lid, but that’s missing here. The smooth finish on the laptop is nice to touch and makes for a premium feel.

There is a small lip on the top of the lid to make it easier to lift open the notebook. Surprisingly, you can lift the lid with just one hand which is not something we can say about a lot of laptops. Talking about easy lifting, the laptop weighs just 3.5 pounds making it one of the lightest laptops in the 15’6″ category.

Another distinct feature in the design department is the NanoEdge display. The screen has very thin bezels making the screen-to-body ratio an impressive 88%. This improves your viewing experience like never before. It also reduces the overall footprint of the device as well. What fascinated us is the fact that they’ve managed to keep the webcam at the top despite the thinner bezels.

The keyboard on the ASUS Vivobook 15 F512DA-EB55-SL is a comfortable one to type on. We get key travel of 1.4mm which is okay for a laptop. It comes with backlighting so you can work with this laptop in dimly lit areas as well. Another nice touch is the ergo lift design where the keyboard is in a slightly lifted position making it easier to type on.

The touchpad is a Windows precision touchpad and comes with good responsiveness. There is a fingerprint scanner on the top right corner of the touchpad. With this scanner, you can utilize Windows hello and log into your laptop with your fingerprint.

ASUS Vivobook 15 F512DA-EB55-SL Specs

Before going into the raw performance of the ASUS Vivobook 15 F512DA-EB55-SL laptop, let’s talk about its multimedia capabilities.

The laptop has a 15.6″ display that has a full HD resolution. The smaller bezels on the sides make up for a delightful viewing experience. It really spoils all other monitors with thick bezels. Trust us, once you use this, you’re not going back to them. Enjoying Netflix and other entertainment platforms is a real pleasure.

We have an IPS panel here, and with that, we get excellent viewing angles. You can stand from any angle and you wouldn’t miss a single color on the screen. The color reproduction and contrast are also impressive allowing you to do photo and video editing on this machine (not professionally though).

The audio output is also not that bad. At full volume, you can fill a small room comfortably. However, you may find the sound a bit distortive at higher volumes. You can enjoy a good multimedia experience with around 75% to 80% of the max volume.

Raw Performance

The ASUS Vivobook 15 F512DA-EB55-SL is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U. This is a quad-core processor from the house of AMD with a base clock speed of 2.1GHz. With the help of turbo, the processor can clock to a maximum of 3.7GHz which is enough power for most people.

Being a mid-range processor, this chip does very well when it comes to everyday activities. You can handle your daily tasks without any hiccups. You can even push this processor to run some processor-intensive applications as it can handle apps like photo editors, programming IDEs, and even simulators like MATLAB.

The performance of the processor reflects in benchmark tests as well. It scores a modest 8131 in the CPUMark benchmark test which is decent. There are eight gigs of DDR4 RAM in the memory department. The processor and the memory work well together and offer a smooth experience wherever possible.

Storage and Gaming

For storage, we have a hard drive disk with a capacity of 1TB. There is also a solid-state drive with a capacity of 128GB. Both the storages make for a better end-user experience. You get the space in the hard drive while the SSD boosts the laptop’s performance in every way possible.

Let’s talk about gaming on the ASUS Vivobook laptop. There is no discrete graphics card in this model which makes it not that suitable for gaming. With the integrated graphics card i.e. the Radeon Vega 8 series, you should be able to do some light gaming and that’s it. If you’re into serious gaming then you should look into a serious gaming machine like this one.

Battery Life and Connectivity

The battery life of this Vivobook is more than satisfactory. With light usage, you should be able to get squeeze out 8 hours of battery life. With a bit of medium or heavy usage, the battery can last for about 5 hours and even that is impressive.

There are several ports in the ASUS Vivobook 15 F512DA-EB55-SL model for connectivity. You get a couple of USB 2.0 ports, a USB 3.0 port, a USB type C port, an HDMI port, a headphone jack, and a micro SD card reader. The laptop also supports 802.11ac WiFi which makes up for the absence of the Ethernet port. Like in most modern laptops, you get Bluetooth connectivity as well.

Bottomline

The ASUS Vivobook 15 F512DA-EB55-SL is a solid mid-range laptop that comes with a budget price tag. If you’re looking for a laptop that can handle your workload and your entertainment, then this one fits the bill. The laptop does not do well when it comes to gaming but excels in almost everything else. Go get this laptop if you’re in the hunt for an excellent mid-range laptop.