Asus Vivobook Pro 15 (2024)

Verdict

The Asus Vivobook Pro 15 (2024) is a solid Windows laptop for creatives with an excellent port selection, beefy performance and decent battery life. The keyboard is also tactile and the chassis is solid and chunky. Just watch out for its middling display against the competition.

Introduction

The Asus Vivobook Pro 15 (2024), on paper, offers a serious value proposition when it comes to what you’re getting for your hard-earned cash.

In the configuration I’ve got here, it comes with a beefy combo of an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS CPU, as well as a discrete Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a decent 15.6-inch 120Hz Full HD IPS screen. In the UK, that’s going to run you £999.

That’s quite the spec sheet for that price, considering the price of the likes of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) and a comparably specced MacBook Pro. With that grunt for that price, the Vivobook Pro 15 (2024) comes with quite high expectations – let’s take a look and see if it’s one of the best laptops we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• Solid build quality
• Fantastic port selection
• Decent keyboard, although a smaller trackpad

The Vivobook Pro 15 (2024), as with other Vivobook laptops in the past, is available in what Asus calls its Quiet Blue colour. It’s a shade of dark blue that helps this laptop look especially smart and a little different to the sea of black and grey that modern laptop design has become.

At 1.8kg, it’s reasonably hefty and chunky for a laptop of its screen size, although remains portable enough to slot into a case in a bag for carrying on your travels, while also coming with a lay-flat hinge for collaborative working. To back up its sturdiness, the Vivobook Pro 15 (2024) also carries US MIL-STD 810H certification for resistance to shock, temperature, and particle ingress, which is a handy addition.

Against other ultrabooks whose port selection is mostly USB-C ports and little else, the Vivobook Pro 15 (2024) feels refreshing with an extensive set of inputs. The left side is home to a pair of USB 2.0 Type-A ports, while the right hand side houses another USB-A, although this one is a 3.2 Gen 1 port.

There is also a USB 4.0-capable Gen 3 Type-C port which supports power delivery and display out, as well as an HDMI 2.1 FRL port, a microSD card reader and a 3.5mm combo audio jack, while wireless connectivity comes in the form of Wifi 6E for networking and Bluetooth 5.3. That’s pretty good.

The Vivobook Pro 15 (2024)’s keyboard gives you everything from a dedicated number pad to a smaller nav cluster, convenient function row and arrow keys. It’s a solid chiclet affair with a short travel, but felt reasonably responsive in day-to-day use, while its white backlight offers decent coverage and vividity for after-dark working.

As for the trackpad, the mouse buttons themselves are tactile and not mushy, although it is on the smaller side against other laptops and ultrabooks of this screen size.

Display and Sound

• Decent detail and smoother motion
• Middling colour accuracy and brightness
• Speakers offer lots of volume, but little else

As opposed to opting for a more exciting OLED screen as other Vivobook Pro models tend to, this particular option goes for a tried-and-tested 15.6-inch Full HD IPS screen. It also has the benefit of a 120Hz refresh rate for smoother motion.

It’s a reasonable display in terms of all-around performance with results that tick all the right boxes with solid viewing angles, decent detail and responsive motion, although is a little dim, while colour accuracy and temperature could be better.

The 97% sRGB coverage means mainstream colours for productivity workloads are displayed with generally excellent accuracy, while the 72% Adobe RGB and 73% DCI-P3 numbers are underwhelming for a laptop designed for creatives who will most likely be engaging in colour-sensitive workloads where those gamuts are important.

A maximum brightness of 238.3 nits on one hand virtually meets Asus’ claim of 250 nits from this panel, although is behind our 300 nit target, which is disappointing for a laptop at this price and means you’re best to keep it indoors . Blacks are reasonable with a measure 0.14 level being about as good as it gets for an LCD screen, as is the 1130:1 contrast ratio, while the 7000K temperature is a little off.

When it comes to the built-in speakers, they get quite loud and come with a surprising amount of bass, which is pleasant. However, the top end is a little off, while the mid-range feels quite thin. They’re serviceable for casual viewing, but not much else.

Performance

• Solid CPU results with the Ryzen 9 7940HS
• RTX 4060 provides some welcome graphical oomph
• SSD could be a bit quicker

The Vivobook Pro 15 (2024) packs in a fair bit of power for the price. Inside there’s an 8 core/16 thread AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS CPU, which makes for one of AMD’s more powerful laptop chips. This powers it to some serious levels of performance which is reflected in high-riding scores in the likes of Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23, proving CPU-intensive work shouldn’t be much trouble. Its results are right in the mix with similarly-priced laptops such as the Lenovo LOQ 15i and HP Omen 16 (2023), even with the latter being more of a mid-range gaming choice.

With this in mind, the Nvidia RTX 4060 that’s included here also gives the Vivobook 15 Pro (2024) some graphical horsepower with a solid result in our 3D Mark Time Spy test. It’s not as strong, oddly, as the two competitors mentioned above, despite having the same GPU, but offers a much better score than those ultrabooks that rely on an iGPU – that even goes for ones that cost a lot more.

The Nvidia RTX 4060 also offers some oomph for gaming workloads at 1080p with respectable scores in the likes of Returnal (65fps) and Rainbow Six Extraction (97fps).

It was a similar story with Cyberpunk 2077’s 59.76fps result, although adding DLSS Frame Gen into the mix pushed things up to 79.92fps, which is solid enough for a laptop not necessarily aimed at gaming. You may want to steer clear of ray-traced games, even with the 4060 inside, as on the RT: Ultra preset, Cyberpunk 2077 slumped down to 36.86fps at 1080p.

16GB of DDR5 RAM offers some solid headroom for the intensive workloads this laptop is designed for, while the 512GB SSD provides a reasonable amount of storage for saving files and apps. It isn’t the speediest drive, though, with measured speeds of 4337.61MB/s for reads and just 1827.22MB/s for writes.

Software

• Reasonably clean Windows 11 install
• MyAsus offers lots of useful functions
• Other convenient apps also present

The Vivobook Pro 15 (2024) runs Windows 11, and is for the most part bloatware-free, with the only real annoyance being the presence of McAfee antivirus. With this in mind, it’s an otherwise clean install of Windows 11 with some of Asus’ own tools thrown in.

Chief among these is MyAsus, which acts as the laptop’s control panel outside of Microsoft’s own settings where you can monitor everything from battery percentage to the load on the CPU and RAM utilisation. You can also fiddle with the fan profile, as well as enabling features to improve battery longevity and which type of tasks the built-in network card prioritises.

Other than this, you also get Asus GlideX for sharing screens across devices from the laptop, as well as Asus ScreenXpert for managing windows across any connected Windows displays, and Dolby Access for improving audio and video playback.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 8 hours 30 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting between 1 and 2 working days

For a laptop this powerful, the Vivobook Pro 15 (2024) offers some reasonable endurance, lasting for 8 hours and 30 minutes in our battery benchmark test where the brightness is dialled down to 150 nits and we let the PC Mark 10 battery test run until the laptop conks out.

It may not be as long as other ultrabooks out there, but it is longer than this laptop’s OLED brother, the Asus Vivobook Pro 15 OLED. You may need to do a bit of hypermiling to get it to last a full working day before closing the lid and going home, although you will probably be looking at the percentage just before you decide to clock off.

It’s reasonably brisk to charge the 70Whr battery with a 150W adapter, too. Going from zero to 50% took just 28 minutes, while if you want a full charge, that took 96 minutes.

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