Asus Vivobook S 15 (S5507) Copilot+ PC review

25 August 2024

The Vivobook S 15 (S5507) Copilot+ is the first notebook from Asus to be powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip. It's also part of the first wave of devices to ship on this new platform as part of Microsoft's renewed push into the ARM-based PC market currently dominated by Apple.

The Vivobook S 15 is a premium device with a price tag of $1300. For that money, you are getting the Snapdragon Elite X in its base configuration, a 15.6-inch 120Hz OLED display, 16GB memory, 1TB storage, and a 70Wh battery. The device is targeted towards home and office users who would like to do some light productivity work and media consumption on the go.

In this review, we will be looking at how the Vivobook S 15 performs but also what it's like to live with an ARM-based Windows PC.

Design

The S5507 design isn't anything new and looks similar to other Vivobook S 15 models before it. The exterior, made out of aluminum, has a smooth matte finish to it with a subtle Vivobook logo on the lid. The back has a row of vents with a long raised rubber foot.

Lift the lid and you'll notice that you now have your thumbprints on the webcam. Also, you managed to slide the webcam cover while opening so now the face detection doesn't work. The location of these elements is rather unfortunate, as both the webcam and especially the sliding mechanism for the cover are right where you are expected to put your thumb to open the lid. You have to train yourself to avoid these which makes something as simple as opening the lid more involved than I'd like.

Once open, you'll be greeted by the large 15.6-inch display. The display gets very close to the side edges but the top and bottom bezels are noticeably thicker. If, for some reason, you kept opening the lid, you'll realize that it actually opens a full 180 degrees, making it flat with the base.

Below the display, the keyboard deck is also made out of aluminum with the same silver finish. Even the keys are silver, which has an unfortunate downside as will be discussed later. Below the keys is the large trackpad that measures around 13cm x 8.5cm. The trackpad is off-center so it aligns with the keyboard and not the numpad on the right.

The Vivobook S 15 is relatively compact despite the large display. More importantly, it's also very light, weighing in at just 1.42kg or 3.13lb. This makes it very easy to slip into a backpack and I barely even noticed the added weight.

The overall design of the notebook is very business-like. I'm not overly fond of the all-silver scheme, especially the silver keys that also have a somewhat boring, tile-like design. A black variant would have been nice but this model only comes in one color. However, there isn't much to complain about the build quality, which is good overall. The keyboard deck has a slight flex to it but it's only noticeable when you press down on it rather than while typing. Asus also claims US MIL-STD 810H rating for added peace of mind.

Display

The Vivobook S 15 has a 15.6-inch, 2880x1620 OLED display. It has a 120Hz refresh rate with a claimed 0.2ms response time, 600 nits peak brightness, 100 DCI-P3 color coverage, and HDR support.

Asus has included a handful of display options in the MyASUS app. The OLED Care feature enables a pixel refresh mode that runs when the display is static for 30 minutes to minimize burn-in. There's an OLED flicker-free dimming option that reduces brightness without causing display flicker which some people perceive. The Adaptive Edge Brightness setting dims the corners of the display on battery, which looks like having a vignette around the screen. At the default setting of 2, it's barely noticeable so it's best to just leave it on.

The display is color-calibrated at the factory and comes with a calibration certificate found in the MyASUS app. Asus also includes color calibration profiles to lock the display to sRGB, DCI-P3, Display-P3, or just leave it unclamped at its native gamut.

The OLED panel has outstanding image quality, with exceptional color accuracy, contrast, and viewing angles. The resolution is ample, and provides a sufficiently sharp and high resolution image, especially at the size. The 600 nits brightness is more than adequate for indoor use and is also fine outdoors unless you find yourself under direct sunlight.

The 120Hz refresh rate is a great accompaniment to the stellar image. You get very fluid scrolling, which is aided by OLED's phenomenal response times that are near instantaneous. HDR performance is also quite impressive but with no Dolby Vision support, you are limited to static metadata HDR10 content only.

The display does have two controversial aspects. First is the 16:9 aspect ratio, which is great for media consumption but not for productivity or even web browsing. The second is the glossy panel, which is terrific when you are in a pitch-dark room but anywhere else you are constantly fighting reflections.

That aside, it's hard not to be impressed by the display on the Vivobook S 15. Asus has done a great job on this one.

Keyboard and trackpad

The Vivobook S 15 has a standard chiclet-style keyboard with 1.7mm key travel and a numpad on the side. The keys have a single-zone RGB backlight, which can be customized in the MyASUS app.

The keyboard is comfortable with decent travel. The keys are slightly wide with less spacing than a typical chiclet-style which takes some getting used to but once done it was a breeze to type on. I am personally a bit split on the dedicated numpad on the right, especially since Asus has shown it can have a virtual numpad on the trackpad that functions just as well, and I'd rather have an evenly spaced keyboard and trackpad.

What I'm not split on is the unnecessary new Copilot key, which replaces the right control key. All this does is launch the Copilot 'app', which also happens to be just a window in Edge, and something you can just pin to the taskbar. All this is on top of the dubious value that Copilot brings. I'd much rather have my control key back, please.

As mentioned before, the keyboard features RGB backlighting, which feels a bit odd for a device of this nature. You can adjust the lighting color, pattern, and brightness from the MyASUS app but since it's a single-zone lighting, it will apply uniformly to the entire keyboard. The backlighting isn't very bright and has the unfortunate side effect of making the key legends difficult to see during the day as the light just blends with the silver surrounds, especially if you pick a neutral color like white.

Below the keyboard is the rather sizable trackpad. The smooth glass surface makes this a pleasure to use, although one could argue if it needs to be this big. Asus has assigned some gestures to the top and side edges, which control things like volume, brightness, and playback but I found myself triggering them accidentally too often. Thankfully, you can just disable them but you have to disable all of them and not just the one that's getting in your way.

The trackpad is hinged at the top as is usually the case but you can click on a good 80% of it and get a satisfying response, with only the top edge being unable to move.

One recurring issue I had with the trackpad was it would confuse a two-finger scroll gesture in the browser for a pinch-to-zoom gesture. The page would briefly zoom in a little before scrolling. This may be an issue with the trackpad driver that can potentially be fixed with an update.

ASUS also sent over its MD100 Marshmallow Mouse Steve Harrington Edition, a cutesy device with a funky pattern and a handy strap that can be tucked away when not needed. It's a decent mouse with Bluetooth and wireless connectivity, soft clicks and scroll wheel, and a slim, lightweight design.

Audio and webcam

The Vivobook S 15 has a pair of bottom-firing Harmon Kardon-tuned speakers. The speakers have decent audio quality, especially when the bundled Dolby Atmos app is enabled. There isn't much bass but voices sound clear with good timbre.

I was not particularly impressed by the headphone jack output. While it got very loud, there was noticeable background noise coming through the jack. The sound was also oddly light on bass and everything sounded thin and flat by default with the Atmos app disabled. I wouldn't recommend using the Atmos app for headphones as it brings additional distortion with it. Unfortunately, even if you turn it off, it somehow manages to turn itself on again.

The webcam quality is mediocre. Much was made about the image processing of the Snapdragon chips but I'm not seeing it. It looks like any other webcam, which is to say it's fine for the casual video call but you should still consider an aftermarket camera if you need it often.

Hardware and connectivity

The Vivobook S 15 S5507 runs on the Snapdragon X Elite X1E 78 100 chipset. It features 12 CPU cores that can clock up to 3.4GHz along with the Adreno X1 GPU clocked at 1250MHz.

The X1E 78 100 is one of the four Snapdragon X Elite models and is technically the runt of the litter. Not only does it have the lowest boost clock speed, but it's also the only one with no single or dual-core boost like on the other chips, which can temporarily boost one or two of their cores even higher. The GPU is also slower than the top two models.

Paired with the chip is 16GB or 32GB of LPDDR5X memory clocked at 8448MHz. Unlike Apple's M-series chips, the Snapdragon X Elite does not include the memory on-die. Rather, it's soldered onto the motherboard like on most other notebooks these days. While it's good that a 32GB option exists, it seems it's only available in select regions, and ours only came in 16GB with no other option available.

For storage, our review unit had a 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD with a 512GB option available in some regions. Thankfully, the SSD here is a standard 2280 M.2 drive, which can easily be replaced should you require more storage.

Despite what you might think, the Vivobook S 15 has a decently-sized cooling system inside with dual fans cooling dual heat pipes. There aren't any fanless notebooks yet based on this chip since it can pull a fair bit of power. But more on that later.

When it comes to connectivity, the Vivobook S 15 does really well, especially compared to its rivals. You get two full-size USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports on the right with 5Gbps bandwidth and on the left are two USB 4.0 Gen 3 Type-C ports, which support 40Gbps bandwidth and fast charging. There's also an HDMI 2.1 TDMS port here but in reality, it's just HDMI 2.0 in terms of actual bandwidth. Finally, there is a microSD card reader and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

For wireless connectivity, you get tri-band Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) and Bluetooth 5.4 with LE audio.

Software

The Vivobook S 15 comes with Windows 11 Home Edition installed. This is obviously the version built for the ARM 64-bit platform, and almost all the apps that come pre-installed are also built for ARM.

In terms of bloatware, Asus is generally pretty good. There are just a handful of Asus apps that are pre-installed, all of which can be removed. However, you should keep the MyASUS app as it offers a vast array of settings for the device along with the ability to upgrade the device firmware, which is separate from the Windows updates.

Being an ARM-based device, there was always going to be a question mark on how the device runs all the apps you are used to running on a Windows machine. This was a major bugbear of early ARM-based Windows devices, which could only run a select few apps from the Windows store that were built for ARM.

Fortunately, we have come a long way since then, and making things a lot easier this time around is Prism, the Windows emulator that lets you run x86-64 apps on the device without you even realizing it. Seriously, all you have to do is install the app as you normally would and it just runs as you'd expect it to. Well, except if it's a game, but more on that in the Performance section.

However, emulation isn't a free lunch, and there is a cost to translating the app to another architecture every time you are running it. While you won't notice the difference much in lightweight apps other than some delayed launch times, more demanding apps will run noticeably slower.

This is where native ARM apps come in. Thankfully, with a little bit of searching, you can usually find an ARM version of your app. Sometimes it will be in beta or even alpha but depending on the nature of the app can still run vastly better than a stable x86-64 version. The past month or so of using the Vivobook S 15 sent me down the rabbit hole of finding the ARM version of every app I use and it was actually kind of fun. I was surprised to see just how many apps do have an ARM version now, at least in some state of development. Funnily enough, it was usually the apps with small dev teams who were quick on the uptake but even bigger apps like DaVinci Resolve and Photoshop now have a native ARM version.

The combination of a robust emulator and a growing library of native apps means Windows on ARM is currently in a good position, at least as far as every day or commonly used productivity apps. Of course, there will be cases where the emulator doesn't work well nor is there a native app available but at least in my usage I never came across this scenario. Based on my personal experience as of August 2024, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Windows ARM notebooks to everyday home or office users.

Performance

Productivity

The Vivobook S 15 has four 'Fan profile' options in the MyASUS app which, counterintuitively, are actually the power limit options that in turn also affect the fan speeds. You get Whisper mode, which targets 20W as the peak power value, Standard, which is the default, targets 35W, Performance (45W), and finally, Full-speed mode, which targets 50W.

It's important to note these power figures as that's the only real information we get regarding how much power this chip pulls. Qualcomm has not provided access to any of the power consumption metrics from the chip so even though apps like HWiNFO can access information regarding clock speeds and temperatures, there is absolutely no data available on the amount of power being pulled.

Regardless of which power profile you select, the chip can hit the stated 3.4GHz across all 12 cores. Whisper can only hold 3.4GHz in an all-core workload for a couple of seconds before dropping down to 2.2GHz for the remaining duration. Standard stays a few seconds longer before dropping down to 2.7GHz. Performance will drop down to 3GHz and Full-speed will maintain 3.4GHz until it hits its 95-degree thermal limit. The chip regulates the number of cores it can assign to a task in batches of four, so you'll see four, eight, or all twelve cores being active depending on the task.

With all that in mind, the following benchmarks were run using the Full-speed profile in MyASUS and the Windows power profile left at the default Balanced. All attempts were made to get the ARM version of the benchmark wherever possible but unfortunately, some of the tests are still x86 only.

Benchmark	Category	Score
Cinebench R23 (x86)	Single	1120
	Multi	12753
Cinebench 2024	Single	107
	Multi	1130
Blender (Classroom)	Time (seconds)	372
7-Zip	Compression	91781
	Decompression	90799
Geekbench 6	Single	2446
	Multi	14277
	GPU (Vulkan)	23662
Geekbench AI	CPU (Quantized)	5837
	NPU (Quantized)	21633
Corona 10 (x86)	Rays/s	4332801
WebXPRT 4	Overall	280
JetStream 2	Score	282
Speedometer 3.0	Score	20.9

As mentioned before, there is a penalty for using emulation and you are looking at anywhere from 12.5% in 7-Zip to a massive 74% worse performance in Blender when switching from the native ARM to the x86 version.

Benchmark	Category	Score (ARM)	Score (x86)
Blender (Classroom)	Time (seconds)	372	646
7-ZIP	Compression	91781	80377
	Decompression	90799	79341

The four power profiles in MyASUS have a proportionately higher impact on performance as you go down the list. From Full-speed to Performance, you lose about 9% performance in Blender in the Classroom scene. Going down to the default Standard makes you lose about 22% of the performance of Full-speed and then finally at Whisper, you lose a significant 53% of the performance.

Benchmark	Power profile	Time (seconds)
Blender (Classroom)	Full-speed	372
	Performance	404
	Standard	451
	Whisper	567

Still, as you can see, even running at the lowest power level is better than running in x86 for Blender, as the Whisper mode on ARM outperforms Full-speed in x86.

On battery, the power profiles in MyASUS app do not change and you can still get the same performance, provided you leave the Windows power profile to Balance. However, by default, Windows switches to the Best Power Efficiency profile on battery, which has a severe impact on measurable performance.

Benchmark	Category	Time (seconds)
Blender (Classroom)	Power	372
	Battery	750

Now for some real-life testing. I tried using the Vivobook S 15 in a typical home use case consisting mostly of web browsing and media consumption and also in a more productivity-oriented setting with heavy image and video editing.

In the former, the Vivobook S 15 performed flawlessly. Regardless of whether you are on power or battery, there always seems to be ample power available and the device feels quick and responsive. Of course, this was mostly when running native ARM apps but even non-native apps seemed to run fine most of the time outside of benchmarks to the point it was easy to forget they were running under emulation.

When it came to heavier productivity tasks, there was a problem, and it was not the Snapdragon chip. Turns out, the chip has enough power to handle the things that I do for work, which is editing high-resolution RAW images in Affinity Photo (which also comes in native ARM) and occasionally editing a 4K video in DaVinci Resolve (also ARM but in beta). I was able to power through these apps without experiencing any major slowdowns. That is until I hit the limits of the 16GB memory. Unfortunately, this simply isn't sufficient to do any real productivity work on the device, and the moment I opened more than three RAW files or larger video projects, the performance ground to a halt.

As mentioned before, Asus does offer a 32GB memory option in some markets. That would be the go-to if you plan on doing memory-heavy tasks. Unfortunately, not having that option everywhere feels like leaving performance on the table as the Snapdragon X Elite chip, and thus the Vivobook S 15, is capable of more but is held back by the 16GB configuration. Home users probably wouldn't care for web and media applications but then again, you can also just use an iPad if that's all you want to do.

The 1TB drive that came with our Vivobook S 15 performed reasonably well. It's not the fastest drive we have seen but for the use cases this device is designed for it should be adequate.

Gaming

This is where things go pear-shaped for the Vivobook S 15 and the ARM-based Windows platform in general.

This is the unfortunate reality of the current situation; there are simply no games available for Windows at the time of writing that are based on the ARM architecture. This means every game you try will have to go through emulation, which affects games disproportionately compared to regular apps.

All the games I tried (and I tried a lot) fell into three categories:

• The game installed, launched, and ran as expected with reduced performance
• The game installed, launched, but had graphical errors and/or unplayable performance
• The game installed but could not be launched

A small subset of games fell in the first category. They installed and functioned more or less as they would on a native x86 device. The average frame rate wasn't great owing to the emulation, lack of drivers, or just a general lack of GPU performance, but it was stable and playable. Some examples of these include titles like Control, Metro Exodus, Alien: Isolation, Stray, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Unfortunately, most of the games fell into the second and third categories. While some games launched fine, the performance was often unplayable. If you were to just look at average frame rates, you might make the mistake of thinking the game runs fine but the frame time performance was all over the place with massive spikes that made the game difficult to play and impossible to enjoy. This includes titles such as God of War, Outer Wilds, Resident Evil 3, Counter-Strike 2, and Overwatch 2.

Some titles seemed to run fine but had visual issues. The Tomb Raider I-III Remastered collection, for example, ran perfectly but was too dark, which made it difficult to see. A couple of others also had artifacts like flashing textures and visual glitches while playing.

Then some games simply would not even launch. This included titles like Death Stranding and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. The first instantly crashes on launch. The second, like many others, searches for compatible drivers likely from Nvidia or AMD, and upon not finding any throws the system doesn't meet minimum requirements message and peaces out. Then there was Doom Eternal, which initially did not launch at all, then later would launch and crash after the opening logos, and most recently would launch and reach the menu before crashing.

A vast majority of games that won't launch were multiplayer titles with anti-cheat. Even if the game itself would run under emulation, the anti-cheat software would prevent the game from launching due to an incompatibility error. In some cases like Elden Ring where the multiplayer is an optional component of the game, it was possible to bypass the anti-cheat and directly launch the game to play offline. But with titles like Fall Guys, there's no way in.

The problem here is twofold. First and foremost, game developers are going to have to build native versions of their titles to be able to run properly. In the interim, some of them could at least make them launch so that even if the performance isn't great, one could still at least get into the game and maybe with a bit of fiddling around with the settings, have a somewhat playable experience. Second, Qualcomm needs to start shipping graphics drivers for titles. Nvidia does this, AMD does it, and now even Intel does it. There is no getting around it and if Qualcomm needs to be taken seriously in this space, it also needs to catch up with the others.

Microsoft has included a temporal image upscaling solution in Windows called Automatic super resolution, which runs a handful of whitelisted games at a lower internal resolution and then upscales them. Unfortunately, all the titles I tried that supported this feature looked awful as the resolution is far too low and non-adjustable. You are far better off launching the game normally and using whatever image upscaling technology the game comes with, like TSR, FSR, or XeSS.

In case you are wondering why there aren't any game benchmarks on this page, the answer for that is that the benchmarking tool I use wasn't able to run correctly. Initially, it wouldn't work at all and later having the tool running would cause any game launched to crash immediately, even if the game would run otherwise. All I could do was run the in-game benchmarks for games that would run.

In terms of actual playability, I was able to get simpler titles to run reasonably well enough. I could, for example, play Inside or Gris well enough on the device. Basic 2D titles like the Ace Attorney series also ran fine. I was also able to run Control at a reasonably stable frame rate. The trick with these was to always just drop the resolution to the lowest number you can tolerate, which for me was 720p on this screen and then set everything to the lowest settings.

One could argue that the chip isn't aimed at gamers nor is Asus' Vivobook series in general. However, the feeling I had playing games on the device was that there was sufficient power here to get a PS4-level of performance, which is to say, 1080p with medium settings and 30fps locked frame rate. That's not too bad, but for that to happen there would need to be native titles available, as well as optimized drivers from Qualcomm.

Funnily enough, the Mac now has a decent number of native ARM titles available for it. You have titles like Resident Evil 4, Baldur's Gate 3, Assassin's Creed Mirage, Death Stranding Director's Cut, and several others natively available on the Mac App Store, with more in the pipeline. Not only is there not a single ARM title available for Windows, no one has even made any claims to release them in the future. It's so weird to see macOS and Windows swapping places when it comes to games when switching over to ARM.

Funnier still, our Vivobook S 15 came with three months of Xbox PC Game Pass Ultimate membership. The thing is, you can't access most of these games since the Xbox app on ARM will simply not show any of them to you. You can download a handful from the Microsoft Store app but when I say handful, I really mean handful. Most of the others will not show up in the store at all or will not let you download them citing compatibility reasons. It's possible the Game Pass membership was a one-off thing for review units as it makes no sense to bundle this for actual consumers.

Long story short, gaming, for the most part, is a no-go on the Vivobook S 15 at the moment and if that's a problem then this isn't the device nor the platform for you.

Thermals

The Vivobook S 15 has a decently sized thermal solution despite what one might expect from an ARM chip. The truth is, the Snapdragon X Elite can pull a lot of power, and running it fanless doesn't seem to be an option for the moment.

As such, the fans on the Vivobook S 15 are almost always running. However, by default they are so quiet, you will rarely hear them, even in a quiet room. The only way to get the fans audible is to run the two higher power profiles and do something heavily multi-threaded on the CPU. For everything else, it's almost like having a fanless system.

While the fan noise is fairly pleasant on the Standard or even the Performance mode, the Full-speed profile feels like summoning a demon as suddenly the fans get very loud. Of course, despite the name, the fans will only spin up to their full speed when doing something extremely taxing on the CPU, meaning you can also just run the system on this profile and not hear the fans at all until you decide to run Cinebench for some reason.

Under load, the bottom half of the keyboard deck remains at a comfortable temperature although the area above the top row gets quite warm.

Battery life

The Vivobook S 15 has a 70Wh battery. Asus makes a rather bold claim of 18+ hours of battery life, a figure they obtained while playing video locally.

For my testing, I left the device on the default Standard mode in the MyASUS app and the Best Power Efficiency profile in Windows settings. The display was set to 60% brightness and the keyboard lighting was off. The Adaptive Edge Brightness feature was left at the default value of 2. All other battery-saving and standby mode features were disabled.

Using these settings, I got about 12 hours of pure web browsing in Edge. For video, I got about 14 hours when playing YouTube 4K and 15 hours when playing Netflix 1080p.

The Windows Best Power Efficiency profile is perfectly adequate for web browsing and media consumption. However, you would want to switch to Balanced if you want to do productivity work on the go, as it makes a big difference to performance. It also has a major impact on battery life and I got about 6-8 hours when trying to do mixed productivity tasks in this mode, which involved editing RAW files in Affinity Photo and watching the occasional YouTube video.

One great feature of all these new ARM-based PCs is that the idle power draw is significantly reduced. I can close the lid and leave the PC overnight only to find about 3% drained in the morning.

Overall, the battery life on the Vivobook S 15 is incredible. I was able to go on a two-day trip without the charger and still had power left when I came back. The efficiency gains over previous x86 chips are real and you are no longer blowing crazy amounts of power for basic tasks. If all you do is a couple of hours of web browsing or watching Netflix in a day, you won't need to charge more than once a week.

Speaking of charging, the Vivobook S 15 comes with a 90W USB-C charger. Looking at the HWiNFO figures, the machine was pulling about 72W while charging. I also tried a 65W USB-C PD charger, which Windows promptly told me wasn't fast, and it pushed about 48W. Considering the battery life of the Vivobook S 15, you can just carry a single high-power USB-PD phone charger for all your devices for a short trip instead of lugging around the much larger and heavier Vivobook S 15 charger.

One thing to note is that the left edge gets extremely hot when the device is charging. The surface temperature is higher than even while running something CPU-demanding on the device. If you are using the device while charging, your left hand is going to start feeling it soon.

Conclusion

The Vivobook S 15 S5507 is an excellent device for home and office users. It's thin and light yet well-built, has a fantastic display, a good selection of ports, a comfortable keyboard and trackpad, quiet operation, and an exceptional battery life. The overall performance for web browsing, office work, web browsing, and even light photo and image editing is more than adequate.

What the machine isn't good at is heavy production work due to the limited 16GB-only memory configuration available in some regions and the 16:9 aspect ratio display, and the gaming experience was largely poor due to a lack of native titles and driver support.

If you are looking for a jack of all trades, this won't be the option for you and you might be better off looking at the new Ryzen AI 300 models. But for those looking at doing mostly home, office, or school work with a bit of media consumption on the side, the Vivobook S 15 is a highly compelling option that's only going to get better with time.

Pros

• Thin, light, and well-built design
• Excellent display
• Great overall performance from the Snapdragon chip
• Good keyboard and trackpad
• Barely audible cooling
• Outstanding battery life in light usage
• Good variety of ports

Cons

• 16GB not enough for productivity; 32GB has limited availability
• Poor gaming experience
• 16:9 aspect ratio not ideal for productivity
• Dim keyboard backlight
• Replaces the right Ctrl key with a pointless Copilot button