Apr 29, 2025 8:30 AM

Review: Asus Vivobook Pro 15

Name: Vivobook Pro 15
Item: Vivobook Pro 15

Asus’ 15-inch laptop is an uninspiring machine built for creators.

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$1,500 at B&H

Rating:

6/10

WIRED

Affordable creator laptop. Solid gaming performance. Excellent OLED display. Storage and RAM are user-accessible. Crisp 5-megapixel webcam.

TIRED

Old-school 16:9 aspect ratio display. Poor battery life. Expensive compared to last-gen models that offer similar performance.

Graphical power is more important than ever, but access to laptops with powerful discrete graphics remains difficult due to their price. Thankfully, the Asus Vivobook Pro 15 is a more affordable take on a creator laptop like the MacBook Pro, and I was excited to try it out.

Despite a good amount of power under the hood and an excellent display, this Asus machine has some quirks, like the dated 16:9 aspect ratio screen and lackluster battery life. If you can look past some of those oddities, there’s value here for the performance.

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Dated Design

Aside from the newer Asus logo on the lid, the Vivobook Pro 15 looks like a machine from a decade ago. The dark gray chassis is nondescript, marked by large plastic bezels above and below the display. Meanwhile, the chunky, plastic chassis is fairly thick at 0.7 inch. It’s not a looker, and those thick bezels are an eyesore. The design hasn’t been revamped in many years, and you can tell.

The 16:9 aspect ratio screen is the reason behind the outdated appearance. The transition to 16:10 happened a few years ago, following what MacBooks have always used. This ratio offers increased vertical space on the screen, which means less scrolling because more content fits into the display. Only a handful of new 16:9 aspect ratio laptops are coming out nowadays. Having spent so much time on 16:10 laptops, going back to the wider shape takes getting used to.

The wider footprint allows Asus to include a number pad on the keyboard, but I don’t count that as a positive. NumPads used to be fairly common, and while some people swear by them, I don’t find them all that useful. The inclusion forces the touchpad to be off-center, which I don’t love.

The good news is that both the keyboard and touchpad are adequate. The keyboard is satisfying to type on, while the touchpad's surface feels smooth to glide your finger across. The click of the touchpad isn’t quite as responsive or quiet as on more premium laptops.

The ports are on the sides of the laptop, the majority of which are on the right side, including two USB-C (one Thunderbolt 4 and one USB-3.2 Gen 2), HDMI, USB-A, Ethernet, and the proprietary charging jack. Both USB-C ports support power delivery for charging and display out, but the Thunderbolt 4 port is faster. The only ports on the left are an additional USB-A and an SD card slot.

OLED Upgrade

Unlike another Vivobook I recently reviewed, the display is one of the Vivobook Pro 15’s greatest strengths. The resolution is a 2,880 x 1,620-pixel resolution, thanks to its 16:9 aspect ratio. It is an OLED panel with a 120-Hz refresh rate. It's a highly glossy panel too, as many of these OLED displays are. The trade-off with OLED is typically brightness, though I measured it at a max of 346 nits—enough to overcome intense glare in most circumstances.

The quality of the display sets this laptop apart from other MacBook Pro alternatives. The color coverage is fantastic, and the accuracy is as good as it gets. None of that is too surprising for an OLED, but it helps make the Vivobook Pro 15 a proper option for content creators. You can color grade on this laptop right out of the box.

In addition to having a great display, the Vivobook Pro 15 also has a stellar webcam. It’s a 5-megapixel camera, a solid step up from standard 1080p or even 1440p resolution webcams. The result is a sharp video feed from the camera, even in lower-light conditions.

Impressive GPU

The draw of the Vivobook Pro 15 is all about performance. That’s why there’s only one configuration offered: the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H, the RTX 4050, 24 GB of RAM, and 1 terabyte of storage. The memory and storage are user-accessible, which is great for repairs and future upgrades.

The CPU performance is strong, certainly serviceable for video editing and rendering. But there’s a problem: It’s a bit of a side-step compared to Intel’s previous-gen chip, the Core Ultra 9 185H. It appears slightly behind in multi-core performance and slightly ahead in single-core performance. As we’ll see later, that puts it in an awkward spot against much cheaper laptops from last year. It measures up fairly close to the M4 in the MacBook Pro, though the M4 is still 26 percent faster in single-core performance.

This laptop is all about the GPU, though. You need a dedicated graphics card to call your PC a high-performance laptop, which separates this from much sleeker machines, like the Vivobook S16. In exchange for that girth is power. Although the RTX 4050 might not sound impressive compared to a gaming laptop with a 5090, you can get a wide range of performance—the Vivobook Pro 15 can give those graphics more oomph than you might think.

This makes it a solid content creation device, from editing high-resolution video to 3D modeling and rendering. Apple's M4 Pro’s graphics capabilities, however, are 12 percent faster than the Vivobook Pro 15’s RTX 4050, in case you’re interested in this as a proper MacBook Pro alternative.

A discrete GPU means the Vivobook Pro 15 offers some solid gaming performance, even if that’s not the main purpose of this laptop. I tested a few games, such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Marvel Rivals. Because this is a 40-series GPU, you have access to frame generation, which can net you over 90 frames per second at Ultra settings, so long as you turn off ray tracing and play at 1080p. On the other hand, a lighter game like Marvel Rivals feels great and represents the perfect type for the Vivobook Pro 15.

Battery life sadly falls short of expectations. The combination of those power-hungry components and the high-resolution OLED screen take a lot of juice to power. Playing a local video file on loop, it only lasted 6 hours and 21 minutes before dying. That was with the screen at a standardized 100 lux of brightness, and the keyboard backlighting turned off. A heavier load will drain the battery fairly quickly, so this isn’t the best choice for work on the go.

Tread Carefully

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The Vivobook Pro 15 costs $1,500, and I’ll be clear: That’s slightly too expensive in my book. The OLED display is excellent, and the performance is solid, but if you’re trying to save a buck, there are cheaper laptops that offer similar performance.

Take the Vivobook Pro 16, which launched last year and also had an RTX 4050. Thanks to some price drops since its launch, you can currently buy it for $1,000. The screen resolution is lower—it is not OLED—but it’s a more modern laptop thanks to its 16:10 display. It also only comes with 16 GB of RAM instead of 24 GB. But it's also a $500 price difference. There’s also last year’s Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i, which frequently dips to $1,350, also comes with the RTX 4050, and is a similar size. You don’t get OLED, but it includes a higher resolution IPS touchscreen panel with a faster 165-Hz refresh rate to make up for it.

Ultimately, the problem with the Vivobook Pro 16’s value proposition is the lack of a new GPU onboard. The generational CPU upgrade this year likely won’t make a huge difference over the prior Intel chip, and since it uses the same graphics card, it’s hard to make a case for paying this much more. That’s especially true since the RTX 5050 may just be a few months away. The quality of the OLED still makes it stand out—if only it weren’t in an outdated aspect ratio.