When it comes to making thin and lightweight laptops, ASUS is among the best notebook/ultrabook makers out there. What if someone prefers a large screen display, long battery life, premium looks for a reasonable price tag? The ASUS VivoBook S510U is meant to give the perfect combination of beauty and performance. With its slim NanoEdge bezel, brushed-metal finish, the latest Intel® Core™ i7 processor with 16GB RAM, and NVIDIA® GeForce® 940MX graphics, VivoBook S510U is designed for today’s fast-paced urban lifestyle. But does it deliver? Read on to know how the ASUS VivoBook S510U is. Scroll to the bottom to get full list of specifications.
Build
ASUS has a long history of making Ultrabooks that look premium and feel premium. ASUS Vivobook S510U upholds this. ASUS Vivobook S510U that we have comes with Gold color shell and with display that has very thin bezels at the side and somewhat thin bezel at the bottom. Though the ultrabook looks like it is made of aluminium, the base is actually made of very hard plastic that feels like metal. ASUS has cleverly pained and build the plastic to make it look like metal and free premium. Thanks to the 15.6″ display, there is enough space to install a backlit keyboard with large key size and good amount of gaps between keys. Though there is lot of flex, it did not hinder my typing speed. We will discuss about keyboard and trackpad later. The large glass trackpad with build in finger print reader is below the display and is centred well.
On the left side of the frame, there are two USB ports, a SD card reader, LED lights for power and battery charging. At the front, dual speakers are installed on the base and are downward firing. There is a USB port, USB Type-C port, HDMI port, 3.5mm headphone jack, power input port on the right hand side. Given the length and the way display hinge is designed, there is not possibility of adding any ports at the back. The hinge looks good and is highly functional. There are no visible cables. The fans are installed on the base and are hidden by the hinge. The display panel cannot be pushed more than 120-130 degrees. Bottom of the ultrabook is super clean with four rubber feet for grip. Webcam and audio sensors are placed above the display.
The S510U comes with dual hard drives. the SSD is where the OS is installed and is lightning fast. The boot up happens in seconds and same is the case with shutdown or opening applications etc. The 1TB is where we can store all media, documents and game files. The 8th generation Core i7 8550U is a very capable quad core CPU and the Nvidia MX150 GPU is powerful enough to play most games (at lower resolution and decent graphics quality settings). There is 16GB of RAM onboard and Windows OS is pre-loaded. There is a 42Whrs battery that can keep the laptop on for up to 9 hours.
Display
ASUS has managed to reduce the bezels but not to the level of Dell XPS that has nearly no bezels. But hey, this one costs half the price of the XPS. The deep black bezels around the display makes the ultrabook looks really good. The light gold border around the bezel is barely noticeable. ASUS calls this display NanoEdge display. The screen to body ratio is at 80% and the side bezels are just 7.8mm thin.
The FullHD display comes with a 1920×1080 pixel resolution and the text looks sharp. One great feature of the display is that this one in an IPS panel. Unlink AMOLED or TN panels, IPS panels comes with 178 degree viewing angle which means that whatever angle at which you look at, the display will show the colours the same way. As with any laptop, you can set variable brightness levels and the display gets very bright at maximum level but it is not as bright as leading ones in this price range. Overall, we are impressed with the display quality. With the kind of firepower inside, ASUS should’ve provided option to have a 2K and 4K resolution displays.
Keyboard and trackpad
The keyboard on S510U is landscape style with very good gaps between keys. The key travel is just 1.4mm. I learned how to type, on a typewriter and I never look at the keyboard to type. With my home PC, I use TVSE Gold mechanical keyboard and I consistently hit 90+ words per minute. When I first tried the keyboard on the S510U, I was skeptical about it. Half an hour later, i did couple of typing tests. Here is the result:
When I am hitting 90+ wpm on my mechanical keyboard, the clicks will be loud and irritate my wife and kids (though I love the music of mechanical keys). The S510U is exceptionallly silent when I was typing at that kind of speed. The difference between these two keyboard is 4-5wpm but the difference in click sound is massive. The typing experience on this keyboard is amazing and you can hit insane typing speed.
There are thre levels of backlight intensity. The keys are very well lit when you turn on backlight. There is no choice of colors and the keys get white glow. There is lot of keyboard flex when you press on the keyboard but it doesn’t matter. Why? look at the screenshot of typing speed test above.
Not everything is bright though. ASUS should seriously change the power key placement. The key is right next to delete key. Also, the right column of keys (home, pgup, pgdown,end,fn) shouldnt be there. There is absolutely no need for right side function key (unless ASUS wanted to make left handers happy).
Coming to trackpad, the large glass trackpad is good and has integrated fingerprint reader. There is a small vertical bar at the bottom to differentiate right click and left click. Palm rejection is very good. The built in fingerprint reader can be configured using Windows Hello. Windows OS provides four sensitivity modes (most, high, medium, low) and the default setting is medium. There are lot of gestures that you can use now and these can be configures from ‘Touchpad’ settings page.
When you press the trackpad, you feel the click and the clicks are ‘very’ audible. When you click and hold, you can notice that the trackpad has slightly moved inside the chassis and I felt like the trackpad will die if I press too hard.
Overall, the keyboard and trackpad on S510U are very good.
Performance
Boot up and login : Turn on the ultrabook and in less than 10 secons, you will see the login screen. Tap on fingerprint reader and bam, you are in. If windows hello face recognition is supported by the built-in webcame, you dont even have to life your finger to login. But unfortunately, the webcam is not compatible with Windows Hello so you either rely on pin or on fingerprints.
OS : Windows has gotten better and better with time. Thanks to super fast SSD, the OS performance is extremely good. Applications load really fast and app switching is also very fast. Thanks to Windows touchpad gestures, navigating through OS is very good. The built in mics pick up speech really well and you can rely on Cortana voice assistant.
Speakers: The built in speakers are poor. When the laptop is placed on desk or on your lap, there is some bass but loudness is lacking. When you lift the base to look at speakers, they sound shrill and there is lot of treble. We have seen ASUS laptops with amazing speakers and this one is definitely way off in speaker quality.
Heat dissipation: I was playing YouTube videos in 1080p resolution and at the same time editing posts on wordpress. Once in a while the fans would turn on and they are not at all noisy. The laptop remained cool. Overall heat dissipation is very satisfactory. Big screen means bigger base, bigger base means better heat dissipation thanks to larger surface area.
Bundled applications : Like most ASUS laptops, there is too much of bloatware on ASUS VivoBook S510U. We suggest you spend sometime in cleaning up unwanted applications before doing anything else.
Battery
S510U supports fast charging and can reach 60% of battery from 0% in 49 minutes.I used the laptop for like 3 hours and battery went from 100% to 60% and this included lot of video playback. For normal use, one can easily expect 6 hours of battery life. This is impressive for a 15.6″ laptop that weighs under 2kgs.
Conclusion
There are a lot of positives for the ASUS VivoBook S510U. You get a large display that has amazing viewing angles, terrific battery life, fingerprint authentication, 1TB+ storage with option to expand further, super fast SSD for OS. Thanks to plethora of ports, you do not have to carry dongles to connect the VivoBook to various peripherals. There are some problems though. There is too much of bloatware on the laptop, the non alphanumeric key layout is bad, trackpad is not as good as that on competing laptops and the speakers are bad. For the price that you are going to pay, we do recommend you to try this one out. If you a casual gamer and looking for a laptop that is good at everything (but not the best), the S510U is ideal candidate.
Specifications
- Processor Options
- Intel® Core™ i7 7500U Processor
- Intel® Core™ i5 7200U Processor
- Intel® Core™ i3 7100U Processor
- Intel® Core™ i7 8550U Processor
- Intel® Core™ i5 8250U Processor
- Operating System options
- Windows 10 Pro – ASUS recommends Windows 10 Pro
- Windows 10 Home
- Endless OS
- Memory : up to 16 GB SDRAM(On selected models)
- Display options
- 15.6″ (16:9) LED backlit FHD (1920×1080) 60Hz Anti-Glare Panel with 45% NTSC with 178˚ wide-viewing angle display
- 15.6″ (16:9) LED backlit HD (1366×768) 60Hz Anti-Glare Panel with 45% NTSC
- 15.6″ (16:9) LED backlit FHD (1920×1080) 60Hz Anti-Glare Panel with 45% NTSC
- Graphics : NVIDIA GeForce 940MX , with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM
- Storage options
- Hard Drives: 500GB 5400RPM SATA HDD or 1TB 5400RPM SATA HDD or 2TB 5400RPM SATA HDD
- Solid State Drives: 128GB SATA3 M.2 SSD or 256GB SATA3 M.2 SSD or 512GB SATA3 M.2 SSD
- Keyboard: Chiclet keyboard with optional backlit keys
- Card Reader : Multi-format card reader (SD/SDHC)
- WebCam : VGA Web Camera
- Wi-Fi : Integrated 802.11 AC (2×2)
- Bluetooth : Built-in Bluetooth V4.1
- Ports:
- 1 x Microphone-in/Headphone-out jack
- 1 x Type C USB3.0 (USB3.1 GEN1)
- 1 x USB 3.0 port(s)
- 2 x USB 2.0 port(s)
- 1 x HDMI
- 1 x Fingerprint (On selected models)
- Audio : Built-in Stereo 2 W Speakers And Microphone with ASUS SonicMaster Technology
- Battery : 3 Cells 42 Whrs Battery
- Power Adapter : Plug Type :ø4 (mm), Output : 19 V DC, 3.42 A, 65 W, Input : 100 -240 V AC, 50/60 Hz universal
- Dimensions : 361.4 x 243.5 x 17.9 mm (WxDxH)
- Weight: 1.5 kg ~ 1.7 kg with Battery
- Security : BIOS Booting User Password Protection, HDD User Password Protection and Security
