Asus laptop worth buying?

RaiderX

RaiderX

RaiderX

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I'm looking at a new laptop for when I'm not gaming. I was looking at the following but it seems too good a price for the specs so wondering if anyone had any experience with these and if they were worth buying.

ASUS Vivobook 16 M1603QA​

16" 1920x1200 display
Ryzen 5 5600H
16GB 3200MHz DDR4 RAM
512GB Gen3 SSD
Price: £499
 
I think they've got the price down by using a fairly average IPS screen running at 60hz, where a lot of the rest of the Vivobook range use lovely, lovely OLED screens. It's using last-gen CPU, RAM and SSD (relatively speaking) but still very capable for most things you'd typically want a laptop for. It's good but I don't look at it and wonder if it's a misprice.

I went with a Zenbook when I was buying just because I caught a deal on a refurb, but I had been looking at a Vivobook just for the OLED screen at the price. The Vivobook obviously isn't as premium feeling as a Zenbook but, again, they're alright: it's not like it's creaking and flexing every time you touch it.

You can get Vivobooks with a slightly smaller 15.6" OLED screen and a newer generation Intel core I5 CPU (that I believe is still slightly outperformed in multi-threaded applications by the ryzen 5 5800H?) with 16gb RAM and 512gb SSD for a little bit more if you shop around and I guess there might be some decent deals around black Friday?
 
Can highly recommend the Asus stuff with OLED screens. I recently got a 14 inch Zenbook with OLED screen for my son. Lovely machine, but can't comment for reliability yet. I've had a lot of laptops over the years, and the worst so far has unfortunately been the recent Lenovo cheaper stuff, as they have a major hinge failure epidemic. Otherwise HP, Dell, Toshiba, Acer have all been good for me.
 
I've been looking at laptops around that price bracket but have been put off because of the cripplingly poor batteries in that range. All very low 3 cell jobbies - I think I may have even seen a 2 cell battery. You'd be lucky to get 2 hours before having to plug it in. Now Dell seem to be the only one that offer a nice 16" laptop with a very tasty 6 cell 86Wh battery (Lenovo come close with an optional upgrade to one of their IdeaPad laptops). I was monitoring the Dell price before black friday, waiting for a nice deal to appear and I swear the price went up then they've discounted it to what it was before! So I've never pulled the trigger but it is ~£800 and has no num pad, which is a shame. Looking at the run of the mill Acer and Asus offerings just seem underwhelming in the mid to lower price bracket.
 
Usually when the specs are good and the price is low, the screen is terrible. The vivobooks are usually good value though but check the screen specs.
 
I've had an ASUS TUF A15 for a couple of years now, my lad has his A17 for a bit longer. I had to replace the fans this year on both after they started making horrible grinding noises (almost started at the same time too) new fans cost roughly £40 for each machine. My A15 screen is now on its way out I can't use it with 144hz refresh I have to tweak it down so another £100 to replace the screen. To be fair both machine have been put through their paces over the few years. Build quality is much to be desired but I can't really grumble for the initial outlay.
 
roge8014 said:
I've had an ASUS TUF A15 for a couple of years now, my lad has his A17 for a bit longer. I had to replace the fans this year on both after they started making horrible grinding noises (almost started at the same time too) new fans cost roughly £40 for each machine. My A15 screen is now on its way out I can't use it with 144hz refresh I have to tweak it down so another £100 to replace the screen. To be fair both machine have been put through their paces over the few years. Build quality is much to be desired but I can't really grumble for the initial outlay.
Click to expand...
yes build quality has always been poor compared to most, they are cheap so you have to decide if i's worth the trade off
 
My main use is going to be coding in VS so I wanted to avoid the OLED due to burn-in risk and the 16" has the 16:10 instead of the 16:9 of the oled. The display does seem to be the weak link as it's only 300nits and 49.6% NTSC instead of sRGB or DCI P3
 
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