The ASUS Vivobook S14 is undoubtedly an all-rounder ultrabook, with an 11th gen processor. that allows you to stretch the battery until 10 o’clock, but is also capable of giving us a lot of power when required, whether with design programs, photographic editing or casual games.
Today we have with us the ASUS VivoBook S14 ultrabook, a small notebook that packs great potential inside, with a really good performance and that will adapt to your needs. So let’s see if it can make our list of the best cheap and good laptops.
Pros and Cons
| PROS | CONS |
| A balance between power and autonomy | High timings for RAM |
| High-quality display | The charger is not USB Type-C |
| Multimedia capabilities | |
| Premium finishes |
General Info
| Asus VivoBook S14 S433FA | |
 | |
| $ | CHECK PRICE |
| Series | VivoBook S14 |
| Brand | Asus |
| Weight | 1.4 Kg |
| OS | Windows 10 Home |
| Memory | 8 GB DDR4 |
| Storage | 512 GB |
| Display | 14 Inch |
| Type | Laptop |
Display
| ASUS VivoBook S14 | |
| Display Type | IPS LCD Display |
| Display Size | 14 Inches |
| Display Resolution | 1920 x 1080 Pixels |
| Aspect Ratio | 16:9 |
| Display Touchscreen | No |
| Colour | Indie Black |
The first thing that stands out is its small size with 32.4 × 21.3 × 1.6 mm and only 1.40 kg, so it is a little bigger than a sheet of paper and we can always carry it with us without our back suffering. Already in our hands, it feels very robust thanks to the aluminium construction and its matte finish, although, on the contrary, it will be a magnet for fingerprints.
A design that has served ASUS to receive the “red dot winner 2020” award that rewards design innovation.
The outer part of the screen has a dark graphite grey, only highlighting the metallic of the name on the right side, while the lower part has a somewhat lighter tone, with a metallic bevel that greatly stylizes the appearance. laptop line.
Once we open the lid, we find a compact keyboard (without a “visible” numeric keypad) and a generous trackpad, with a small recess in the central part that facilitates its opening. For its part, the screen highlights its fine-tuned frames of only 6.5mm on the sides, with 12mm on the upper part with the webcam on the upper part and a slightly larger lower frame where the model name appears again (a clear nod to the MacBook, the rival to beat).
One of the strengths of this laptop is its 14 ″ IPS screen with 1080p resolution and it looks really good, although as we will see in the performance section we will differentiate between the battery saving mode and the maximum performance mode. The first difference that we will find is the maximum brightness that it will allow us, reaching 280nits in performance mode, while if we opt for the battery saving mode we are around 100nits.
To further analyze the screen we have gone through the same calibration process that we go through on monitors thanks to our X-Rite i1 Display Pro. The first thing we can see is that the minimum brightness measured is 0.233nits, a normal value typical of IPS panels, but that limits the contrast ratio to only 1: 400 when we use the battery saving mode, while we arrive at 1: 1200 with the maximum brightness which is an expected value for an IPS.
Color reproduction is really good with a deltaE less than 1, so we can edit photos in it without sacrificing color accuracy. Actually, 22 of the patches are below 0.5, however, we have a couple of boxes (marked in yellow and red in the graph) that are not perfectly represented and have a little more color deviation.
Turning to the uniformity of the panel, we are also very satisfied, with maximum values of 11%, which is within the usual. At the level of viewing angles, we can not put any problem either since the IPS panel ensures its correct vision from all of them.
Specification
| ASUS VivoBook S14 | |
| Processor Name | Intel® Core™ i5-1135G7 Quad-Core (11th Gen) |
| Graphics | Intel Iris Graphics |
| Dimensions | 325 x 213 x 16 mm |
| RAM | 8 GB DDR4 RAM |
| Storage | 512 GB HDD |
The computer comes to us with 64-bit Windows 10 Pro and, after several updates, the tests have been carried out with version 20H2 and all the updates available at the time. At the program level, we find MyAsus pre-installed, a very complete suite to control all the parameters of our VivoBook S14 laptop and that has a dedicated key for quick access (F12).
Thanks to MyAsus we can have access to updates of all the drivers that we may need for the laptop, including BIOS updates and some really advanced options. We will also have McAfee pre-installed, a fairly intrusive antivirus that will bring out some alarmist message every day such as “you really don’t want to have your laptop protected” as a reminder … personally I think the Windows protection system is good enough to need dedicated antivirus.
Performance
| ASUS VivoBook S14 | |
| Clockspeed | 2.4 GHz |
| Graphic Processor | Integrated |
| Processor | Intel Iris Graphics |
| Graphic Ram | – |
Turning to the internal components, we have an eleventh generation Intel i7 1165G7 processor that brings the new integrated Intel Xe graphics, which represents the first step in Intel’s strategy to enter the dedicated graphics market with a system of “tiles. ”Scalable. In our case, it comes accompanied by 16GB of DDR4 RAM at 3200MHz and some 22-22-22-48 timings, a shame that they are so poorly adjusted, causing really bad latencies and affecting the performance of the integrated graphics (which depends on these memories. ).
That said, the biggest problem we have detected is the thermal throttling when we try to squeeze the performance of the laptop, which requires us to turn up the ventilation in order to get its full potential. For this reason, we have made a double battery of benchmarks differentiating the results between the “battery saving + minimum fans” mode and the “high performance + maximum fans” mode.
At the storage level, we have a Kingston “om8pcp3512f-ab” type NVMe SSD, an M.2 drive for OEM manufacturers with reading speeds around 2000MB / s similar to the Kingston A2000 that we could buy in our usual store.
Multimedia
| ASUS VivoBook S14 | |
| Web-cam | HD 720P Webcam |
| Speakers | Dual Speakers |
| Microphone Jack | 3.5 mm |
| Wireless Lan | 802.11a/b/g/n/ac |
| Bluetooth | v5.0 |
| USB | 1 x USB Type-A (USB 3.1) 2 x USB Type-B (USB 2.0) |
| Memory Slots | Yes |
| HDMI Ports | Yes |
| Ethernet Ports | Yes |
| Finger Print Reader | No |
One of the points that we liked the most is the connectivity, far from the absurd trend of eliminating ports from our laptops, the VivoBook S14 opts for full-size connectors for the HDMI that is located on the left side along with a USB 3.2 Gen1, combo audio jack (microphone and headphones) and a Thunderbolt ™ 4 in type C format that is compatible with screens and has the ability to transfer energy (for a screen or simply to charge our mobile).
On the right side we find a microSD card reader and two USB 2.0 connectors, which will be perfect for connecting our mouse and other peripherals. As you can see, we do without the RJ45 network cable connector but we should not miss it much.
At the level of wireless connectivity, we have Bluetooth 5.0 dual-band 2 * 2 with which we can connect devices such as mice or controllers, in addition to Wifi 5 802.11ac with the Intel AC 94962 chipset. However, from the specific ASUS website that should have Wifi connectivity 6 802.11ax, so it may simply be because it is a review unit.
Battery
| ASUS VivoBook S14 | |
| Battery Cell | 4 Cell |
| Battery Type | Lithium-Ion |
| Battery Backup | N/A |
| Power Supply | 50 W AC Adapter |
It should be noted the good performance that we have observed at the level of the battery, with more than 10 hours of battery life in normal daily use, something incredible considering that we have a 4-core and 8-thread processor, but that is possible thanks to the jump to the 10nm since it handles very low frequencies when the tasks are not very demanding.
Although the charger has small dimensions (little more than a mobile charger) put to bet on maximum mobility (with an ultrabook) the USB type C port for its power would have been more successful since the same charger would serve as a laptop, smartphone and any other gadget.
Conclusion!
This is a very interesting ultrabook type laptop, both for its construction and for its performance and battery life. An ultrabook with quite premium sensations capable of optimizing battery to the maximum when we are away from home, but if we demand performance it will give it perfectly. Both the i7 1165G7 processor itself and the integrated Intel Xe graphics have pleasantly surprised us, despite the obvious thermal limitations when we want to demand maximum performance.
However, the choice of RAM seems a serious mistake, since that excessively high latency detracts from good performance. And it also seems to us a mistake not to get on the USB type-C charger bandwagon due to the advantages it entails for an Ultrabook, such as being able to carry a single charger in the backpack to charge all our devices.
The alternative to this Intel i7 1165G7 is undoubtedly the AMD Ryzen 4700U, the Intel being more powerful in tasks of 1-2 cores, but with the advantage that the Ryzen is octa-core, so it will have an advantage in heavy tasks of editing video or rendering, both being a notch above their previous generation variants.
Almost all laptop manufacturers have wanted to enter the lucrative ultrabook market that Apple has dominated for years with its MacBooks. ASUS itself, in addition to the VivoBook S14, has the ZenBook 14 with i5 and i7 versions of the 10th and 11th generation, in addition to the interesting AMD version with the 4700U that usually has a somewhat lower price. Something similar to what happens with the MSI Modern 14 or the LG Gram 14.
