Asus VivoBook 15: The ideal content creator’s laptop

YouTubers and Twitch streamers now have a more affordable way to make content, thanks to the VivoBook X571. It features all the right internals to get one’s content creator journey up and running, while keeping to a mobile form factor that maintains location flexibility. 

The body is plastic, which is expected from the VivoBook range, but also ensures the laptop doesn’t get metal dents from being carried around. It is quite a thick laptop, but with these internals, it compares well to many mid-ranged desktop computers. Its thickness also allows the computer to have more fans inside, which enables video exports from one’s lap without getting uncomfortably hot. It also features all the ports you’d expect from a desktop PC, like Ethernet, full-sized HDMI, USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C, and an SD card reader. 

The trackpad is comfortable and large, while being slightly off-centre to the left – which is a good thing for typing because the keyboard is full-sized. The backlit keyboard itself is comfortable to type on, although there are better laptop keyboards from the VivoBook range for those who primarily type. 

The screen is bright and vivid, with a glare-free matte coating to make it more comfortable to use in brighter situations – a huge plus for content creators with ring lights all over the place. All models of the X571 come with a Full HD 1080p display, which allows users to play back their 1080p content and watch it as their viewers would. 

On the inside, it features a powerful Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card to make sure a user’s 1080p video rendering happens in real-time, with Da Vinci Resolve. To help with processing, the laptop comes with a 10^th Gen Intel Core i7 processor, with up to six cores to ensure great multithreaded performance. For better battery performance, it also comes with Intel UHD Graphics, which allows the Nvidia Graphics processor to power down while one performs simpler tasks on battery. On all models of the X571, they can be upgraded to 16GB of RAM. 

The storage options vary – we got a 512GB NVMe SSD model, but some models come with SATA hard drives with more storage. There are also options for Intel Optane Memory, which will increase performance while multitasking. 

The built-in sound by Harman Kardon is good but can become distorted at higher volume levels.  Fortunately, this computer comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack, so content creators will likely use this option while editing their videos. Nevertheless, the laptop plays music and spoken word fine when the volume is under 95%. 

The built-in webcam is good – it’s a standard 720p laptop camera, so it probably won’t produce YouTube videos, but it is acceptable for streaming to Twitch. 

The computer holds its own when outputting games in their native resolutions to the primary display. We played Resident Evil Village, one of the most taxing games out there right now, and played at a smooth 60 frames per second (fps) when set to ultra. While fps performance issues will crop up when connecting it to 4K displays, this is an outlier use case. 

We were pleasantly surprised at the 4K performance on lighter games. We managed to play FIFA 21 on a 4K display at an average of 77 fps – a huge win for FIFA streamers. 

Overall, the Asus X571 laptop comes at the right time as more South Africans improve their video editing skills while staying under a R20,000 budget.