ASUS VivoBook 15 Thin and Light Laptop, 15.6″ Full HD, AMD Quad Core R7-3700U CPU, 8 GB DDR4 RAM, 512 GB SSD, AMD Radeon Vega 10 Graphics, Windows 10 Home, F512DA-NH77, Slate Gray ASUS

★★★★★ Pros: he look and feel of this VivoBook is solid and nice looking with the backlit keyboard it is a breeze to work on. Setup was super with not to much bloatware. The screen looks crisp fingerprint login program works well. The PCIE drive is very responsive. Boot time is 8 seconds from cold boot. That is with Virus scanner running but only minimal programs installed. It made 5.1/2 hours on a full charge. The Chiclet Keyboard has full size keys and spacing is good. Mouse pad is very responsive and the right and left click options work really well and are easy to use. The small basil around the screen is very nice for more screen real estate. It has plenty of ports. It has 2X USB 2.0 Not 1 as is stated in the Specs, 1X USB 3.1 Type A, 1X USB 3.1 Type C, 1 HDMI Port and one SD card slot. This is the lightest laptop I have ever owned but still feels solid. Wireless is very solid also. I have not had any drops and speed has been fine. Comes with Win 10 home addition. I was able to upgrade the memory to 16 Gigs of ram without issue. This comes with one free month trial of Microsoft office 360. And McAfee 30-day trial. You also get one free year of Dropbox 25 Gig's. Cons: Only one memory slot. Specs state only 8 Gigs of ram supported. Con is really not a big thing but thought I would list to bring attention to this. Another con is the slot for adding another drive is blank. No options to plug in a drive. Maybe if you pull the motherboard out and if it has pins for adding power and data plug. But I saw nothing to indicate this. Overall Review: I would recommend this laptop.

★★★★★ Pros: This review is on the Asus VivoBook F512D-NH77. When opening the lid to the box there was an advertisement that said nothing more than “IN SEARCH OF INCREDIBLE” The advertisement was a clever cardboard slide that projected itself as a subtle surprise when you opened the box. The laptop itself sat inside a padded sleeve and was nestled inside ample amount of cardboard protection on all sides of the box. Under which was a user guide and warranty card. To the right tucked away under a flap was a relatively small Asus charger. When I pulled the laptop out of the padded sleeve, I could tell right away I liked the looks of this laptop. It is a darker grey plastic with a real nice Asus branded logo on the lid. The laptop is very thin, and the curves are sleek and subtle. I opened the lid and started to like the laptop even more. A padded sheet covered the keyboard and protected the screen. When the lid was fully lifted there are two hard rubber pegs that act as feet. More than clever, lifting the laptop so it does not lay flat on its surface. This is great because there is room for the cpu cooler to breath and it gives the keyboard a bit of an incline to make typing more comfortable, not to mention the speakers are underneath the laptop and allows for sound to travel much better. The bezels around the monitor are visible, but small. Honestly think they are perfect because the camera and rubber strips that protect the monitor from smashing into the keyboard when the lid is closed are very well hidden, not even noticeable. I turned the laptop on and was impressed by the colors and viewing angles of the screen, there were no dead pixels and writing this review with the 30-day free trial of word makes the print easy to read and clear. The keyboard is comfortable to type on and has white back lighting. There is also a small number pad to the right of the keyboard just in case you are more comfortable hitting numbers there, I know I am. The touchpad is a great size with no buttons to collect dust or debris. It is very responsive with movements, clicks and soft double clicks. Using the fingerprint sensor was easy to setup and very responsive when being used to login. There are 3USB ports, Mini SD card reader, headphone jack, type-C port, HDMI port and the charging port. All worked fine out of the box. The first thing I did when starting the laptop was check for windows updates and start it charging. I checked the battery life and from the looks of it, McAfee Live was using 17% of what the battery was dishing out. Not the first time I have uninstalled McAfee, but at least it’s there for the believers. The most impressive thing about this laptop is its performance. My hard drive is an Intel SSDPEKNW512G8 that gave me impressive reads of 1837MB/s and write speeds of 968MB/s. The processor is a quad core, 8thread AMD Ryzen 7 3700U which has a base clock of 2.3ghz and boost up to 4.0ghz. For day to day laptop use, this laptop is great to look at, very fast, holds at least 5 hours of battery charge and not loaded with bloat software to slow it down. Cons: These are not cons. If you purchased this laptop, I hope you know this already. This is not a gaming laptop and it is not a solid works work horse. I installed Heaven benchmark and scored 530 with an average fps of 21. The transition screens were horrible. I tried to install steam and play my favorite FPS game PUBG. Turned all the graphics down to very low and dropped the resolution to 720p. Averaged about 30fps and the character was unresponsive and could not hit the broadside of a barn with a two by four. About the last thing I would like to mention here is that the memory layout really confuses me. There is only one memory slot on the motherboard. It holds a single 4gb stick of memory, this means another 4gb is soldered directly onto the motherboard. Truthfully, 8gb is more than enough to do what this laptop needs to do, it just makes upgrading memory in pairs impossible. Overall Review: This laptop is everything a laptop is supposed to be. The screen, and keyboard size is a great compromise when it comes to portable computer work. It is very light to carry, holds a charge that last close to 6 hours depending on workload and though its shell is plastic, it feels strong and sturdy and so far, it has been able to withstand some light scratching and general use. The combination of M.2 SSD and Ryzen 7 processor makes this laptop fast and a very capable workhorse when it comes to light web browsing, movie watching and word processing. For this purpose, I would highly recommend this laptop. If you are looking for a gaming laptop, I suggest you look elsewhere. I would like to thank Asus and Newegg for providing this sample for review.

★★★★☆ Pros: Fairly good value. Got it at six hundred seventy-nine to replace my wife's very aging ThinkPad T61. 4-core / 8-thread second generation 12nm Ryzen mobile CPU with up to 4GHz boost provides plenty of computing power, while being quite power efficient. Display is bright and vivid, and the keyboard feels good to type on. It's quite light while still providing reasonable screen real estate. Enough USB and other connectivity port options for typical uses. The 8GB* of RAM (more on that below) and 512GB NVMe SSD run Windows 10 well. Cons: While overall the system is fine for our intended use, I do have a few complaints. 1) System comes with 4GB of RAM soldered to the motherboard and one SODIMM expansion slot populated with a 4GB module. There's no BIOS control to enable/disable the soldered-in RAM. I would rather have had nothing soldered and an 8GB module, because if any of the soldered RAM goes bad it makes the system a doorstop. 2) Memory allocated to graphics is fixed at 2GB. There is no way to adjust it. No BIOS option listed at all (BIOS version 310 currently). In combination with the other ~100MB of hardware reserved address space, that leaves 5.9GB of system RAM available in the shipping configuration. I verified this isn't a Windows/software issue, as only 5.9GB are reported by Memtest86 as well. While this isn't a deal-breaker by any means, it's still annoying not to have control over it. This system will be used solely for office-type work, no 3D whatsoever, so I'd have much preferred to be able to adjust the VRAM allocation down to around 64/128MB or so and free the rest up for the OS. 3) The VRAM (and hence system RAM) and GPU clock speeds in 3D graphics mode throttle pretty aggressively if the system is not connected to the AC adapter. Again, this isn't much of an issue for me given it will be an office/work system, but if you're expecting to do light gaming (on the otherwise reasonably capable Vega 10 graphics) be prepared for possibly inconsistent performance when running on battery. 4) (minor) The NVMe SSD is only a x2 PCIe 3.0 model, but I/O speeds are still three times faster than SATA3 at around 1,800MB/s, so there's not much real-world difference during typical use. And one could upgrade to an x4 drive later if desired. Overall Review: Overall I'd say this is a good all-around laptop with a few minor drawbacks that don't substantially impact normal use. Would've given it 5 eggs if all RAM was modular and video memory allocation was adjustable. Hoping this will last as long as the workhorse T61 it replaced!