Asus VivoBook S400 review

The Asus VivoBook S400 is the bigger brother of our budget-buy winner, the Asus VivoBook S200, which brought us a great-value touchscreen laptop for just £400.

While the top model of the S200 had a 11.6in display and a Core i3 processor, the top spec of the S400 reviewed here gives you a 14in touchscreen and a 1.9GHz Intel Core i7-3517U processor for just £700.

This is the same processor that that powers the considerably more expensive Asus Taichi and Dell XPS 12, and it breezed through our multimedia benchmarks with an overall score of 48, making it plenty fast enough for everyday tasks as well as applications that can make use of multiple cores and threads.

Not only is the S400 much better value than many competitors, it also offers roughly a 70 per cent increase in performance power compared to the S200.

Its 3D performance, on the other hand, is roughly the same, as its graphics are provided by its integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 chipset. This is to be expected from most Ultrabooks, but this nevertheless makes it a relatively poor laptop for gaming – excepting lightweight tablet/mobile fare.

It only managed 16.2fps in our Dirt Showdown tests on High Quality settings at a resolution of 1,280×720. We had to put it down on Low Quality to get nearer to a more playable 30fps at the same resolution, but we managed to do so while keeping the 4x anti-aliasing, so you’ll manage an even faster frame rate with this disabled.

It may not be able to handle modern 3D games, then, but its ten-point touchscreen makes it a perfect companion for many of the less-demanding games and apps available through the Windows 8 Store. It’s extremely responsive and calling up the Windows 8 Charms bar and switching between individual windows has never been easier.

Tapping icons does make the screen wobble slightly, but as long as you’re not too heavy-handed with it then the S400 has enough weight to prevent it from rocking backwards. Its larger screen doesn’t detract from its overall portability either, as it weighs just 1.8kg and has a depth of 21mm.

We were slightly disappointed that its screen falls into the same pitfalls as the S200, though, as while its glossy finish helps colours appear richer and more vibrant than an ordinary matt display, its lacklustre brightness levels ends up making everything appear quite dim. This is perhaps the VivoBook’s biggest flaw, and it isn’t helped by its average viewing angles. Our solid colour tests also revealed that the bottom half of the screen appeared to be much lighter than the top half if you’re not looking at it more or less straight on. It’s not particularly noticeable during day to day use, though, and there’s a fairly generous amount of screen tilt to help remedy this problem as well.

Of course, one of the advantages of having slightly muted brightness levels is a longer battery life, and the S400 lasted an impressive 6 hours and 24 minutes in our light use battery tests. It’s still an hour shy of the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13, but this is still one of the better battery scores we’ve seen from an Ultrabook, giving the S400 yet another edge over its rivals.

Screen issues aside, and the S400 retains everything we liked about the S200. Its full-sized Chiclet-style keyboard showed no signs of flex while typing, and its well-spaced keys provide plenty of bounce and tactile feedback. The hard edge of the keyboard tray is perhaps a little sharp for our liking, but there’s still plenty of room to rest your hands. The smooth all-in-one touchpad is a joy to use as well, handling multi-touch gestures like pinch-zooming and two-finger scrolling with ease, and it never got in the way while we were typing either.

The S400’s 500GB hard disk gives it more storage than SSD-based Ultrabooks, but of course it’s not as quick when it comes to working on big files and it’s not silent either. On the edges are two USB2 and one USB 3 port, an SD card reader, a combined headphone and microphone jack plus full-sized VGA and HDMI ports for connecting up external displays.

The Asus VivoBook S400 doesn’t improve on the S200’s faults, then, but its bigger screen and faster processor make a better all-rounder and a great buy. It’s only other major competitor is the Core-i5 based Toshiba Satellite P845t-101, which is £70 cheaper, but even the Toshiba’s brighter screen can’t beat the S400’s vastly superior build quality, performance and portability. It wins a Best Buy award.