Asus Vivobook 16X (K3605) review: The Swiss army knife of laptops

What is the recipe for a truly successful do-it-all laptop? Decent performance from CPU and GPU certainly, and that means a discrete GPU unless you have no intention of gaming or serious graphics work. Long battery life, so you aren’t tethered to a power socket. A good screen and keyboard, an up-to-date selection of ports and comms.

Something well-made, not too heavy, stylish and resistant to greasy prints is handy, too, if you plan on toting your laptop around with you a lot. A not-exorbitant price tag is also to be desired. There’s only one thing worse than dropping or losing a laptop and that’s dropping or losing an expensive laptop.

If that sounds like the laptop for you, Asus may have just the thing in the form of the Vivobook 16X.

Asus Vivobook 16X review: What you need to know

If you are after a general-purpose laptop that avoids the cliche that being “a jack of all trades is a master of none” then the Asus Vivobook 16X is just what you are looking for. Indeed, to complete Shakespeare’s line, the 16X is a good example of a device that is “oftentimes better than a master of one”.

The Asus Vivobook 16X range is a broad church with prices ranging from as little as £600 to as much as £1,300. The key difference is the GPU. At the bottom end of the scale, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2050 variant is good for general graphics work but will struggle with complex 3D tasks, be it modelling or gaming. Next, is the more potent RTX 3050 model, while stepping up to a RTX 4050 brings Nvidia’s latest DLSS3.5 upscaling technology to the party. The range-topping RTX 4060 machine is pretty much a gaming laptop in disguise.

I think the RTX4050 is the sweet spot between ability and price. It won’t empty your bank account but still has the performance to chew through modelling tasks and run even hard-core AAA games at decent frame rates. In all other ways, the RTX 4050 and 4060 models are identical.

Asus Vivobook 16X review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: Intel Core i7-12650H CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 GPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 16in 120Hz 1,920 x 1,200 IPS display. Price when reviewed: £1,299

The entry-level Vivobook 16X machines feature the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2050 GPU or the 3050 and will typically set you back around £750, however we have seen the former on sale for as little as £599. The RTX 4050 model costs around £1,300, while the RTX 4060 version will set you back £1,349.

Depending on when and where you look, the price of the Asus Vivobook 16X can vary dramatically as it is one of the most common Asus machines to feature in sales and retail special offers. I would advise looking around thoroughly before you buy, no matter which GPU you’ve decided on. Some markets get the Vivobook 16X with a 2.8K OLED screen but the UK has to make do with a 16in 1,920 x 1,200 IPS panel.

As always, we won’t proceed without a word or three about some possible alternatives, should the Vivobook not light your candle.

• Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I – excellent value at £666 with a great display, easy upgradability and a good keyboard, but the Intel Arc 530M GPU struggles with demanding games and battery life is poor.
• Huawei D16 – not a particularly exciting laptop but its Intel Core i9-13900H CPU gives it a decent turn of speed and both the keyboard and battery life are good. At the current price of £899 it’s very good value.
• The RTX 2050 model of the Acer Aspire 7 seems to have shuffled off its mortal coil but you can pick up the RTX 3050 version for £899 from Acer, making it a solid choice for anyone wanting a cheap discrete GPU laptop.

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Asus Vivobook 16X review: Design and build quality

• Solid and smart design
• US MIL-STD-810H tough
• Excellent resistance to greasy fingerprints

The workaday Vivobook may not be as achingly pretty as the likes of the Zenbook S16 or Zenbook 14 OLED but it’s still quite a handsome thing with a matte silver paint job. A silver paint job which is wholly immune to greasy fingerprints – handy if you plan on working while consuming a cheeky takeaway with your fingers.

Cool Silver is one of two colourways that the Vivobook 16X is available in, but I haven’t been able to find the “Indie Black” model on sale in the UK, which is a bit of a shame.

Still, the 16X is put together nicely enough. It’s made largely from plastic but still feels solid and robust. If you give the base and lid a real twist, there is some flex but nothing you’ll notice in everyday use. Usefully, the lid angles back to 180-degrees, which is great if you are using it slouched on the settee with your knees up.

Like many Asus laptops, the 16X boasts US MIL-STD-810H military-grade levels of resistance to vibration, temperature and particle ingress. To ensure this, the laptops undergo what Asus describes as “12 rigorous test methods and 26 punishing test procedures”.

Weighing 1.83kg and being just under 20mm thick, the Asus Vivobook 16X is perfectly transportable and the 120W power brick doesn’t take up much space or weigh much, either. If you want to leave the brick at home the 16X will happily charge from a USB-C PD charger. I tried it with 65W and 125W chargers and it worked with both.

The 16X has a good selection of ports, too, with two 5Gbit/sec USB-A ports, one on each side, as well as an SD card reader on the left and Thunderbolt 4 (or fully-functional 10Gbit/sec USB-C on the RTX 2050 and RTX 3050 models), HDMI 2.1 and 3.5mm audio jacks on the right. The DC charging point is at the rear on the right-hand side, where it doesn’t get in the way.

Wireless communications are handled by a MediaTek MT7902 card that supports 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E as well as Bluetooth 5.3. That’s not wholly up to date now that we’re into the era of Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, but many laptops in this price range don’t offer 6GHz connectivity, so I’m not complaining.

Opening up the 16X is an easy operation and, once inside, you can easily access all the important components including the M.2 2280 SSD and wireless card (both removable). My review model came with 16GB of DDR4 memory soldered to the motherboard and an empty SODIMM mount for another 16GB. There is no space for a second SSD.

Asus Vivobook 16X review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

• Solid keyboard with numeric keypad
• Fingerprint scanner
• Basic by competent 720p webcam

The “ErgoSense” keyboard is impressively solid. You have to push down hard to detect even the slightest flex and the keys have a near-perfectly weighted 1.4mm of travel. The keycap graphics are models of clarity, although the three-stage white backlight can cause some contrast issues when it isn’t fully dark. White light behind silver keys is never a great idea.

The keyboard has a third-width numeric keypad, which is great, but is cursed with half-height arrow keys which is not so great. There’s no dedicated Co-Pilot key, which I don’t deem a loss, but there is a dedicated key to launch the MyAsus control panel and you can lock the function keys to media controls if you want.

The 130 x 80mm touchpad is plastic but does a good job of feeling like glass. The pad works perfectly but the click-action is just a little on the noisy side. There’s a fingerprint scanner in the top-right corner, which speeds up logging in, but there’s no Windows Hello IR facial recognition.

Speaking of which, the webcam is a rather basic 720p affair and doesn’t come with any of Microsoft’s fancy Studio Effects. However, it does have a manual privacy shutter and performs surprisingly well. Images proved to be colourful and crisp and things didn’t get too noisy when the light fell.

As for the 512GB Micron SSD, it proved capable of fairly mediocre read performance with sequential read speeds of 3,205MB/sec, while the average write speed was a tardy 1,259MB/sec. According to Asus, the RTX 2050 and RTX 3050 models use a PCIe3 rather than a PCIe4 drive, and so may be even slower.

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Asus Vivobook 16X review: Display and audio

• Bright, colour-accurate IPS screen
• Smooth 120Hz refresh rate
• Detailed and spacious speaker system

Asus is a brand increasingly associated with OLED displays and rather good ones at that, but that’s no reason to dismiss the 16in 1,920 x 1,200 IPS screen fitted to the cheaper Vivobook 16X models we get here in the UK.

To start with, it’s usefully bright – I measured it peaking at 350cd/m2 – and it’s able to reproduce 98.8% of the sRGB gamut. Colour accuracy was decent as well, with the Delta E variance (vs the sRGB profile) reaching a highly impressive 0.94 (the lower this score the better).

In addition, thanks to a combination of pretty high brightness and a low 0.2cd/m2 black level, the contrast ratio is a high 1,727:1, which makes for a punchy and impactful viewing experience. The display has a Vivid mode, which plays merry hell with the colour accuracy, but lends videos an attractive, slightly over-saturated look.

The 120Hz refresh rate ensures that on screen action is silky smooth, while the matte finish does a good job of keeping reflections in check. There’s no support for HDR content, however.

The 2 x 2W speakers have been tuned by the bods at audio specialists Dirac and come with a Dirac control panel. The results are rather impressive. There’s volume aplenty, the system generating 75.5dBA measured against a pink noise source and a reasonable amount of bass.

But what really grabs the attention is the amount of clarity and space. I’m listening to Tracy Chapman’s eponymous debut album as I write this, and the immediacy of her voice and guitar is really something.

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Asus Vivobook 16X review: Performance and battery life

• Good graphics and gaming performance
• Some thermal throttling under stress
• Excellent battery life

Shovelling the coal inside the Asus Vivobook 16X you’ll find a 12th-generation Intel chip – the 10-core Intel Core i7-12650H – and an Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU with a total graphics power or TGP rating of 55W. That’s a recipe for solid performance and a system that can take the vast majority of tasks in its stride.

In our standard 4K multimedia test, the 16X scored 267, comfortably above the 200 figure at which general performance is frankly moot: no everyday task is going to tax this laptop.

Generally unlooked for in a machine of this price and category is the MUX switch Asus has fitted, enabling you to get the very best out of the GPU. But even in standard Windows MSHybrid mode, this laptop’s RTX 4050 did well, running the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling test at an impressive 64fps.

It’s not too shabby when it comes to gaming either, running the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark at 53fps at the highest detail setting without Ray Tracing light effects, and Returnal at 63fps in the same circumstances. Of course, thanks to Nvidia’s DLSS 3.5 upscaling and frame generation, there’s plenty of headroom to boost those numbers.

If you want fancy ray-traced lighting effects, the Cyberpunk test ran at the same 53fps using the Ray Tracing: Low preset with DLSS set to Performance and Frame Generation on. That’s not too shabby for a laptop that is not being promoted as a gaming thoroughbred.

One minor caveat needs to be mentioned, however: in prolonged stress testing of both the CPU and GPU, the single fan struggled to keep things as cool as they could be. While GPU utilisation stayed nailed to 100%, CPU usage quickly dropped to between 50% and 60% as thermal throttling reared its ugly head. This isn’t a deal breaker, but it’s certainly something to be aware of.

What’s possibly most impressive about this machine, though, is its battery life. In our standard video run-down test, which involves looping an SD video with the screen at 170cd/m2 brightness, it lasted 12hrs 14mins, which is an excellent showing from the 70Wh battery. I’m inclined to describe it as almost Mac-like. Note, that the lesser RTX 2050 and RTX 3050 machines won’t do as well as they come with smaller, 50Wh batteries.

Asus Vivobook 16X review: Verdict

What all of this adds up to is that the Asus Vivobook 16X is a seriously capable general-purpose laptop, that can handle everything from day-to-day PC drudgery to serious gaming via watching Netflix or listening to Spotify. The robust, stay-clean design and excellent battery life are cherries on an already rather scrumptious cake.

To find fault with the 16X, I’m reduced to mentioning the lack of a second SSD slot, and small issues with thermal throttling. The latter won’t bother the vast majority of users and if you need more storage, swapping out the 512GB SSD for a 1TB unit is straightforward. In summation, the Asus Vivobook 16X is a great all-rounder, and that rarest of things: a jack of all trades and a master of them as well.