Here’s my review of the Asus Vivobook 14 X403: the laptop with a terrible name, but a great… just about everything else with a price tag of Rs. 54,990.
Design and Build
Look, the Vivobook 14 X403 is a thin-and-light laptop aimed at productivity oriented workflows, and it looks perfect for that. It has a sleek design that looks great, and it comes in this Silver Blue colour, which just looks silver to me, which is a classic colour for these type of laptops, just like black is the classic colour you’d find on most gaming laptops, and that’s great.
It’s not the sturdiest of laptops I’ve seen and used, but then again, at this price point, it’s one of the sturdiest ones I’ve experienced. Thankfully, I didn’t drop it, so I’m not sure how that would’ve gone (and I hope you don’t have to find out for yourself either), but Asus claims that the laptop comes with military grade durability and reliability standards(MIL-STD 810G) and can, Asus claims, handle drops from as high up as 10cm with ease. It’s definitely a good rating to have, but once again, I didn’t test this out, so I can’t confirm whether it holds up to that claim or not, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.
Display
The fact that there’s nothing to complain about doesn’t really extend to the display though. The Vivobook 14 X403 comes with a nice 14-inch FullHD display which I really liked in my usage of the laptop. 14-inch looks like just the perfect screen-size to me, for the kind of work I do on a daily basis. It brings in just a little more screen-real estate, which is great, but it’s not massive, like 15-inch laptops usually are. 14-inches sounds like a reasonable screen size to have if your workflow mostly revolves around your laptop being big enough that things aren’t cramped in, and portable enough that you can carry it around to meeting rooms and, sometimes, to the cafeteria.
I digress though, let’s circle back to the display. So this panel in the Vivobook 14 is a decent display to have. It’s not the brightest, by far, but it’s not so dim that you wouldn’t like using it. Plus, it has a matte finish which I suspect makes the brightness levels worse. However, the thing I find weird on this display, is the contrast. Honestly, colours just look a little dull on this screen. Now I’m not sure why that is, and I tried everything I could to fix this, but that’s just how the display is. It basically turns every colour into a flat colour, which sounds like a good thing in theory, but can quickly get annoying because it just doesn’t look satisfying enough.
Performance
If you’re reading this review, chances are you’ve spotted the “Impressive Performance” I put in the title, so you already know where this section is headed. The Vivobook 14 X403 comes with an 8th-gen Intel Core i5-8265U processor paired with 8GB of LPDDR3 RAM, and a 512GB PCIe SSD.
That translates to great performance that doesn’t let you down. Sure, the 8th-gen processor is a weird choice from Asus, but in practice, it wouldn’t make the kind of difference that would push this laptop to the bottom of the barrel, so to speak. Especially for the kind of workflow this laptop is meant to be used in. In my week-long usage of the Vivobook 14, I didn’t experience any lags, freezes, or annoyances of any kind. The laptop handles multiple Chrome tabs paired with a Photoshop session with ease, and doesn’t let up if you try to push it.
Great laptop with a decent price. Thanks for sharing the info.
ReplyDeleteKeep sharing these types of reviews :)