The start of the new school year often also means a new laptop. Asus seems to be targeting school and college students with the new version of the VivoBook S14. For example, the laptop is available in different colors and you get stickers to decorate it. But is it also a good laptop?
Asus Vivo Book S14
Price € 699,-Processor Intel Intel Core i5-10210U
Memory 8GB
Screen 14-inch IPS (1920x1080p)
Storage 256GB SSD
Dimensions 32.5 x 21.4 x 1.6 cm
Weight 1.4 kilo
Battery 50 Wh
Connections 2x usb 2.0, usb 3.1 (gen 1), usb-c (gen 1), hdmi, 3.5mm jack, card reader
wireless Wi-Fi 6, bluetooth 5.0
Website www.asus.com 8 Score 80
- Pros
- Smooth hardware
- Beautiful housing
- Battery life
- Negatives
- USB-C no video/loading
- Two USB 2.0
- Contrast keyboard
The Asus VivoBook S14 S433FA is a beautiful laptop to look at and is largely made of aluminum. The lid is finished in white in a color Asus calls Dreamy White, but the laptop is also available in other colors. In any case, the laptop seems focused on appearance because Asus supplies stickers that you can stick on the laptop and the keyboard to decorate it. Funny and also striking is the yellow-rimmed Enter key, which I personally find a nice detail. I suspect that Asus is targeting school or college students from the looks of it. The laptop weighs 1.4 kilograms. It's not the lightest out there, but it's handy and light enough to always take with you. In any case, that is already a good basis for the study.
The build quality is fine, although the housing around the keyboard is a bit flexible. In itself, the VivoBook with four USB ports has enough connections, but unfortunately two of the ports are only USB2.0 ports. It is also unfortunate that the USB-C port does not support video output or charging. Asus has provided an HDMI connection for video output and charging is via a separate charging connection. It is nice that a micro-SD card reader is present. The Wi-Fi card is a Wi-Fi 6 variant from Intel and that's the best you can get right now, so it's an excellent choice.
Usage
The screen is a 14-inch panel that uses IPS technology. The viewing angles are good and the color reproduction is satisfactory, but the maximum brightness is somewhat disappointing. It is bright enough for indoors, but working outside is difficult. In any case, you can work comfortably inside. The keyboard has a nice touch and is equipped with key lighting in three levels. The keyboard has silver-colored letters in almost the same color as the housing. It looks nice, but it does have one major drawback. When the key lighting is on during the day, the contrast of the letters becomes so low that they are difficult to see. The black variant of this laptop also has black keys and this disadvantage will probably not apply.
The glass touchpad is a precision touchpad that works smoothly. The touchpad has a trick up its sleeve that we've seen on Asus laptops before. Pressing the top right corner turns the touchpad into a virtual numeric field. Handy if you work with Excel, for example, although of course they remain virtual keys that you can hardly use blindly.
Performance
The configuration I tested (S433FA-EB043T) is equipped with an Intel Core i5-10210U, 8 GB ram and a 256 GB ssd. The working memory of the laptop cannot be upgraded, but a free m.2 slot is provided. So you can expand the storage relatively easily without having to replace the SSD. The SSD is an NVME variant of WD and performs well with a maximum read and write speed of 1747 and 1298 MB/s. The laptop feels smooth and the score of 3948 points that the laptop puts down in PCMark confirms this image. The laptop is equipped with a 50Wh battery, which is very spacious in practice. With normal light office work you can count on about 8 hours of battery life.
Conclusion
The Asus VivoBook S14 S433FA is a quirky laptop that, thanks to a border around the Enter, colored lid and supplied stickers, stands out due to its cheerful appearance. The build quality is also excellent. The performance is also good and due to the long battery life and the weight of 1.4 kilos, this is a laptop that you can always take with you. The only real downside are the connections. It's a shame that two of the four USB ports are only USB 2.0 and that the USB-C port is only suitable for data. For 699 euros you get a nice laptop that performs all normal (office) activities smoothly. This makes it a perfect laptop for students or schoolchildren who are not interested in gaming, because there is no separate GPU.
