For the price of $699, this is a great laptop, but any higher and you start getting into territory where this may no longer make sense. Personally, I haven't had a lot of luck lately with Asus products (and I have a lot of them), but so far this one has been pretty decent. I think the brand is a far cry from the high end stuff they used to put out 10+ years ago.
Out of the gate, I think the best feature of this laptop is probably the fact that the screen can lay completely flat. I don't really know what benefit this has in the real world, but it does it well.
For everything else, let's go through some of them.
The description says that the AMD Ryzen 5 7530U processor is 8-core/16-thread. This is incorrect. This CPU is 6-core, not 8. The processor itself is about 1.5 years old and it is a standard laptop CPU. You won't be able to do any high end gaming with it, but if that's your intention then you wouldn't (shouldn't) be buying this laptop. It is perfectly fine for regular multitasking office or home use activities.
It comes with 16GB of DDR4 3200mhz RAM, 8 of which is an upgradeable SK Hynix stick and the other 8 being soldered to the motherboard. You *should* be able to replace the 8GB stick with a 32GB stick and get a combined total of 40MB.
The onboard graphics adapter is and AMD Radeon with 512MB of dedicated RAM, though it will share with the system RAM. It is capable of displaying 1920x1080 resolution at 60 hertz on the 15.6" TN Panel LCD screen.
The SSD M.2 storage drive is a Solidigm P41 Plus 512GB 2280 removable stick and there is only 1 M.2 slot available. You will be able to replace this with a larger drive, if you wish to.
The onboard battery is a 42Wh, 3640mAh (typical) / 3550mAh (rated) cell that does provide pretty decent battery life for this laptop. I didn't test the number of hours I could get on a charge, but I was able to use it semi-regularly for a few days while on battery alone.
The other features that it comes with are WIFI 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. There are 4 USB ports, (1) 2.0 Type-A, (2) 3.2 Type-A & (1) Type-C. No Thunderbolt ports. There is also (1) HDMI port. You won't be burning any data cables up due to speedy transfers on this, but these should work well enough in most cases.
I should mention too that the camera has a privacy shutter. I always like this feature as nothing beats a good old physical barrier. Maybe I should have said this was its best feature above.
In all, this is a decent laptop for a casual user. Everything worked as it should and I was able to score a 5967 on PCMARK 10 with it, scoring well in Spreadsheets & App Start-up scores. Both of which are important for casual users.
| Standing screen display size | 15.6 Inches |
|---|---|
| Display Resolution | 1920 x 1080 pixels |
| Max screen resolution | 1920x1080 Pixels |
| Processor | 2 GHz ryzen_5 |
| RAM | DDR4 |
| Hard Drive | 512 GB SSD |
| Chipset brand | AMD |
| Card description | Integrated |
| Wireless Standard | Bluetooth, 802.11ax |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 1 |
| Average Battery Life (in hours) | 8 Hours |
| Brand | Asus |
| Series | Asus Vivobook |
| Item model number | 90NB0X21-M00L00 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Home |
| Parcel Dimensions | 48.2 x 28.6 x 6.6 cm; 1.69 kg |
| Colour | Quiet Blue |
| Processor Brand | AMD |
| Number of Processors | 1 |
| Memory Type | DDR4 SDRAM |
| Voltage | 5 Volts |
| Batteries | 1 Lithium Ion batteries required. (included) |
