Asus Vivobook 16 X1607QA (Snapdragon X) overview

The Asus Vivobook 16 X1607QA is likely one of the first batches of notebooks to run on the brand new Qualcomm Snapdragon X chip. In comparison with the extra premium Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus chip units we’ve seen previously, the Vivobook 16 X1607QA is a extra reasonably priced mid-range pocket book befitting the entry-level Snapdragon chip.

Beginning at $749, the Vivobook 16 X1607QA — henceforth known as simply X1607QA — targets college students, house, and workplace customers with considerably primary computing wants. It has a 16-inch FullHD 60Hz IPS show, a full-sized keyboard with numeric keys, and a 50Wh battery with 65W quick charging. It is not the kind of machine one would go for if extra particular necessities equivalent to gaming or media creation are a precedence. And we’re speaking about actual media creation right here, not asking an AI chatbot to make Studio Ghibli edits of your pictures.

So with that disclaimer out of the best way, let’s get on with the overview.

Design

The X1607QA design is typical of an Asus Vivobook mannequin with little or no design aptitude. The Cool Silver mannequin we’ve right here seems to be particularly boring however there’s additionally a Quiet Blue mannequin that does look higher in pictures.

The again of the lid is sort of featureless with only a refined Asus Vivobook brand on the aspect. On the within, there’s a somewhat substantial body across the show, not by way of width however extra by way of top. When closed, this thick body makes it seem like there is a sizable hole between the lid and the bottom though there is not.

The bottom can be completed in silver on our unit however is fortunately damaged by the black keys. This makes the X1607QA look so much higher on the within than the S5507QA Snapdragon X Elite mannequin we reviewed final yr that had silver keys over a silver base. That was far too monotonous and the black keys on the X1607QA present a much-needed reduction from the ocean of grey, though they present smudges extra readily than silver.

Alongside the perimeters, the X1607QA has a variety of ports on the left however only one on the fitting together with a few standing LEDs, one in every of which is annoyingly vivid. The entrance edge has a cutout offering sufficient house to pry the lid open. Not like with the S5507QA, I didn’t really feel like I used to be overlaying the digicam with smudges or sliding the digicam cowl each time I opened the lid, which is a particular enchancment though this machine is cheaper.

Shifting on to the underside of the machine, there’s a grey cowl with a concrete-like texture to it. It’s held in place by ten screws, one in every of which is captive, however comes off comparatively simply as soon as all of them are undone. The duvet has a comparatively small opening on the again for a single fan consumption in addition to a small row of vents for the exhaust. The 2 are positioned subsequent to one another however the raised edge that acts because the toes prevents the exhaust air from being sucked again into the consumption when the machine is on a desk.

Going again to the lid for a second, the X1607QA has a kind of 180° hinges that Asus likes to equip a few of its fashions. I am nonetheless undecided what the purpose of it’s as at no level did I really feel like I benefited from the lid opening that vast. The bottom of the lid additionally tends to cowl the exhaust port utterly when the lid is absolutely opened so you actually do not wish to try this if the fan is operating.

The general construct high quality of the X1607QA is first rate. Each floor you contact is made out of plastic however none of it feels flimsy or cheaply made. It does, nonetheless, get coated in smudges fairly readily and the again of the lid on our unit additionally picked up a thriller scratch early on within the check interval.

My greatest concern with the X1607QA is the burden. At 1.88kg (4.14lb), the laptop computer feels onerous, particularly with the charger in tow. Opening up the again panel reveals a compact motherboard, a easy cooling system, and a 50Wh battery together with a bunch of empty house. Your complete development is made out of plastic. As such, there actually does not appear to be any justification for the burden.

Show

The X1607QA has a 16-inch, 1920×1200 decision IPS LCD. The show has a refresh charge vary of 40-60Hz with VRR assist. The panel has a matte anti-glare coating and a peak brightness of 300 nits. There isn’t a contact or HDR assist.

By way of shade gamut protection, Asus makes no claims for the X1607QA., which normally does not bode properly. By our estimates, the panel appears to only about cowl the sRGB shade house however may doubtlessly fall quick as some colours do seem a bit uninteresting. We could not carry out a full show calibration check as our calibrator was not acknowledged on the machine even after putting in the drivers.

Asus enables you to modify the colour temperature and blue mild filter for the show, however neither helped repair the considerably cool blue tone of the show with out making the picture excessively crimson or inexperienced. There may be additionally a Vivid mode nevertheless it solely pretends to spice up shade quantity when in actuality simply boosts the gamma a bit, which additional proves that this panel merely is not able to a large shade gamut.

The 300 nits peak brightness declare additionally couldn’t be verified. Indoors, the brightness appeared satisfactory for essentially the most half. Even when used open air, the show was usable at most brightness. It is solely when there’s direct daylight on the display screen does it will get onerous to see. The anti-glare coating works properly, which suggests the show backlight does not need to struggle stray reflections as a lot.

The show has good distinction efficiency, definitely not on par with OLED and even VA panels however fairly first rate for IPS. Viewing angles are equally good each prime to backside and aspect to aspect.

Movement efficiency was not very best but additionally not poor. There may be some ghosting in movement, which could be noticeable in some content material, particularly 60fps video or any video games you might trouble to run nevertheless it’s not too distracting.

Total, the show on the X1607QA is fairly good for internet and workplace work that it’s primarily optimized for together with some media playback. Nevertheless, with OLEDs changing into more and more frequent, it could have been a worthy inclusion, particularly for media consumption.

Keyboard and trackpad

The X1607QA has a backlit chiclet-style keyboard with 1.7mm journey keys. Together with the total set of letter and image keys, there’s additionally a ten-key numeric keypad on the aspect. The highest row is assigned to shortcuts by default however could be quickly or completely toggled for use as perform keys.

The keyboard on the X1607QA works properly. The keys are spacious, have good suggestions, and are moderately quiet. The white backlighting is completely satisfactory in the dead of night and for the reason that keys are black as a substitute of silver as on the S5507QA, the important thing legends do not mix with the background when the lighting is on through the day.

If I needed to complain, it could be in regards to the regular lack of the right-side management key in lieu of the ineffective Copilot key. Home windows can be fairly obtuse in terms of letting you customise the important thing. You may both swap it to Home windows Search, disable it totally, or set it to a distinct AI app equivalent to ChatGPT. There isn’t a choice to set it to manage or another perform. After all, that is neither an X1607QA-specific nor an Asus-specific concern however endemic to all of the Copilot branded notebooks.

Shifting on, the trackpad beneath the keyboard is sizable, measuring 13cm x 8.5cm, and is completely flush with the bottom. It’s a plastic floor however nonetheless fairly easy and though it’s hinged on the prime you’ll be able to click on on nearly 80% of the floor and register a click on. The sound it makes is not very satisfying and makes your complete backside half of the laptop computer vibrate.

Audio system

The X1607QA has a pair of down-firing audio system on both aspect. The audio system are aided with Dolby Atmos processing by the Dolby Entry app together with Asus’s Good Amplifier and Audio Booster options.

By default, the audio system have first rate audio high quality with no audible distortion even on the comparatively excessive max quantity. Nevertheless, being down-firing in nature, the audio system do not have nice readability within the higher mid and excessive frequencies.

That is the place the Dolby Entry app is available in, which may course of the audio sufficient to make up for this deficit and ship a lot clearer audio. The sound nonetheless can not compete with the likes of the MacBook Air audio system, that are louder and fuller sounding however they get the job performed.

Webcam

The X1607QA has a mediocre-quality webcam. It is solely higher than not having a webcam in any respect however when you’ve got larger expectations out of your webcam then you might want to get one individually.

The digicam comes with a privateness cowl, which can be utilized when you do not use the Home windows Whats up facial unlock function. This function works okay in case you are straight in entrance of the pocket book, inside a detailed distance, not too angled, and never in vivid lighting. If any of these circumstances aren’t met then the function simply does not work.

Software program

The X1607QA comes with Home windows 11 Residence Version pre-installed. As we’ve seen with previous variations of Asus notebooks, the quantity of bloatware is pretty restricted to a handful of Asus apps, most of that are helpful. There’s additionally a trial model of McAfee however you’ll be able to simply instantly uninstall it.

The X1607QA additionally comes with a one-year subscription to Workplace 365 together with three months of Xbox Sport Go. That second one did not actually make sense even on the S5507QA, particularly when you think about the Xbox app will not even present you any video games on an ARM-based Home windows gadget.

The variety of ARM64 apps has additionally grown significantly over the previous yr. A number of standard apps now have an ARM64 model out there both in secure or beta type alongside x86. Nevertheless, the consumer does must show some stage of competence to obtain the right model. Some apps will solely set up the right model on your system by a mixed installer, and a few will routinely current the fitting model as default whereas downloading, however many will simply make you select manually. Anticipating the typical consumer to know the distinction between x86, x64, and arm64 is perhaps a bit a lot.

Sadly, whereas the app state of affairs is enhancing, nearly nothing has modified on the gaming entrance. There are nonetheless no ARM variations of AAA or standard titles, with the one native titles being cell recreation ports. It is particularly embarrassing contemplating Microsoft owns half the key recreation studios at this level and nonetheless can’t be bothered to port a single recreation to ARM so customers have not less than one recreation to strive. So as to add insult to harm, Apple retains racking up main titles for the macOS platform, successfully making even the MacBook Air a greater gaming machine than any Snapdragon-based Home windows PC.

{Hardware}

The X1607QA runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X chip. Not like the X Elite and X Plus fashions that function a number of SKUs, the Snapdragon X simply has a single SKU, the X1-26-100.

The X1-26-100 has 8 Oryon CPU cores clocked at 3.0GHz with Adreno X1-45 GPU. Whereas the CPU is technically an identical to the opposite Snapdragon desktop components, it has the least quantity of cores and likewise the bottom clock speeds with no extra enhance. The GPU can be the slowest out of the Snapdragon X sequence. Nevertheless, the X1-26-100 has the identical 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU as the opposite fashions.

Paired with the chipset is 16GB LPDDR5X 8448MHz reminiscence and 512GB M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD with a 1TB possibility out there in some areas. The reminiscence is soldered however the storage could be changed or upgraded simply.

By way of connectivity, the X1607QA has 2x Kind-C USB 4 40Gbps ports, 2x Kind-A 3.2 Gen 1 20Gbps ports, HDMI 2.1, and a headphone jack. The pocket book doesn’t have a separate charging port so one of many USB-C ports will likely be taken up by the charger. Sadly, there isn’t any SD card slot though there’s sufficient house on the fitting aspect to slip in a punch card.

For wi-fi customers, there’s triple-band Wi-Fi 6E 802.11ax and Bluetooth 5.3.

Efficiency

The X1607QA provides 4 fan profile modes inside the MyASUS apps. As with the S5507QA with the X1E-78-100, the fan profile modes additionally act as energy modes with completely different energy limits that change efficiency together with fan speeds.

On the X1607QA, each the Full-speed mode and Efficiency mode can hit 30W, the Customary mode maintains 23W, and the Whisper mode can solely obtain 18W. After all, every mode additionally has a distinct fan profile that dictates how loud it might probably get below full load.

Now let us take a look at the benchmarks. By way of multi-threaded efficiency, the three.0GHz 8-core X1-26-100 contained in the X1607QA has about 63% of the efficiency of the three.4GHz 12-core X1E-78-100 in Cinebench 2024, which is smart. The one-core efficiency is down 11%, which can be consistent with the roughly 12% drop in clock speeds. There may also be duties the place the 12MB discount in cache ought to make its absence felt however Cinebench does not care about that.

Evaluating efficiency between the completely different energy profiles makes it rapidly obvious there’s no actual distinction within the prime three modes in CPU assessments, regardless of the Customary mode consuming much less energy. Even the Whisper mode is not miles off the opposite three modes. The complete-speed mode feels particularly pointless because it makes a complete lot of noise for no considerable return.

Efficiency total is sort of good. Regardless of the chip being the runt of the Snapdragon litter, it doesn’t really feel such as you’re utilizing a weak or low-power pc. The X1607QA all the time feels comfortable with primary internet or workplace duties and the one time it felt prefer it was operating out of breath was whereas taking part in 4K movies on YouTube. The advantage of the efficiency is that there isn’t any noticeable drop in efficiency when shifting from the charger to the battery.

The 16GB reminiscence can be satisfactory for the meant utilization. Even with a bunch of tabs open together with workplace apps, Spotify, and some different apps open, you’re unlikely to get wherever near utilizing all of the out there reminiscence. It is solely if you begin doing picture or video enhancing workloads will you’re feeling you’re operating out of house however these will not be actually what the X1607QA is meant for.

Sadly, gaming efficiency stays simply as abysmal because it was on the Snapdragon X Elite final yr. Simply to provide it the good thing about the doubt, I fired up God of Conflict on Steam, particularly since Qualcomm particularly mentions the sport in one in every of its driver updates as being improved. What I found was a recreation that was unplayable even when taking part in at 400p on the lowest settings. Maybe it runs a bit higher on the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips however the weaker X chip struggles to even play the intro video with out stuttering.

Contemplating the breadth of titles out there on Steam, it could be unfair to say that you just can not play video games in any respect on the X1607QA. If all you do is play Balatro or Amongst Us, then you may get by simply fantastic. I am personally partial in the direction of the Ace Lawyer sequence and people run simply fantastic as properly. Mainly, nearly something you can run on the outdated Intel UHD graphics could be run right here, which is the very best reward you can provide the Home windows ARM gaming scene.

Lastly, the cooling efficiency is fairly good total for the reason that chip doesn’t devour a lot energy. The fan barely spins up more often than not so you’re normally operating the system fanless. When it does spin, it is not audible. The one time the fan turns into loud is when you’ve got set the fan profile to Efficiency or Full-speed and are operating one thing very CPU-heavy.

Battery life

Simply wanting on the specs, the 50Wh battery on the X1607QA doesn’t sound too promising. Nevertheless, the power-efficient nature of the X1-26-100 means you may get away with so much even with 50Wh.

Beginning with the online shopping check, the X1607QA lasted for 8.5 hours of steady use. Within the streaming video check, the gadget lasted for a barely longer 8.7 hours. These are fairly good numbers and when seen within the context of typical non-continuous utilization would imply roughly 2-3 days of use out of a single cost.

As talked about earlier than, the chip doesn’t lose a lot or any efficiency when switching to battery energy. Furthermore, the gadget additionally has a really low battery drain on standby, with an in a single day sleep session dropping solely 1-2% of the battery.

The X1607QA helps as much as 65W quick charging and comes with a 65W USB-C charger. The gadget can cost as much as 50% in half-hour however then takes over two hours for a full cost.

Conclusion

The Asus Vivobook 16 X1607QA is an efficient pc so long as you keep inside its pocket of experience. The massive 16:10 show, full-sized keyboard with numpad, spacious trackpad, and good battery life make it very best for internet, workplace, and college work. Whereas that won’t sound particularly spectacular, a lot of the x86-based notebooks out there on this vary do not have nice battery life or good usable efficiency on battery.

Having mentioned that, the X1607QA nonetheless feels a bit costly. At $750, one would anticipate not less than an OLED show, which might have additionally made this good for media consumption. However since that isn’t the case, it is advisable to attend for a reduction earlier than choosing one up.