Whenever we get a new laptop in to review at the Beebom office, I’m usually fairly excited. Sometimes, I’m too excited, and sometimes I’m not, but I am excited to a certain degree almost every single time. So when Asus sent us the Vivobook 14 X403 for a review a while back, I was definitely looking forward to using it as my primary laptop for a few days to see what it’s like. Well, I have used it fairly extensively over the last week, and if you’re wondering whether this is the laptop for you, and if it’s worth the asking price of Rs. 54,990, here’s my review of the Asus Vivobook 14 X403: the laptop with a terrible name, but a great… just about everything else.
Before we jump in to the review, here’s a specsheet for the laptop that Asus sent over to us:
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.
Coming back to the design for a bit, the Vivobook 14 comes with the signature Vivobook thin-bezels that look stunning, and result in this laptop being a lot smaller than what you’d expect a laptop with a 14-inch display to be. In fact, it’s only very slightly bigger than my 13-inch 2017 MacBook Pro, which is just a little embarrassing to me, personally, because I used to love the thin bezels on the MacBook Pro, and this is just unfair. Jokes apart, I love the thin bezels on the Vivobook 14 X403.
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.
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.
Still, if you’re hell bent on playing something on this, games like CS:GO run fine on the laptop, albeit at a mix of low to medium graphics settings if you want playable frame rates. CS:GO assumed High graphics by default and then got frame rates of around 20FPS, which is just plain sad. However, switch the graphics to low, and you easily get around 50FPS on CS:GO. If you’re a gamer, you’re probably annoyed that 50FPS on CS:GO is acceptable to me, and you’d be right, but on a laptop that’s clearly not aimed at gaming, 50FPS in CS:GO means you can take breaks at work and get some AWP kills in Dust 2, which is what I did.. or at least tried to do.
Anyway, performance isn’t an issue on the Vivobook 14 X403, and the laptop will easily power through your workflow without hiccups, which is awesome.
Speaking of awesome, the keyboard on the Vivobook 14 is mighty good. It’s a backlit keyboard, with a standard white LED backlight that’s bright enough, and bleeds out from under the keys, but that’s not really annoying. Using the keyboard is fun, the keys have ample travel, the response is a little bouncy, but not so much as to fatigue your fingers, just enough to make typing feel like playing a game — I massively appreciate that because I type a lot.
For a thin laptop, Asus sure packed in quite a lot of ports on this thing. There’s a USB-C port, two USB 3 ports, an SD card reader, and a headphone-mic combo port. That’s not too many ports, but it’s more than enough for what you will be doing on this laptop. Plus, the addition of a USB-C port is always a plus.
In my usage, at least, I didn’t find myself looking for ways to add more ports to the laptop, but if you do need to, there are a ton of USB-C dongles that will easily bring more I/O options to your laptop. Plus, there are a lot of USB-C accessories that you can use with this laptop as well, thanks to the USB-C port.
So, the battery. I don’t know how Asus did this, but it managed to put in a massive 72Wh battery inside the sleek, tiny chassis of the Vivobook 14, and that big battery brings along a great battery life. I’m not talking 9 to 12 hours of battery life here, I’m talking “this laptop will get you through your work day, and have juice left over for watching Netflix back home without charging” levels of battery.
Pros:
- Amazing battery life
- Great performance
- Fingerprint scanner
Cons:
