Just like the budget smartphone category that’s cluttered with so many confusing options, the budget laptop market is no exception. If you hop onto any e-commerce platform right now, you’ll find a multitude of options and it’s easy to be overwhelmed, especially since you don’t want to buy a laptop with dated specs or inferior performance.

Before we dive into our complete review, first let us get the internal specifications of this machine out of the way. The VivoBook X505 is powered by the Ryzen 3 2200U in the low-end variant and goes up to Ryzen 5 2500U in the highest-end one. It is coupled with up to 8GB of DDR4 RAM, 1TB of 5400RPM HDD, and up to Radeon Vega 8 graphics memory. Here’s the detailed specification table of the VivoBook X505:

Asus VivoBook X505: Design and Build

Starting off with the design, Asus VivoBook X505 doesn’t look a whole lot different from any other laptop in the company’s budget lineup. It closely resembles the VivoBook X507, which we reviewed earlier this year, in terms of aesthetics and I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing. It’s a design language that works for Asus and the laptop looks sturdy and functional.

One of the highlights of the VivoBook X505 is its ultra-thin construction and light design. The laptop might not have the most compact build and is about the same size as any other 15.6-inch laptop and weighs just 1.6 kilograms. Yes, it’s really light.

Asus VivoBook X505: Display

The display on the VivoBook X505 is splendid, considering it’s a mid-range laptop and makes for a great entertainment experience. The 15.6-inch screen on this laptop is surrounded by slimmer 7.7mm bezels and offers a striking 81 percent screen-to-body ratio.

Asus is known to sprinkle its own software into the mix and here also it enables you to choose between 4 different display modes, namely Normal, Vivid, Eye Care, and Manual. The display is set to normal by default, but you can pick Eye Care to apply a night light filter.

Moving on to the keyboard, the VivoBook X505 packs a standard chiclet keyboard with no numpad. We know not having a numpad may be a dealbreaker for some but it didn’t really affect me much.Asus is looking at professionals and students to market its latest entrant into India and if the keys are well-spaced out instead of being stuffed into the limited space then it’s all fine, right?

Also, there is no LED indicator in the Caps Lock key, nor does the laptop show when the function has been activated with an on-screen toast, so it was a huge pain to write uppercase letters. You can’t know when you accidentally hit the Caps Lock key.

Asus has included a decent-sized touchpad on the VivoBook X505 with a single button at the bottom, where the left and right clicks are defined with a small line down the middle. The touchpad here is made out of plastic with a matte texture so that it doesn’t feel cheap and icky to the touch and offers a comfortable scrolling experience.

While Apple has taken the minimalist route with its MacBooks, those are super premium and the company knows that users can spend a few more bucks on a dongle that makes the required ports available to you. Well, budget laptop makers don’t really have such liberty and VivoBook X505ZA has all the ports that you might need for daily use. Ports on the left side

Moving our attention to the right side, there’s the Kensington Lock, coupled with 2 USB-A 2.0 ports, a combo headphone jack (will support an earphone with an in-line microphone), and a multi-format card reader.

Though we might have already come across a few hardware kinks, it’s the performance that I was secretly excited to check out with this laptop. This is the first Ryzen Mobile laptop that I am testing out, so I was really excited to see how it performs. So, let’s not waste more time and dive in.

The APU in the VivoBook X505 makes it a highly versatile machine, which is not only capable of handling daily workloads but can also stomach casual gaming sessions. The 1TB spinning hard-disk is disappointing, but you can replace that for an SSD. So, let’s take a different route than we usually do for laptop reviews and talk all about the performance of the laptop in two situations- the day-to-day tasks and casual gaming.

In regular day-to-day use, the VivoBook X505’s performance has been pretty good in the one week that I got to spend with it. The laptop was able to handle my daily writing needs with ease, where at a time I had close to 15-20 tabs open in Opera and Microsoft Edge at the same time.

Asus VivoBook X505 can handle heavy workloads and that’s evident but what about the gaming performance? Well, let me preface this section by saying that VivoBook X505 is certainly not made for gaming in mind but you can enjoy a few popular game titles like CS:GO, Fornite, PUBG Mobile on emulator, and many more.

I’m not going to lie, I was quite skeptical about playing games on this laptop and all the skepticism was met with equal force by the VivoBook X505. Firstly, the graphics drivers were missing and I had to go through the trouble of finding those on Asus’ website and installing them, post which I started my gaming endeavor and it wasn’t good.

I even tried out Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) that recently went free-to-play and was easily able to notice an average 100 fps frame rate in 720p low settings and also around 42 fps in 720p high settings. Even multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) titles such as Dota 2, as well as League of Legends, were easily playable on the VivoBook X505. You can check out our statistics in the table attached below:

So, the laptop may not be a gaming beast but it can surely handle some casual gaming. I believe the low-frequency DDR4 RAM and the spinning hard disk could be creating a bottleneck here and if you plan on upgrading it, the gameplay could be improved by a wee bit. I’d, however, suggest you use a cooling pad to regulate the heat and not play hours-on-end.

Though we’ve already seen that the performance of the Ryzen 5 2500U processor on the VivoBook X505 is quite decent for the price, let us see if the benchmark figures back the same. And well, some users really rely on benchmark numbers to better understand the overall performance, so here we go.

In the Geekbench test, the Ryzen 5 2550U on our VivoBook X505 gave us a single- and multi-core score of 3378 and 9048 respectively, which is very respectable. These figures are better than the official Geekbench results of the Intel i3 8130U, that has a single and multi-score score of 3680 and 7090 respectively.

With casual gaming possible on the VivoBook X505, it became important for us to explore the thermal performance as well.

This laptop includes only a single fan module at the rear end, sitting right under the SonicMaster logo that’s visible above the keyboard deck. While the VivoBook X505 stays cool during regular use, i.e. while browsing or even while using Photoshop, but it tends to heat up when you’re gaming on it. Not extremely hot, but mildly hot!

Nowadays, you can find some decent cameras being integrated into budget smartphones but the webcam on laptops are still crappy and haven’t improved over the years. Same is the case here as VivoBook X505 comes bundled with a 0.3MP VGA camera and the picture quality is obviously sub-par – like always!

This laptop is designed and priced to address the needs of a casual user, who is likely to carry it to the workplace or lectures during the day and use it as their primary source of entertainment at night. It is not only the display that plays a major role but instead, the audio output can help make the experience worthwhile. We cannot say that about the Asus VivoBook X505 that we have right here.

The VivoBook X505 has two tiny speaker grills on either edge, at the bottom front (as seen below) and the sound output is not well-balanced and lacks bass. I tried watching a popular Spanish crime thriller, The Invisible Guest, on Netflix the past weekend and the speakers were bit of a disappointment.

The output was sufficiently loud when the VivoBook X505 was placed on a table, however, moving to the comfort of your bed or placing the laptop on your lap muffled the sound. I found Asus Zenfone phones to be louder. My 4-year old 11-inch MacBook Air also sounds sounding than this laptop, and that’s a tiny machine.

Turning our attention to one of the more important factors, well, the Asus VivoBook X505 carries a small 3-cell 42WHr Lithium-ion battery and it’s decent enough to offer you up to 3.5 hours of backup on a single charge.

Talking about the charging capabilities of the VivoBook X505, Asus bundles a 45W (19V, 2.37A) charging adapter with the laptop and my tests saw it fully charge it in about 2 hours and 15 minutes– which is quite decent but still a bit slow when you consider the amount of charge it holds.

Now that you know almost everything about the VivoBook X505, it’s time to see if Asus’ latest mid-range laptop is worth buying or not. Well, the Taiwanese giant has gotten an equal mix of good and bad in this laptop. I mean, it does check all the right boxes when you talk about the design and performance, but there are some negative quirks like the average battery life and keyboard quality that might be a turn off for some.

Asus VivoBook X505 (starts at Rs 30,990) offer you an ultra-slim build, with a metallic finish and it’s awesome. We even adored how light it was, making it easy to carry around, and well, we’ve already shown that the Ryzen APU breathes life into this machine, and is powerful enough for light gaming too.

  • Slim bezels
  • Anti-glare display
  • Good performance
  • Precision Touchpad
  • Good for casual gaming
  • Decent thermals

CONS:

  • Crummy battery life
  • Lacking audio experience
  • Keyboard flex

Asus VivoBook X505 Review: A Versatile Machine With Minor Faults

The VivoBook X505 is certainly a versatile machine as it not only offers you the ease and comfort of using it as your daily driver for simplistic tasks but also using heavy software and gaming on the same. It proves that the Asus-AMD partnership could be quite fruitful over the coming months.