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While the Asus VivoBook 16 F1605VA-ES56 doesn’t sport the flashy profile of its stablemate, the Asus VivoBook 16X, neither does it come with the brilliant screen of the VivoBook 16 OLED; it does one thing right: it delivers reliable performance and some premium features at a very reasonable price. Asus has some of the best high-end productivity and gaming laptops out there, but the brand is more popular for its budget line of laptops that don’t scream “cheap” from design to performance, despite rocking rock bottom prices.
With the Asus VivoBook 15 laptop in this review, you’re undoubtedly getting one of the best everyday laptops for college or office work. Among the standout features you’re getting are a premium design, a physical webcam shield, a large 16-inch display, an extremely flexible 180-degree hinge, and decent performance thanks to a 13th-gen Intel Core i5 processor paired with 16GB of memory.
Unfortunately, you might just need to compromise on the quality of that big display, and the keyboard isn’t one of the best we’ve tested around this price point. But as laptops are getting more expensive, we surely expect more compromises appearing here and there, whether we like it or not. It might not be the most powerful or flashiest laptop around, but the Asus VivoBook 16 laptops makes the cut as a solid Windows 11 laptop overall.
Asus VivoBook 16 Laptop Specs
- CPU: Intel Core i5-13420H
- GPU: Intel Iris X
- RAM: 16GB
- Storage: 512GB SSD
- Display: 16-inch, 1920 x 1200, 60Hz, 16:10, 300-nit
- Battery: Up to 8 hours
- Dimensions: 14.1 x 9.82 x 0.78 inches
- Weight: 4.1 pounds
Design & Features
The Asus VivoBook 16 sports a premium silver look, but it’s still an all-plastic construction through and through. The lid is stamped with a silver Asus Vivobook logo that’s simple yet elegant. You shouldn’t worry about durability here; Asus makes some good machines with solid build quality. The interior is more of the same, sporting a dark colorway around the screen and a silver keyboard deck and keypads.
Meanwhile, the bezels around the screen are thin, and there’s also a webcam on top with a manual privacy shutter. At 4.1 pounds and 14.1 x 9.82 x 0.78 inches, the Asus F1605VA-ES56 is on the larger side compared to most 15-inch laptops like the HP 15-fc0099nr (3.1 pounds, 14.17 x 0.73 x 9.29 inches), but that’s justified by the extra screen real estate you’re getting here. Still, it’s more portable and can fit in most laptop bags.
The Asus Vivobook 16 laptop is certainly a solid pick for anyone who needs an expansive screen for less money than competitors.
The main thing with the Vivobook 16’s display is that it’s a good size. Beyond the 16-inch screen size, the 16:10 aspect real estate feels particularly spacious when doing anything apart from watching videos and playing certain games. You’re probably not going to run either of those tasks here, though. While other members of the Vivobook 16 family offer punchy OLED displays, the standard version in this review has a fairly drab IPS-level LCD panel. It maxes out at a 60Hz refresh rate, maximum brightness of 300 nits, and packs a regular 1920 x 1200 (FHD+) resolution.
The typing experience, on the other hand, is good, with a full-sized chiclet keyboard that’s quieter but with less key travel than a mechanical one, and it finds space for a few dedicated numerical keys. Key travel is fine, and I find it easy to transform from a MacBook Pro WORHORSE TO THE Vivobook 16 without too many false presses. The touchpad is perfectly functional, with decent sensitivity and a well-actuated physical click.
Connectivity is a mixed bag – the inclusion of three USB Type-A ports and an HDMI port is welcome, but having a single USB Type-C port feels like an oversight in a 2024 laptop. There’s no SD card either; this is surely a blow to some creatives. The single USB-C port can’t be used for charging, with the Vivobook using a proprietary port. I would’ve liked to have that option, as it eliminates the burden of carrying around a power brick.
Specs & Performance
The Asus Vivobook 16 unit in this review is the F1605VA-ES56 model, which packs an Intel Core i5-13420H processor, which has since been replaced by the Intel Core i5-14420H, available in productivity laptops released in early 2025. The chip in our review model isn’t the very latest Intel processor, nor even the most powerful version of its generation, but we’re not talking about a high-end laptop here. The processor is paired with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD storage.
As an everyday-use laptop, the Core i5 iteration of the Vivobook 16 is reasonably capable, especially in the light usage scenarios for which it’s intended. Almost all productivity apps, especially the MS Office suite and web pages, boot up snappily, you can flip through multiple tabs on web browsers, process Excel spreadsheets, and menus without the laptop taking a pause.
Without a discrete GPU like the Asus Vivobook 16X, this Vivobook 16 relies on an integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics solution. Suffice to say, this is not a machine to rely on when you want to enjoy your favorite AAA title. However, you can get by with casual games such as 3D FPS Atomic Heart at low settings, but it doesn’t get overly smooth or pretty.
Most budget laptops can last well over eight hours on a single charge, and the Vivobook 16, with its fairly newer CPU, doesn’t struggle to hit the eight-hour mark. It lasts only 8 hours and 39 minutes through continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 200 nits of brightness. It beats out the Acer Aspire 5 (7:13) and the HP 15 (4:58), but doesn’t come close to the Apple MacBook Air’s 16 hours 41 minutes.
Asus VivoBook 16 F1605VA-ES56 Review: Bottom line
The Asus Vivobook 16 laptop offers an expansive 16-inch display for much less than you’d spend on most 16-inch laptops. However, that display isn’t particularly vibrant or accurate, which holds the laptop back from being an ultimate multimedia dynamo. However, when used for productivity, it is a better proposition over most 15-inch laptops I’ve reviewed before.
Huge discounting means that anyone in the market for a big laptop screen at the lowest price possible will definitely want to add the Vivobook 16 to their cart. If you know you’d take full advantage of the 16-inch IPS screen, 16GB RAM, and a comfortable keyboard, then the Asus Vivobook 16 could suit you. If you don’t mind a 15-inch alternative, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3X offers terrific value for around the same price with a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 16GB RAM, AI Copilot+, and almost all-day battery life.
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