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00:00Are you sitting down? Because we've got a lot to talk about.
00:03This is the new ASUS Vivobook S15 and on the outside it looks like any ordinary laptop.
00:09It's very nice, we'll talk about that in a second, but it's also the very first or one of the first
00:14wave of new Snapdragon X series powered laptops and you can tell because we've got this little
00:20sticker down here. Snapdragon X Elite, which also makes it one of the first and certainly my first
00:26CoPilot Plus PC. A new AI era begins.
00:34And that is Microsoft's branding telling you this laptop supports all of their Windows AI features
00:39like CoCreate. Look at me, I drew that. In fact, let's ask CoPilot what exactly CoPilot Plus does,
00:48what it brings to the table. Local AI photo and video editing, enhanced studio effects,
00:53AI image generation, recall, CoCreator, super res, live captions. Boom, there you have it.
01:00Okay, this is actually a really important moment for PCs because obviously with Apple,
01:04they transitioned to their own Apple Silicon in their MacBooks with their M series, which like
01:09these Snapdragon chips are built on an ARM architecture rather than traditional x86
01:14that we get from Intel and AMD. But now Qualcomm, who have their Snapdragon brand,
01:20which you probably recognize from powering almost all Android phones, and this is the
01:25Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which they launched a few months ago. Now they're entering the PC market
01:29with the X Plus and the flagship X Elite chips. And this is what everyone's been talking about
01:35since they unveiled it back in October last year. And these are the very first laptops that are
01:40powered by this new chip, which obviously comes with a CPU, processor, GPU, graphics,
01:46the neural processing unit for AI tasks, and all the connectivity stuff. That's what makes it a
01:50system on a chip. And they're looking to not only compete with their Intel, AMD, and Apple rivals,
01:56but they're confident with an emphasis on efficiency, battery life, and AI performance
02:00with its 45 tops NPU. And again, I'll explain all that in a second. They reckon this could
02:06transform the PC market. And as Microsoft's crack marketing team likes to say, these are
02:11the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever. But let's just pause there for a second before we
02:16dive into this Vivo book, because there is a lot of hype around these new chips and these new
02:20laptops. And while this is absolutely going to shake up the market and make all the big players
02:25more competitive, which is great for us, the consumer, as with any new tech, it can be sensible
02:30to just wait a little bit for driver optimizations, for app updates, for more AI features to come out,
02:35because Microsoft actually just recalled the recall feature, one of the key Copilot Plus
02:41features. So unfortunately, I can't show you that yet. It will be coming later. And actually,
02:45to be completely clear, they didn't even send out the Windows update until this morning,
02:51the day of the embargo for these laptops, giving us access to these Copilot Plus features. So I 100%
02:57need more time with this. We need to see more driver updates. And also I want to test some of
03:01the competitors to see how the Vivo book stands up against those guys before I give you any
03:05recommendations of what to actually buy. In fact, I'll tell you right now, this will set you back
03:10£1,299. That's the same in dollars, which gets you the X Elite chip, it gets you 16 gigs of RAM
03:16and a one terabyte SSD, which actually isn't too bad at all when you consider a similarly priced
03:2215 inch MacBook Air comes with half the RAM and a quarter of the storage. And that definitely
03:27doesn't have a 120 hertz OLED screen either. And it is a very nice screen 15.6 inches 3k
03:34resolution. That's 2880 by 1620. If you're asking, although I was a little taken aback by the 16 by
03:40nine aspect ratio, you tend to see that as often these days, I'm kind of used to the slightly
03:45taller 16 by 10, which I also kind of prefer, not sure about that, but still very nice. And
03:50it has a 180 degree hinge. So you can bend it right the way back, although it is not a touch
03:55screen. 14.7 millimeters thick, it weighs 1.42 kilograms, great keyboard, that's been an absolute
04:02pleasure to type on with a numpad to the side along with a big smooth touch pad. And the keys
04:06do actually have an RGB backlight, although it is a single zone, so you can only have one color.
04:12And have a look at that, we have a dedicated co-pilot button, which apparently is the first
04:18significant change to the keyboard layout in about 30 years, apparently. And this opens
04:23Microsoft's AI chat bar. We get pretty decent sounding speakers with Dolby Atmos support,
04:28although they are lacking a little bit in bass. In terms of ports, we have two USB type A's,
04:33two USB four type C's, a full size HDMI 2.1, micro SD and an audio combo jack, plus Wi-Fi 7.
04:41A full size SD would have been nice. And also I wouldn't have said no to having a type C on
04:45both sides, so I could plug in the type C charger on either side, but that's just nitpicking. What
04:50I do like is that we have this physical privacy shutter for the 1080p webcam up here, which also
04:56has an IR sensor beside it, so you get really good low light Windows face unlocking. Shall we talk
05:01about the Snapdragon processor, the performance, the battery life, the app situation, co-pilot plus,
05:06you know, the reason you clicked on this video? I think we probably should. So this VivoBook
05:10boasts the new Snapdragon X Elite X1e 78100. Catchy name. And while the X Elite sits above
05:17the X Plus, there are actually four models of the X Elite, and this one, the 78, is at the bottom,
05:23missing out on the dual core boost, the higher clock speeds and the beefier graphics. How does
05:28that translate into real world performance between the different chips? Don't know. We'll have to
05:32wait and see. But still, all X Elites are 12 core, clocked at 3.4 gigahertz, and we also have 16 gigs
05:37of LPDDR5X RAM on the chip. So like Apple Silicon and also Intel's upcoming Lunar Lake chips, this
05:44is using a kind of unified memory, which is great for efficiency. It saves a lot of power. Not so
05:49great if you want to upgrade it because you can't. We also have Snapdragon's integrated Adreno GPU,
05:55the graphics, which can actually support up to three 4K monitors. But the headline, what everyone's
06:00talking about is this thing, the neural processing unit, the NPU, and all 45 tops of performance that
06:07we get with this chip. In fact, all Snapdragon X series chips have the same NPU tops performance,
06:13which stands for trillion operations per second. And for some reason is the metric that we use to
06:17quantify AI performance right now. And it is kind of like the megapixel race we have with camera
06:22phones. We're not entirely sure how much you need and what kind of difference it makes between
06:27having 40, 45, 50 tops. But what I can tell you is that Microsoft require a minimum of 40 tops to
06:34support Copilot Plus. And basically what we're doing is offloading tasks that could have been
06:40run by the CPU or GPU, but that would have required more power onto the NPU, which for these
06:45AI accelerated tasks can either do it much faster or much more efficiently, therefore saving power,
06:51giving you a longer battery life. That's the idea of AI. It can all be very confusing what AI
06:56actually is. We have generative AI that can produce text and images. And then we've got
07:00machine learning algorithms that's going on behind the scenes to optimize performance and things like
07:04that. There are elements of all of that here, but what is going to make most people, I think,
07:08including myself, want to potentially rush out and buy one of these is the promise of much longer
07:13battery life. Now, Asus claim this will get you up to 17 hours of video playback that's running
07:19locally on the device. Again, I have only had a few days with this. More software updates are
07:23coming like every single day, but I actually ran a overnight YouTube test in the power saving mode
07:28with dynamic refresh because this can go between 120 and 60 Hertz. And I'm getting about 12 to 13
07:33hours of online video playback, which is pretty good and significantly longer than a lot of
07:38Windows laptops where I'm often getting seven, eight hours, depending on the model and even
07:42better standby life. Leaving this overnight, I only lost sort of between one and 2% of its charge.
07:49But that combined with this running nice and cool and the fan barely wearing up, except for a couple
07:53of times, much closer to my MacBook, for example, there are some really nice quality of life
07:58improvements with the Snapdragon X series chips. But how fast is it? Well, here are some of my
08:03initial results. And to bring in a bit of context, I've also got a laptop here running Intel's Ultra
08:097155H and they're actually pretty evenly matched in single core, but the Snapdragon is on average
08:1415% faster in multi-core. In terms of graphics, well, we've got a bit of a problem because
08:20this ARM chip just doesn't appear to be optimized for either the OpenCL or the Timespy test here.
08:25But in the Wildlife Extreme test, which is optimized for ARM, the Snapdragon's a good 27%
08:30faster. And in terms of gaming, things don't really improve that much for the Snapdragon.
08:34Bear in mind, this is the lowest end X Elite chip. And also if you do drop the resolution
08:39in Baldur's Gate down to 720, you'll get about 35 FPS. Now both Siege and Baldur's Gate may have
08:44run better in their Vulkan rather than DirectX modes, but it just crashes every time. The Epic
08:50Game Store doesn't work, so I couldn't fire off Fortnite. I feel like we're missing a big driver
08:54update here for the graphics. I've also noticed on the VivaBook, if we put it in full power mode
09:00over the regular standard mode, we get about 5% to 10% high performance. Also, look at this. One
09:05of the reasons a lot of people love their MacBooks is because it runs pretty much just as well on
09:08battery as it does plugged into the mains. And here, now that I have a couple of extra FPS in
09:13Baldur's Gate and a 17% uptake in multi-core performance, on the whole, the X Elite performs
09:18really nicely even on battery. Very impressive processor performance. Not so impressive graphics
09:25performance currently. But what about the AI? Well, it's kind of difficult to benchmark AI
09:29performance right now. There isn't really a standardized set of tools, although in the Geekbench
09:346 ML test, the Snapdragon chip was 38% faster than the Intel. And the idea is, as these become more
09:40common, as people can now actually buy these, more apps and features will be optimized
09:45to take advantage of it. But also, these new Snapdragon series chips are, as I say, the first
09:50to support Windows Copilot Plus. AMD and Intel won't be coming until September at the earliest,
09:56and anywhere you see this little logo, there'll be some AI wizardry going on behind the scenes.
10:00Whether you're editing photos, you're turning on some camera features, you're doing image
10:04generation with CoCreate, or eventually using their recall feature, or simply taking advantage
10:08of an app that's been optimized for AI. I think right now my favorite Copilot Plus feature is
10:13this live captions with translate. So I've got live captions turned on, which I've just
10:19overlaid on top here. You can have it wherever you like. Let's see how it handles Godzilla.
10:26I don't know what I'm talking about.
10:28If you're going to say something like that...
10:30Please give me an answer.
10:32In the first place, a fighter jet can move much more easily than a ship.
10:34I don't know what you're talking about.
10:361, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 churros. And I only had like 6 left.
10:46One of the little beaches in Mazarrón.
10:50I haven't tried it yet.
10:52Is it good?
10:54I think I want to eat it.
10:56It's like a rice ball.
10:58It's good.
11:00And the cool thing is, that will apply to any video calls.
11:04Like if you're on a business call with someone from China, or Japan, or Italy, Spain, France,
11:08up to 40 different languages, that will live translate on your screen for you.
11:14That's insane.
11:16But, taking advantage of the AI performance here and speeding up your apps, like we have in CapCut,
11:20and DaVinci Resolve, and Luminar Neo, and a handful of other tools,
11:24is one thing, and is great.
11:26The more important thing is because, as I say, this is running on an ARM platform,
11:30we need apps to be compiled and optimized to run on ARM, as opposed to x86,
11:34which we get with the other big chip companies out there.
11:38Apple have done the transition over the course of a couple of years,
11:40and now it's Windows' turn.
11:42Again, we've been here a couple of times before.
11:44Hopefully this is going to be more successful, especially as we have much better hardware now,
11:46and also much better support from Windows.
11:48But while the vast majority of apps and programs will run out of the box,
11:52they're not necessarily optimized to run on ARM,
11:54so you're not going to get the best performance out of this,
11:56until they are.
11:58I spend a lot of time in Adobe's Creative Suite,
12:00and while Photoshop and Lightroom have been optimized,
12:02Premiere Pro hasn't.
12:04And unfortunately, some apps just don't work,
12:06and I've come across a fair few already in my testing.
12:10Okay, enough of me waffling.
12:12Let's wrap this up.
12:14And my takeaway right now is wait.
12:16It's a very good laptop.
12:18You can absolutely go and buy this if you want for $1299,
12:20and you will have a great time.
12:22But like with any new technology,
12:24as I said at the beginning,
12:26maybe just wait a little bit.
12:28More drivers, more features, better optimizations,
12:30and also we can review all the different devices that have come out.
12:32But overall, the Asus VivoBook S15 is a very nice laptop,
12:34and I think at that $1299 price,
12:36it's actually definitely worth considering.
12:38And if you do fancy one of these,
12:40I will put a link in the comments below.
12:42That's not right, in the description below.
12:44Leave a comment below, and I'll see you guys next time
12:46right here on The Tech Jab.
12:48Thanks for watching.