PRICE £2,083 (£2,500 inc VAT)
from johnlewis.com
When you think of Asus’ Vivobook range, affordable laptops probably spring to mind. So you may wonder what’s going on here: a Vivobook costing £2,500? Surely that’s more Asus ROG gaming laptop territory? Dig into the specs and it sounds like a gaming machine, too, with a turbo-fuelled Core i9 matched with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics.
Here, though, Asus has creators in its sights rather than gamers. It comes loaded with Nvidia’s Studio drivers, a Pantone-validated OLED screen and even a clever dial built into the touchpad. But let’s start with the fundamentals: power.
■ Top guns, part one
It’s easy to get blasé about such things, but I still find it remarkable to say that there are 24 cores inside this laptop. That’s because Asus has opted for a Core i9-13980HX processor, which is as boy racer as it sounds. The 13980 indicates that it’s right at the top end of Intel’s family, a fact reinforced by the H suffix (which stands for high performance). The X is the overclocking cherry on top.
All this would be for nought if Asus had skimped on cooling, but a double fan and meaty heatsinks mean that the CPU should keep running at its peak speeds – 5.6GHz
