ASUS Pro VivoBook 14X Review – OLED, Oh Yeah

There’s never been a better time to be a content creator than right now, as not only is there a terrific line-up of software available with which to craft videos of your exploits, but also more affordable hardware.

Take the ASUS Vivobook Pro 14X for example. With a sharp OLED display, an 11370H processor, 16GB of RAM and a chunky 500GB SSD that’s all held together by an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU, this notebook has enough grunt to run resource-intensive programs for your creator needs. To a point that is, but more on that in a moment.

The headline-grabber here is the OLED screen, an invaluable tool for colour-accurate content creation. It’s a sharp and svelte 16-incher that’s bright and offers 4K resolution in a 16:10 aspect ratio, and fits in well with the rest of the notebook’s slim design. I’m not going to yammer on too much about this, but the overall build quality is solid, reliable, and has one or two interesting tricks up its sleeve.

I’m also not talking about gaming, because that’s a secondary concern with this type of hardware. I’ll just say that with the internal hardware, keep your expectations in check and your AAA games at 1080p settings and you’ll be fine for whatever can be thrown at you.

Workhorse performance is the name of the game here, and for this review, I used a mix of Adobe Premiere Pro and Wondershare Filmora for some video work. When it came to 1080p video from my Sony ZV-E10 using a 50mb bitrate, the workflow was solid and reliable. Programs like Premiere Pro and Wondershare Filmora do have shadow-rendering features to make scrolling through videos easier on the timeline, but the rendering for those files went smoothly. No complaints on that side, and within moments I was working with 9:16 aspect ratio files for my TikTok and crying about how social media compresses their original quality.

When it came to 4K though, the Vivobook Pro 16X was more sluggish. Higher-quality files meant choppy editing, and annoying waiting periods. The small SSD was also quickly filled up when I copied the files over to it. To be fair, it’s not as if I was expecting a smaller notebook to hold a candle to my beefier PC that I regularly render content on, but the test had to be made. That said, I’m of the opinion that if you’re a vlogger who wants to work with quality, full high-definition content and you’re aware of the disposable nature of this content in a landscape where people consume entertainment and move on, then the Vivobook can help you add to that multimedia buffet.

It’s more than powerful enough to step into that suitable-for-social 1080p arena–Adobe Premiere Pro works especially well here thanks to optimization–and the hardware can easily run other content creator programs like Photoshop. Perfect for when you need to do a goofball thumbnail because the YouTube algorithm demands it.

The compact size of the Vivobook, a staggering amount of battery life for a machine that’s running a 4K display, and decent gaming potential for when you need to grab some Shadowplay captures, makes for a device that’s terrific for the road. Are there larger and more powerful content creation laptops out there? Absolutely, but the Vivobook’s strength is that you can throw it into your backpack and not have to worry about playing a game of Jenga with your spinal column when you travel.