There is no shortage of folks who have modest performance expectations from their systems, but require a large display for entertainment and creativity purposes. ASUS has introduced a massive new laptop seemingly intended for such people, dubbed the Vivobook 18. As the name suggests, the laptop sports a large 18.3-inch display with an aspect ratio of 16:10. As we shall find out later, the product is affordably priced, which justifies the 1080p IPS display. At its size, a higher-resolution panel would've certainly been a welcome addition. Thankfully, however, the display boasts a refresh rate of 144 Hz, which should allow for an excellent motion experience. The display is also claimed to cover 100% of the sRGB color gamut, which is pretty neat.
At its heart, the Vivobook 18 is powered by the
Ryzen 7 260 APU with 8 Zen 4 cores and 16 threads paired with up to 32 GB of DDR5 memory. The APU is no slouch, and packs enough grunt to trade blows with the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H CPU. There is no option for discrete graphics, which means that any graphically demanding task will have to solely rely on the integrated Radeon 780M iGPU. For non-intensive workloads and casual lightweight gaming, the RDNA 3-based Radeon 780M should easily suffice. An M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 x 4 slot takes care of storage requirements, with 512 GB as standard. The memory is also upgradeable, courtesy of the single unpopulated SODIMM slot.