Test Asus Vivobook S 14 OLED laptop - Inexpensive subnotebook is quieter and lasts longer thanks to Lunar Lake

[Redaktion]

In addition to the AMD model, Asus is now also launching the compact Vivobook S 14 OLED with a new Lunar Lake processor from Intel. We compare the performance and fan behavior of the two models. However, the Full HD OLED with 60 Hz is used in both variants.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Test-Asus-Vivobook-S-14-OLED-laptop-Inexpensive-subnotebook-is-quieter-and-lasts-longer-thanks-to-Lunar-Lake.939243.0.html

[GeoMeo]

I have this laptop with the 258V CPU - I'm not sure if you have direct contact with Asus but the USB C - Thunderbolt ports on many Asus laptops, including this one does NOT work with an external monitor.  Also, when on battery power, the powersavings of the Realtek driver gives the audio random pop and scratch noises.  (Both issues have been mentioned by many people if you google it)

Also, the keyboard is horrible in terms of visibility.  You can't see the keys if the backlight is on and bright in the room.

[LGs]

Ok, battery life is good but CPU and Performace is low than AMD, still AMD is best in battery life.

[BGX]

I dont understand something:

you achieve 20 hours in watching movies, great. correct?
the battery is 75Wh.
It means on average 3.75W / hour.

Wifi testing is not that far.

On the other hand, "idle average" shows an extremely high 8W/hour!
It should be lower than movie watching, not higher!

Can you explain the apparent contradictory numbers?

[BGX]

idle 8W => 6.7W, sorry for the mistake.

But it does not change much the datapoint. It is still twice as much as bigbunny watching, and much more than wifi browing also.

[Aras]

idle 8W => 6.7W, sorry for the mistake.

But it does not change much the datapoint. It is still twice as much as bigbunny watching, and much more than wifi browing also.

I agree. Also, the idle power consumption measurements with internal screen and external screen are not consistent. Using the internal screen increases the consumption of the AMD model much more than that of the Intel model. It might be due to the image shown on screen, as OLED screens draw more power to display brighter images. Fixing the brightness to 150 cd/m2 doesn't mean anything for OLEDs - their consumption depends on the RGB value of every pixel.

Overall, choosing this Intel model over the AMD does not make sense unless it's much cheaper and you want to save some money. The multicore performance is less than half of AMD's, gaming performance is worse as well, and the battery life is only slightly better. The Intel model has less fan noise and heat, but you can configure the AMD model to consume exactly the same max power to get similar noise and heat, and still get significantly higher performance, as mentioned in the review. I would expect some benchmark results for the same power levels in the review.

[Konstantinos]

Okay, Lunar lake has half the performance of the AMD HX 370, and it runs cooler. Why this makes Lnar lake better??

You can reduce the power profile of the AMD HX 370 to the similar levels as Lunar lake and I am sure it will be much cooler!

The problem for Lunar lake is that you can't do the reverse... to increase the performance of Lunar Lake to AMD HX 370 levels!!

Okay, so you advice people to buy half the performance for the same money (almost). Good conclusion!

[sdadsadsadas]

Dude, thanks for the review, but you should reconsider your conclusions...
the MAIN reason why the intel variant is cooler and quieter is because it's power profile is tuned differently, aka, the AMD model is tuned in standard to give you a lot more performance, aka 2x.
how tf is that insignificant?
turn it to whisper mode and the AMD will be 1.5x of the intel and the same temps and noise and power...
i have the vivobook s16 with hx 370 and tuned it to whisper it's damn silent, fans rarely turns on so i know exactly what i am saying.
intel has been a bit too drastic with their core cutting (probably because of tsmc prices) and now they have a big deficit in performance that cannot be understated. sure, ST performance is good, but most of the software nowadays is MT.
so that 2x perf of AMD is a BIG factor so I don't see why I would choose the intel variant when i can just set the amd to whisper mode and get 1.5x performance at the same price, at the same noise levels, heat and battery?

[bgx]

idle 8W => 6.7W, sorry for the mistake.

But it does not change much the datapoint. It is still twice as much as bigbunny watching, and much more than wifi browing also.

I agree. Also, the idle power consumption measurements with internal screen and external screen are not consistent. Using the internal screen increases the consumption of the AMD model much more than that of the Intel model. It might be due to the image shown on screen, as OLED screens draw more power to display brighter images. Fixing the brightness to 150 cd/m2 doesn't mean anything for OLEDs - their consumption depends on the RGB value of every pixel.

Overall, choosing this Intel model over the AMD does not make sense unless it's much cheaper and you want to save some money. The multicore performance is less than half of AMD's, gaming performance is worse as well, and the battery life is only slightly better. The Intel model has less fan noise and heat, but you can configure the AMD model to consume exactly the same max power to get similar noise and heat, and still get significantly higher performance, as mentioned in the review. I would expect some benchmark results for the same power levels in the review.

I think you got it wrong.
Enabling external monitor has an enrgy cost , and the difference is what you witness here.
Yes, OLED image is important, but it s hightly likely the same on all the machines (they use some script), so it would not explain the difference.

What I believe is that their script, may be monitoring, makes the machines far from idle. Hence the idle numbers are not at all what you would witness with true idle. It is ture on this machine, but on pretty much all the notebook test. The protocol should be changed.

Also, sometjhng else which is weird:
average load is less than 1/2 on the lunar lake than on the AI HX370.
But the "load" runtime on battery is very comparable. Does not make sense. Same everything else, including battery.

[bgx]

Okay, Lunar lake has half the performance of the AMD HX 370, and it runs cooler. Why this makes Lnar lake better??

You can reduce the power profile of the AMD HX 370 to the similar levels as Lunar lake and I am sure it will be much cooler!

The problem for Lunar lake is that you can't do the reverse... to increase the performance of Lunar Lake to AMD HX 370 levels!!

Okay, so you advice people to buy half the performance for the same money (almost). Good conclusion!

well, check cyberpunk 2077.

25.1FPS vs 24.9fps. Virtually similar.
lunar lake runs at 40W (~2 hours battery life) vs 60W for the AI HX 370 (1.15hours of battery life)

Also, average load for lunar lake is 34W vs 76W for the Rizen. That's a huge difference.

It is just not the same machine at all, for different use.

If you want a workstation to run scientific mutliCPU code, I agree that Lunar Lake is not at all for you.

For the rest - i.e. what you would do with a subnotebook: office job, some games sometimes, you want the best real life battery life - Lunar Lake makes perfect sense, and more than the Rizen.
It all depends what you do with your machine.

[Konstantinos]

For the rest - i.e. what you would do with a subnotebook: office job, some games sometimes, you want the best real life battery life - Lunar Lake makes perfect sense, and more than the Rizen.

Okay, I understand your point but the battery life difference is about 0.5 hours only (16.5 vs 17) and as I said you can reduce the power profile to make the Ryzen cooler/quieter for the usual tasks. So why should you sacrifice the multicore performance for almost no advantage in the rest??

[bgx]

"why should you sacrifice the multicore performance"

that is all the question: if it is a sacrifice, then dont take the lunar lake.
In 20 years with a subnotebook as my daily driver (and a desktop for heavier stuff, e.g. gaming), I NEVER wished to have more mutlicore performance. I wished to have more battery life at some point. I also wish to have better gaming experience at other, but I knew the tradeoff.

If you need even 5% of the time strong multicore performance, do not take lunar lake.

Otherwise, THIS IS NOT A SACRIFICE, because you dont care. You live very well even if your subnotebook does have a big score at your favotite benchmark.

> the battery life difference is about 0.5 hours only (16.5 vs 17)

As shown in  notebookcheck
"Intel Lunar Lake CPU analysis - The Core Ultra 7 258V's multi-core performance is disappointing, but its everyday efficiency is good" (sorry i cant use URLs).

Power consumption during everyday use:
So far, we have only compared the performance/efficiency under full load, which of course isn't representative of the everyday requirements of the majority of users. However, this is also different for every user, which is why we decided to compare the power consumption during a PCMark 10 test (duration ~22 minutes). We compared the CPU package power of the Core Ultra 258V with the Core Ultra 7 155H and the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, each with the standard power limits. Although the Core Ultra 7 258V was at a slight disadvantage here due to its RAM, its average power consumption remained significantly lower than that of the other two competitors. For the Lunar Lake chip, we noted just under 9 watts, for the AMD Zen 5 processor it was just over 14 watts and the Meteor Lake processor required almost 16 watts.

you see 50% power difference between lunar lake and rizen AI 370.
again, that's not negligible, very far from the 5% displayed in the test.
During wifi browsing, yes, all the processors are close to idle, so difference in battery life is minimal (screen and wifi makes more difference there).

=> I d advocate notebookcheck to include battery live during PCMARK test.
Also, it is important to display battery life / power consumption / benchamrk AT THE SAME TIME.
If you show best possible performance and best possible battery life but they use different settings, then you are missing an important part of the equation.

E.G.
25 fps / 60W / 1hour battery life
15 fps / 25W / 3 hour battery life.

this is more meaninfgul that saying:

-25fps. (forgetting it needs a lot of power)
3 hours battery life. (forgetting that the fps is lower for such a battery life).
as is reported in the review.

[sdadsadsadas]

People defending the intel variant still don't understand the full picture...
First of all, you cannot say that after 10-15 years of multicore software development, you DON'T feel the need for more multicore performance. That's just...hilarious to say and shows that you don't really know how things work. ST wise, Zen 5 and 258v are very similar in performance and I can bet you there are multiple apps and scenarios, even browser usage like chrome with multiple tabs (i have 30-50) will show a difference in speed between HX370 and 258V, just because HX 370 has more MT performance.
as for the efficiency, yes, 258v is bound to be a more efficient chip.
heck, it's a memory on package solution. it uses PMIC. those are HUGE advantages in terms of power and you can see them in the idle power which is better than the HX 370.
Then again, the difference ain't that pronounced.
As for general usage, HX 370 is tuned more for bursts of performance, for giving you max performance and having 12 cores, of course it will go higher in power for ... 2x performance. so that ain't for nothing. but the amd chip can be configured to run exactly as the intel chip at 25w, 30w and even run to a certain temp and I can bet it will give more performance at the same wattage.
Gaming wise, yeah, the intel chip has a slight advantage, again, because of integrated memory and higher speeds. it can be clearly seen that even though hx 370 has 16 CUs, it doesn't bring that much extra perf over the hx 365 with 12 CUs, because it's memory starved.
So all in all, i think the amd chip gives you flexibility and that's what you want. you can have top notch performance with good battery life or great battery life with better performance still than the 258v.

[BGX]

> People defending the intel variant still don't understand the full picture...

I have a PhD, habilitat. in computer science.
I run an mulinational lab on AI. I am also responsible for the hardware there.
Please explain to me the full picture!

>First of all, you cannot say that after 10-15 years of multicore software development, you DON'T feel the need for more multicore performance.

you forgot the most important part: "with a subnotebook".
Mind you, i am not a kid with a unique computer to do it all (bad).
I also have a powerful desktop at home.
I also have a couple of threadrippers workstations at the lab
We have also access to several national supercomputers.

So, yes, with my subnotebook, I am confident i care more about the ST of LL than the MT of Rizen.
And I fully understand others in other situation may be much more happy with the Rizen than the Lunar Lake.
It is certainly a very strong CPU offering catering for the needs of a lot of people.
It all depend on your use case, which is what i tried to explain.
But people have problem understanding not everyone as the same use case as themselves.


>That's just...hilarious.


bless you.

[Aras]

> People defending the intel variant still don't understand the full picture...

I have a PhD, habilitat. in computer science.
I run an mulinational lab on AI. I am also responsible for the hardware there.
Please explain to me the full picture!

>First of all, you cannot say that after 10-15 years of multicore software development, you DON'T feel the need for more multicore performance.

you forgot the most important part: "with a subnotebook".
Mind you, i am not a kid with a unique computer to do it all (bad).
I also have a powerful desktop at home.
I also have a couple of threadrippers workstations at the lab
We have also access to several national supercomputers.

So, yes, with my subnotebook, I am confident i care more about the ST of LL than the MT of Rizen.
And I fully understand others in other situation may be much more happy with the Rizen than the Lunar Lake.
It is certainly a very strong CPU offering catering for the needs of a lot of people.
It all depend on your use case, which is what i tried to explain.
But people have problem understanding not everyone as the same use case as themselves.


>That's just...hilarious.


bless you.

What I don't understand is why would anyone want to sacrifice the multicore performance so much to gain only a little battery life and get a lower idle power consumption? You would benefit from a higher multicore performance even in daily usage when multitasking, yet many apps use multiple processes/threads alone. Even if you don't notice the difference in the performance now, you might start noticing it in a few years (because of apps and websites getting more and more demanding), hence, higher performance makes the device more future-proof.