The first reviews of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC in the Asus Vivobook S 15 OLED are coming online, and it seems it falls short of expected performance levels. These preliminary findings suggest it's too early to judge Qualcomm's performance claims solely based on the Vivobook S 15 OLED. Further testing with devices from other brands will provide more insight into its capabilities. The Vivobook S 15 OLED includes a 70 Wh battery, which generally offers longer battery life than many notebooks from AMD or Intel. However, Apple's MacBook Air 15 M3, despite having a slightly smaller 66.5 Wh battery, surpasses it by about 40% in battery life. The Snapdragon X Elite handles basic tasks like web browsing and video playback well, but battery life decreases significantly under more intensive usage.

In terms of processing power, the Snapdragon X Elite shows promising multicore performance in benchmarks such as Cinebench 2024 and PCMark 10. However, it falls behind in tasks like video encoding, file extraction, and document conversion. In these areas, notebooks equipped with Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processors often perform over 50% better. The Snapdragon does boast a low memory latency of 8.1 nanoseconds and strong memory read performance, but its results in memory copy and write tests in AIDA64 are inferior to those of Intel-powered notebooks, despite using advanced LPDDR5X-8448 memory.

Storage in the Vivobook S 15 OLED is handled by a basic Micron 2400 SSD. This DRAM-less, Phison-based drive might be affecting some performance metrics, although it shouldn't influence gaming tests. However, the gaming performance is another weak point for the Snapdragon X Elite. Most games are unplayable at 1080p resolution due to texture and graphics glitches, and reducing graphics settings doesn't help achieve a playable frame rate of even 30 FPS, highlighting the limitations of the integrated GPU.

The Vivobook S 15 OLED is priced at $1300 and features 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. Given this price, consumers might expect better performance. The results indicate that Qualcomm and Microsoft must work on significant optimizations to improve the overall performance of the platform.

Sources: Windows Central, Notebook Check (German)