The initial reviews for Asus' Vivobook S 15 OLED, one of the first notebooks equipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite system-on-chip, have been published, and they reveal a mixed performance profile. While the notebook boasts a 70Wh battery, its battery life does not outperform many AMD or Intel-based laptops. Notably, Apple's MacBook Air 15 M3, with a smaller 66.5Wh battery, achieves an average battery life that is 40% longer.

In application performance testing, the Snapdragon X Elite shows good multicore performance in benchmarks like Cinebench 2024 and PCMark 10. However, it significantly underperforms in other tests, such as video encoding, file extraction, and document conversion, with Intel Core Ultra 7 155H-based notebooks often leading by more than 50%. Despite featuring LPDDR5X-8448 memory, the Snapdragon X Elite falls behind in memory copy and write tests in AIDA64 compared to Intel laptops. On a positive note, the chip offers impressive memory latency at just 8.1 nanoseconds, significantly lower than the 100+ nanoseconds of Intel-based laptops.

As for storage, Asus opted for a basic Micron 2400 SSD, a DRAM-less Phison-based drive that may contribute to some of the less impressive results in certain tests. This choice, however, should not impact gaming performance, which is another area where the Snapdragon X Elite struggles. Most games are unplayable at 1080p resolution, with many unable to run on the chip at all and others suffering from texture and graphical glitches.

Given the Vivobook S 15 OLED's price tag of $1300, including 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, consumers have high expectations for performance. The review outcomes indicate that Qualcomm and Microsoft need to make further efforts to optimize the overall platform to meet these expectations.