Asus’ Vivobook S 15 OLED with Snapdragon X Elite SoC Doesn’t Quite Deliver on Promised Performance
When it comes to application performance, the Snapdragon X Elite offers good multi-core performance in benchmarks like Cinebench 2024 and PCMark 10, but it falls way behind in most other tests, ranging from video encoding to file extraction and document conversion, with Intel Core Ultra 7 155H based notebooks often pulling ahead by 50 percent or more. Despite being equipped with LPDDR5x-8448 memory, the Snapdragon X Elite falls behind in both the memory copy and write tests in AIDA64 compared to the Intel powered laptops. However, it’s not all doom and gloom, as the Qualcomm chip delivers an impressive memory latency of a mere 8.1 ns, compared to 100+ for the Intel based laptops. It also outclasses the Intel laptops when it comes to memory read performance.
Asus went with a fairly basic Micron 2400 SSD which is a DRAM-less Phison based drive and this might be part of the reason for some of the less flattering results in some tests. However, this shouldn’t affect the gaming tests and this is another area where the Snapdragon X Elite doesn’t deliver and most games are unplayable at 1080p resolution. Many games don’t run on the Qualcomm chip for obvious reasons, but many that do, suffer from texture and graphics glitches at times. Most games don’t even manage 30 FPS at reduced graphics settings, let alone 60 FPS, but then again, this is hardly expected from an integrated GPU. Considering that the Vivobook S 15 OLED comes in at US$1300 with 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB SSD, you would expect it to deliver in terms of performance, but it seems like Qualcomm and Microsoft have a lot of work to do to optimise the platform as a whole.