Asus Vivobook S16 (S3607AA) review: A capable 16-inch laptop, but the price is hard to justify

• By Kunal Khullar
Published On: 4 September 2026 | 08:00 IST

The ASUS Vivobook S16 has been an interesting option for users who want a large-screen laptop without having to lug around a bulky machine. We reviewed the Vivobook S16 S3607QA last year with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platform and came away impressed by its exceptional battery life, lightweight design, and vibrant OLED display. However, the move to an ARM-based platform also came with some compromises, particularly around software compatibility.

For 2026, ASUS is offering the Vivobook S16 with both Intel and AMD processor options, giving users the choice between the two major x86 platforms. On the Intel side, you get the latest Panther Lake chips, including the Core Ultra 5 325 and Core Ultra 7 355, bringing updated CPU performance and more capable AI processing through an integrated NPU. The rest of the package remains familiar, with a slim 16-inch chassis, a 16:10 OLED display, and a focus on portability and everyday productivity.

But with the Snapdragon-powered version already setting a high bar for efficiency, the big question is whether the switch to Intel makes the Vivobook S16 a more attractive machine without sacrificing its biggest strengths. Here’s an in-depth look.

Familiar design that remains portable

The 2026 Vivobook S16 doesn’t look dramatically different from last year’s model. ASUS has retained the same basic chassis, with a 16-inch display, relatively slim bezels and a clean, understated design. My review unit comes in Cool Silver, and the colour extends across almost the entire laptop, including the lid, keyboard deck and palm rest. It gives the laptop a simple, professional appearance without drawing too much attention to itself.

Despite being a 16-inch laptop, the Vivobook S16 doesn’t feel particularly cumbersome. It weighs just 1.70kg and measures 35.70 x 25.06 x 1.59–1.79cm, which is quite reasonable for a laptop of this size. The relatively thin profile is especially noticeable when carrying it around, and I found it easy enough to slip into a backpack without feeling like I was adding too much weight.

The chassis is mostly made out of plastic, although the laptop doesn’t feel flimsy in everyday use. There is some flex if you deliberately press down on the keyboard deck or lid, but during regular use the chassis feels sufficiently rigid. The silver finish also does a good job of disguising fingerprints and smudges. As with the previous-gen model, this one also passes MIL-STD 810H testing, which is reassuring if you intend to carry it around on a daily basis. The hinge is another small but useful detail. It feels reasonably sturdy and allows the display to open up to 180 degrees. That isn’t something everyone will use regularly, but it can be handy when sharing the screen with someone sitting opposite you.

As for port selection, you get two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports and two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C ports, with the latter supporting both display output and USB Power Delivery. There’s also a full-size HDMI 2.1 port and a 3.5mm headphone/microphone combo jack. ASUS also supplies a 68W USB-C power adapter, so charging doesn’t require a proprietary connector, allowing you to alternatively use a third-party power brick. The laptop also supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4, which is perfectly adequate for everyday browsing, streaming, video calls and wireless accessories.

Vibrant OLED display, but resolution feels conservative

The VivoBook S16 continues to feature a 16-inch OLED panel with a 1920 x 1200 resolution and a 16:10 aspect ratio. As you’d expect from an OLED panel, the image quality is excellent. Colours look rich and vibrant without appearing excessively saturated, while the ability to produce deep blacks results in a punchy viewing experience. Contrast is particularly impressive, with ASUS quoting a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, and the panel also covers 95% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut.

I particularly enjoyed using the Vivobook S16 for watching some TV shows and YouTube videos. Dark scenes benefit considerably from the OLED panel’s ability to turn individual pixels off, while bright and colourful content has plenty of visual punch. Text also looks crisp enough for everyday work, although the 1920 x 1200 resolution isn’t quite as sharp as what you would get from a higher-resolution 2.5K or 3K panel. This was also one of the few criticisms we had of last year’s Snapdragon-powered S16, where the 1200p resolution felt slightly underwhelming for such a large 16-inch display.

The panel is also limited to a 60Hz refresh rate, which is perfectly reasonable for a machine that is primarily designed for productivity, entertainment and everyday use. But I would’ve liked the display even more if it offered at least 120Hz, as it would have made the laptop feel more responsive. ASUS has also added an anti-glare and low-reflection coating, which is particularly useful on an OLED laptop. Glossy OLED panels can be highly reflective, especially when used near windows or under bright indoor lighting, so the reduced reflections make the S16 more practical as an everyday machine.

Brightness is fairly limited too, with a rating of 300 nits, which is adequate for indoor use but not especially impressive by modern laptop standards. I had no major problems using it indoors, but you’ll need to be more careful about where you position the laptop when working outdoors or in a particularly bright environment.

Comfortable keyboard, oversized trackpad

The large 16-inch chassis continues to offer a full-size keyboard with a dedicated number pad, which is useful for anyone who regularly works with spreadsheets or enters numbers. The layout is familiar, with well-spaced keys, while the power button sits within the numpad area rather than somewhere close to the Delete key. The only compromise is that ASUS had to squeeze the numpad into the available space, with the resulting layout being a little more cramped than the main keyboard. The arrow keys are also smaller, so it can take a little time to get accustomed to the arrangement.

The keys have 1.7mm of travel and offer a reasonably satisfying amount of feedback. During my time with the laptop, the keyboard felt comfortable for long typing sessions, which is particularly important given that the Vivobook S16 is likely to appeal to students and professionals who spend several hours a day writing or working on documents. The keys aren’t loud either, thus it remains fairly quiet in an office or shared workspace. There’s also three levels of white backlighting, which provide enough illumination to make the keys easy to see in darker environments.

A standout feature of the Vivobook S16 is its massive trackpad. It measures roughly 150 x 99mm and takes advantage of the generous palm-rest area. The surface is smooth, and cursor movement feels accurate and responsive, although I believe ASUS is not using a glass surface here. Windows gestures work reliably, making it easy to switch between applications, scroll through webpages or navigate around the desktop. ASUS has also added its Smart Gesture functionality, allowing certain gestures along the edges of the touchpad to control functions such as volume and display brightness. Overall, I found the sheer size of the trackpad useful when navigating Windows, although its large footprint does mean that your palm can occasionally come close to the edges while typing.

Capable everyday performer

The ASUS Vivobook S16 S3607AA is powered by Intel’s Core Ultra 5 325, part of its latest Core Ultra Series 3 family based on the Panther Lake architecture. The processor features eight cores and eight threads, with four Performance cores and four Low Power Efficient cores. It has a 2.1GHz base frequency which can boost up to 4.5GHz, along with 12MB of cache and a 25W base power rating, with a maximum turbo power of 55W. The Core Ultra 5 325 also brings a capable AI engine to the Vivobook S16, with an Intel NPU rated at up to 47 TOPS.

The review unit sent to me came with 16GB of DDR5 memory, which should be sufficient for most everyday workloads, including several browser tabs and productivity applications open simultaneously. One advantage here is that the memory isn’t completely soldered down, as ASUS provides a DDR5 SO-DIMM slot, allowing the total memory to be expanded to 32GB.

Storage is handled by a 512GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. That’s a fairly standard capacity for this segment, although users who maintain a large collection of photos or video files may eventually find themselves reaching for an external drive. It is a speedy drive, though, as the CrystalDiskMark results were quite good. The SSD managed close to 6,700MB/s sequential read and around 5,400MB/s sequential write speeds. These are strong numbers for a laptop SSD, translating to quick boot times, fast data transfers, and a snappy overall system response.

As for synthetic benchmarks, I’ve included three laptops that provide useful points of reference for the new Vivobook S16. The first is last year’s ASUS Vivobook S16 S3607QA with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X1 chip, while the other two are the Dell 15 D15260, powered by Intel’s Core Ultra 5 225H, and the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i Gen 11, which uses Intel’s new Core Ultra 5 322. All four are non-gaming laptops, have 16GB of memory and use integrated graphics, making them reasonably relevant comparisons for a productivity-focused machine like the Vivobook S16.

Starting with Cinebench 2026, the new Vivobook S16 scored 2,383 in the multi-core test and 444 in single-core. The Dell 15 was slightly ahead in both, with 2,398 and 466 respectively, while the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i recorded 1,792 and 448. In Cinebench R24, the Snapdragon-powered Vivobook S16 comes out ahead in multi-core, scoring 707 versus 579 on the new Intel-powered machine. The Dell 15 is also ahead at 601, while the Lenovo trails at 450. In single-core, however, the new Vivobook’s score of 110 puts it ahead of the Snapdragon model and matches the Lenovo, although the Dell remains in front at 118.

Moving on to PCMark 10, the Vivobook S16 managed to score 7,089, compared with 7,975 for the Dell 15 and 6,422 for the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i. The extended test tells a similar story, where the Vivobook scored 7,016, just behind the Dell 15’s score of 7,025 but comfortably ahead of the Lenovo IdeaPad. Geekbench 6 again shows the new Core Ultra 5 325 performing competitively rather than dominating the field. Its single-core score of 2,535 sits between Dell’s 2,638 and Lenovo’s 2,491, while its multi-core score of 9,532 is lower than both the Snapdragon Vivobook’s 10,120 and Dell’s 10,829.

The AI-focused benchmarks are more complicated as they measure different execution paths. In ONNX single-precision testing, the new S16 scored 3,167, placing it well ahead of the Snapdragon model’s 1,466 and Lenovo’s 2,208. In the quantized test, ASUS scores 6,206, again behind Dell’s 7,152 but ahead of both the Snapdragon and Lenovo machines.

While the Vivobook S16 is clearly designed as a productivity-focused laptop, I did put it through a quick GTA V test to see how far the integrated graphics could go. At 1080p, the Vivobook S16 averaged 65 FPS in the GTA V benchmark, making the game quite playable at the laptop’s native resolution. For comparison, the previous Snapdragon-powered Vivobook S16 S3607QA scored 62 FPS in the same test, while the Dell 15 D15260 managed 49 FPS and the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i Gen 11 reached 63 FPS.

That said, raw benchmark numbers aren’t necessarily the entire story. This is a thin-and-light 16-inch productivity laptop, and the combination of an eight-core processor, 16GB of DDR5 memory, and a fast PCIe 4.0 storage is more than sufficient for everyday work, content consumption and moderately demanding productivity workloads.

All day battery life

The Vivobook S16 retains the same 70Wh battery as its predecessor, which continues to deliver solid backup. In my day-to-day usage, which involved web browsing, writing, streaming videos and working with multiple tabs and applications, the Vivobook S16 consistently managed around 14–15 hours on a single charge. That’s enough to get through a full workday without having to constantly look for a power outlet.

I also ran PCMark 10’s Video Playback battery test, which produced an even more impressive result where the laptop lasted 20 hours. The result should be viewed as a best-case scenario rather than an indication of typical usage, but it nevertheless highlights the efficiency of the new platform. With a compact 68W USB-C charger included in the box, the laptop is also relatively convenient to carry around without adding too much weight to the overall setup.

Final words

The new ASUS Vivobook S16 is a well-rounded large-screen laptop that gets most of the fundamentals right. Some of its strengths are the 16-inch OLED display, enormous trackpad, relatively portable design, strong everyday performance, and excellent battery life. Considering the new Intel platform, it makes the S16 a more versatile machine, particularly for users who may have concerns about ARM software compatibility.

Performance is competitive rather than class-leading, with the Core Ultra 5 325 capable of handling everyday productivity with ease. There are a few areas where ASUS could have gone further. For instance, the 1920 x 1200 resolution feels conservative on a 16-inch OLED panel, and a higher refresh rate would have made the experience feel noticeably more modern. I also would have liked to see faster USB-C connectivity, especially since the previous Snapdragon model offered USB4.

The notebook is suitable for students, professionals, and content consumers who value screen real estate without wanting a bulky machine. However, at its current selling price of Rs 1,37,990, it isn’t the most aggressively priced laptop in this segment. In fact, it is much more expensive than its Snapdragon-powered predecessor due to the premium Intel platform and skyrocketing memory prices. If you are in the market for a new 16-inch laptop, consider looking at previous-gen models or even the new AMD Ryzen AI 7 445-powered Vivobook S16 for better value.

Editor’s Rating: 7.5 / 10

Pros:

• Compact and portable 16-inch design
• Solid battery life
• Vivid OLED display
• Expandable memory

Cons:

• Hard to justify the price
• Low display resolution and refresh rate
• Only 512GB storage