Asus Vivobook S 15 (S5507)

Yet another strong showing for a Snapdragon-powered laptop, but we hoped for a slightly lower price

- TIM DANTON

Intel wasn’t alone in releasing a new processor at IFA this year (see p46), with Qualcomm unveiling two eight-core Snapdragon X Plus chips. This should help laptop makers build more affordable Copilot+ PCs, and I fully expect to see machines at the £800 mark, perhaps even cheaper, before Christmas.

The X1P-46-100 and X1P-42-100 include the same NPU you’ll find in every Snapdragon X chip, with Qualcomm differentiating its range via the GPU and CPU. Here, the X1P-46-100 features a beefier GPU than its sibling while packing higher CPU frequencies: 3.4GHz multicore versus 3.2GHz, and 4GHz for a single-core boost as opposed to 3.4GHz.

My test system uses the lesser X1P-42-100, and you can see the main benchmark scores below; if this laptop featured an X1P-46-100 I would expect 2,800 in Geekbench 6’s single-core test and pushing 12,000 in the multicore section, but what surely matters to 90% of people is that this machine is quick and responsive. If you’re using it for Microsoft Office, web browsing, TV streaming or video calls then you’ll be more than happy with its speed. It’s only when you edit videos, extract large ZIP files or play games that it will struggle (it averaged 18fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider even at 1080p Low settings).