ASUS Vivobook 16 X1605VA Review: Core 7 150U Performance at Budget Pricing

The ASUS Vivobook 16 X1605VA Laptop has 82 reviews on Amazon, sitting at ★★★½☆ (3.9).

It's a genuinely good buy at this price: an Intel Core 7 150U, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB PCIe SSD, and a 16-inch 1920x1200 display in the budget tier is a proper deal. It's not perfect. There are trade-offs, and you should know about them before you hand over your money. But if you need a capable everyday machine for work, study, or general life admin, and you don't want to spend mid-range money, this one deserves serious consideration. Let's get into the specifics.

The RAM is 16GB, which is the right amount for 2026. Eight gigabytes was already feeling tight a couple of years ago, and anything less than 16GB now will have you watching the task manager with anxiety during a Teams call with a few browser tabs open. Storage is 1TB via PCIe SSD, which is fast enough for snappy boot times and quick file transfers, and 1TB gives you genuine room to breathe. No faffing around with external drives for everyday use.

The GPU is Intel integrated graphics, branded simply Intel Graphics on this chip. This is the honest bit: it's fine for everything except gaming and serious creative work. Video editing in 4K? You'll feel it. Playing modern AAA games? Forget it. But for web browsing, Office, video calls, streaming, light photo work, and even some older or less demanding games, it does the job without complaint. It's integrated, it shares system memory, and it's not going to replace a dedicated GPU. But at this price, with this CPU, expecting a discrete GPU would be greedy.

The display is a 16-inch panel at 1920x1200 resolution. That extra vertical space compared to standard 1080p (the 16:10 aspect ratio) is genuinely useful for productivity. You see more of a document, more of a webpage, more of a spreadsheet. It's one of those things that sounds minor until you've used it daily and then go back to a 16:9 screen and wonder how you coped.

Wireless is WiFi 6 (802.11ax, dual band), which copes better than older WiFi 5 in busy environments (offices, coffee shops, shared flats). It's a single-stream (1x1) card, though, and there's no access to the 6GHz band that WiFi 6E adds.

Colour is limited: ASUS rates the panel at 45% NTSC, and it doesn't describe this configuration's panel as IPS, so don't count on wide viewing angles. You're not getting an OLED or a high-refresh gaming panel, and that's fine because this isn't that kind of machine. What you are getting is a display that's comfortable to look at for extended periods, which matters more than people realise. ASUS has also put TUV Rheinland certification on the panel for low blue-light emissions, which is a meaningful credential rather than just marketing. The three-sided NanoEdge slim-bezel design makes the screen feel bigger than it is.

Outdoor use is the caveat. ASUS rates the panel at 300 nits, and brightness at that level is usually adequate indoors but struggles in direct sunlight or near bright windows. If you're planning to work outside in summer, manage your expectations or find a shaded spot. That's a fair generalisation for this class of display across most brands at this price.

The charging setup uses a proprietary DC-in connector alongside the USB-C port. The charger in the box is a 45W adapter for the DC-in, but ASUS also lists power delivery support on the USB-C port, so a compatible USB-C charger is an option for travel.

That said, ASUS hasn't made this thing a brick. The Vivobook line is generally designed to be reasonably portable for its class, and a 16-inch machine with a slim-bezel display is still more manageable than the chunky 17-inch workstations of a few years ago. It'll fit in most standard laptop backpacks with room to spare for the charger and other gear. If your commute involves a bag anyway, and you're not walking miles with it, the size is liveable.

The charger is the other portability consideration. The supplied 45W charger uses the proprietary DC-in, so it's one more thing in the bag, though the USB-C port's power delivery support gives you an alternative. If you work mostly at a desk and occasionally take the laptop to a meeting room or a coffee shop, it's barely worth worrying about, though it is worth running a good VPN when you're on shared café or hotel Wi-Fi to keep your connection safe from snooping. If you're a frequent traveller living out of a carry-on, the overall package is on the large side.

Key travel and typing feel on Vivobook machines tend to be reasonable for the price bracket. They're not going to rival a ThinkPad's legendary keyboard, but they're not the mushy, shallow affairs that plagued budget laptops a few years ago. Backlighting is worth checking on the specific listing, as ASUS lists it as optional on this line.

The trackpad on modern Vivobooks is generally a decent size and reasonably accurate. Windows 11 precision touchpad drivers mean gestures (three-finger swipe, pinch to zoom, and so on) work as expected. It's not going to match the glass trackpads on premium machines, but for everyday navigation it does the job without frustration.

Under sustained heavy load, temperatures will climb. That's physics, not a design flaw. The keyboard deck and palm rest should stay comfortable during normal use, but if you're rendering video or running something CPU-intensive for an extended period, the underside will get warm. Lap use during heavy workloads is something to be aware of. For desk use, it's less of a concern since the vents can breathe properly.

Throttling under sustained load is possible, as it is with most thin machines without discrete GPU cooling to share the burden. For the typical user doing office work, video calls, and media consumption, this won't come up. For anyone planning to push the CPU hard for hours at a stretch, a laptop with more aggressive cooling (and usually more weight and noise to match) might be a better fit. But that's a fairly niche use case at this price point and in this form factor.

Push the machine harder and the fans will spin up. During a video call or in a quiet open-plan office, sustained heavy load will be audible. But for the workloads most people actually use a machine like this for, fan noise is a background consideration rather than a constant annoyance.

For students in lectures or workers in quiet offices, the acoustic profile during normal use should be fine. If you're the kind of person who runs intensive tasks constantly and needs near-silence throughout, you'd be looking at a fanless machine (with the performance trade-offs that brings) or a larger chassis with more aggressive cooling that can move more air at lower RPM. For the target user, this machine sits in an acceptable place acoustically.

The 3.5mm audio jack is there, which some manufacturers have started dropping in the name of thinness. Good to see it here. The proprietary DC-in handles charging. WiFi 6, as mentioned, is a step up from WiFi 5, though it lacks the 6GHz band that WiFi 6E brings.

Bluetooth is version 5.2. Overall, for a budget machine, the port and connectivity picture here is better than average. You've got the essentials covered without needing a dongle for basic daily use, which is more than can be said for some machines at higher price points.

• 2x USB-A (USB 3.2 Gen 1)
• 1x USB-A (USB 2.0)
• 1x USB-C (with power delivery)
• 1x HDMI
• 1x 3.5mm audio jack
• 1x proprietary DC-in
• WiFi 6

The speaker situation on a 16-inch chassis has some advantages over smaller machines simply because there's more room for speaker placement and resonance. ASUS generally tunes Vivobook speakers for acceptable media consumption rather than audiophile listening, and that's a reasonable approach. For YouTube, Netflix, and the occasional Spotify session, the built-in speakers should be fine. For anything where audio quality genuinely matters, the 3.5mm jack is there for headphones or external speakers.

The microphone quality on built-in laptop mics is rarely going to impress anyone, but for video calls where you're not in a noisy environment, it should be functional. If you're recording podcasts or doing voiceover work, an external microphone is the answer regardless of what laptop you're using. For Teams and Zoom calls from a home office or a quiet workspace, the built-in mic should hold up without colleagues constantly asking you to repeat yourself.

Finish options on the Vivobook 16 tend toward matte surfaces. It's not going to turn heads the way a premium aluminium machine does, but it has a clean, professional enough look for an office or lecture hall. For the price, the build quality is what you'd expect: functional, not flashy, and designed to last a reasonable working lifetime with normal care.

The honest trade-off is graphics. Intel's integrated graphics mean gaming and GPU-accelerated creative work are off the table. If those things matter to you, this isn't the right machine.

On Amazon it sits at ★★★½☆ (3.9) from 82 reviews.