ASUS Vivobook Go 15.6" E1504FA-DS31-CA Black 2023

The ASUS Vivobook Go E1504FA is a budget 15.6-inch laptop that covers the basics for a low price. It's held back by a weak Ryzen 3 CPU and a bulky, heavy design. It's a decent choice for simple tasks at a desk, but power users and commuters should steer clear.

Let's talk real-world use. The integrated Radeon Graphics actually sit at the 70th percentile, which is a pleasant surprise. It's not a gaming GPU by any stretch, but it's well above average for integrated graphics in this price bracket. You can get away with some very light gaming, older titles, or indie stuff, but don't expect to run Cyberpunk on this thing. The 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM is a bottleneck, ranking in the 23rd percentile. 8GB is the bare minimum for Windows 11 these days, and you'll feel the pinch if you're a tab hoarder.

The 512GB SSD is solid for the price, landing right at the 40th percentile. It's middle of the pack, but 512GB is enough breathing room for a decent media library and all your documents. The 15.6-inch 1080p IPS screen is also about average, hitting the 52nd percentile. It's fine for indoor use, but the 250 nits of brightness and 45% NTSC color gamut mean it's not very vibrant and you'll struggle to see it clearly outdoors. For watching YouTube at your desk, it does the job.

Stacked against something like an Apple MacBook Air M5, the Vivobook Go looks like it's from a different decade. The Air is in a completely different league for performance, battery life, and portability, but it also costs more than double. A more direct comparison might be a Lenovo Yoga Book 9i or an HP OmniBook X Flip, but those are premium convertibles aimed at a different buyer. The real competition for this ASUS is other budget 15.6-inch laptops in the $500 range, and frankly, many of them will offer a similar experience. The MSI Prestige line, for example, often packs a better screen and a more modern CPU for a slight price bump. If you can stretch your budget even a hundred bucks, you'll find a noticeable jump in quality.

Pricing on this model floats between $500 and $600, which puts it in a tricky spot. It's cheap, but not so cheap that you can ignore its shortcomings. For the same money, you might find a last-gen machine with a better CPU and more RAM if you hunt for sales. The value here is in getting a brand-new, full-size laptop with a decent SSD right now, no deal-hunting required. If your needs are truly basic and you value screen size over speed, it's a fair trade.

The ASUS Vivobook Go E1504FA is one of those laptops you spot on a shelf and think, "Hey, a full-size 15.6-inch machine for around five hundred bucks, not bad." And for basic everyday stuff, it's a perfectly fine deal. You're getting a 512GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, and a Ryzen 3 processor in a package that looks clean and inoffensive. If you just need something to browse the web, stream Netflix, and hammer out emails, this fits the bill without emptying your wallet.

But you should know what you're signing up for. This isn't a sleeper powerhouse. The Ryzen 3 7320U is an entry-level chip, and our benchmarks put it in the 20th percentile for CPU performance among laptops. That means it's slower than the vast majority of machines out there. It'll handle a few browser tabs and a Word doc just fine, but start pushing it with heavier multitasking or anything beyond the basics and you'll feel the slowdown pretty quickly.

Portability is another trade-off. At 3.10kg, this thing is a chunky boy. It lands in the 16th percentile for compactness, so it's one of the least portable laptops we've tracked. The 42Wh battery isn't doing it any favors either. This is more of a "move it from desk to desk" kind of laptop, not something you'll want to lug around in a backpack all day.

Anyone who needs to carry their laptop daily should skip this. At over 3kg, it's a brick. Students, commuters, and frequent travelers will hate lugging it around. You should also skip it if you do any kind of creative work like photo or video editing, the CPU and screen are just not up to the task. If you need a portable machine, look at a 14-inch model from Acer or Lenovo in the same price range, or consider a used business-class laptop like a ThinkPad, which will be lighter and better built.

Should you buy the ASUS Vivobook Go E1504FA? If your computing life is simple, web browsing, email, and streaming, and you want the biggest screen possible for the least amount of money, it's a solid "yes." It's a straightforward machine that doesn't pretend to be more than it is. The 512GB SSD is a genuine plus at this price, and the integrated graphics are a nice little bonus for casual use.

But if you have any aspirations beyond the absolute basics, you should probably skip this one. The sluggish CPU and limited RAM will start to grate on you sooner rather than later. Students, anyone who multitasks heavily, or people who need a laptop they can actually carry around all day should look elsewhere. This is a desktop replacement in the truest sense, it's best left plugged in on a desk.