ASUS X1504VAP-C38128

The ASUS Vivobook X1504VAP-C38128 pairs a weak Intel Core 3 100U with a surprisingly generous 24GB of RAM and 1TB SSD. It's a solid student and office machine, but the CPU and integrated graphics are near the bottom of our database. At $909 in the US, you're paying for memory and storage, not performance. Buy it for multitasking and portability, skip it for anything demanding.

Let's talk about that Core 3 100U. It's a low-power chip designed for thin laptops, and it shows. In our database, it lands in the 11th percentile for CPU performance among all laptops we track. That's not a typo. This thing is closer to a Chromebook processor than a proper workhorse. The 6-core setup sounds impressive until you realize only 2 of those cores are performance cores. The other 4 are efficiency cores meant to sip power during background tasks. For Word docs, email, and web browsing, you won't notice. For anything that actually pushes the CPU, you'll feel it immediately.

The 24GB of DDR5 RAM is the real story here. That's more memory than most laptops at this price point, and it's fast at 4800MHz. Our data puts the RAM in the 68th percentile, which is solid. Combined with the 1TB NVMe SSD (79th percentile for storage), this machine multitasks like a champ. You can have a dozen Chrome tabs, Spotify, and a Zoom call running without the system grinding to a halt. The bottleneck is never memory or storage here. It's the CPU and the integrated graphics, which sit in the 6th percentile. That's one of the weakest GPU scores we've seen in a traditional laptop.

Stack this against the Apple MacBook Air M4 and it's not even close. The Air's M4 chip absolutely demolishes the Core 3 100U in both CPU and GPU performance, and the display is dramatically better. But the Air costs more, and you're locked into macOS. If you need Windows and a numpad, the Vivobook has a niche. Just don't expect it to compete on raw power.

Against something like the Lenovo Legion 5i or HP OMEN Transcend 14, the Vivobook looks like a different species entirely. Those are gaming machines with discrete GPUs and high-refresh displays. The Vivobook's 60Hz panel and integrated graphics can't touch them for gaming or creative work. But those laptops are heavier, louder, and often more expensive. The Vivobook is for someone who wants a quiet, light Windows machine for school or office work. In that lane, it's fine. Just know what you're giving up.

Pricing on this thing is all over the map depending on where you live. In the US, it's listed at $909. In the UK, it's £1,327. In Mexico, it's 33,456 MXN. Those numbers aren't directly comparable across currencies, but within each market, you're paying a premium for that 24GB RAM and 1TB SSD combo. Our affordability score puts it dead in the middle at the 50th percentile, which feels about right.

The problem is that $909 buys you a lot of laptop in 2026. You can find machines with better CPUs and actual discrete GPUs for similar money, especially if you're willing to drop to 16GB of RAM. The RAM and storage here are nice, but they're cheap upgrades. The CPU is the expensive part, and it's the weak link. You're essentially paying for a big trunk on a car with a small engine.

The ASUS Vivobook X1504VAP-C38128 is one of those machines that looks like a parts-bin special on paper, but actually makes a weird kind of sense once you dig in. You get a 15.6-inch 1080p display, an Intel Core 3 100U with 6 cores, a frankly unnecessary 24GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 1TB NVMe SSD. It's a custom config sold through Amazon, which means someone cracked it open, stuffed in more RAM and storage than ASUS originally intended, and resealed it. That's not a red flag, but it's worth knowing what you're buying.

This is a student and office work machine through and through. Our database puts it at 62.7 out of 100 for students and 49.2 for business use. The gaming score is 10.8, which should tell you everything about the integrated Intel Graphics. If you want to play anything newer than Minesweeper, this is not your laptop. But for writing papers, running spreadsheets, and having 40 browser tabs open while you pretend to study, the RAM and storage combo is genuinely generous.

The weird part is the CPU. Intel's Core 3 branding is new and confusing, and this chip sits near the bottom of our performance charts, in the 11th percentile. It's a 6-core part with 2 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, boosting up to 4.7GHz. That's fine for everyday tasks, but the marketing copy claiming it's ideal for HD video editing and design work is doing some heavy lifting. We'll get into that below.

Skip this if you do any kind of creative work that depends on color accuracy or GPU power. The 45% NTSC display and integrated graphics make photo editing, video editing, and 3D work a frustrating experience. You'd be better served by a laptop with a dedicated GPU and a better panel, even if it means sacrificing some RAM or storage.

Also skip it if you travel a lot and need all-day battery life. The 42Wh battery is small, and 4 to 5 hours of real-world use means you'll be hunting for outlets by mid-afternoon. A MacBook Air or a business laptop with a larger battery would serve you better. And if you want to connect to a 4K external display at 60Hz, the HDMI v1.4 port caps you at 30Hz, which feels choppy for anything but static content.

For students who live in a browser, write papers, and occasionally edit a photo, this Vivobook is a decent pick. The 24GB of RAM and 1TB SSD mean you won't run out of memory or storage for years. The keyboard with numpad is genuinely useful for anyone doing data entry or accounting coursework. And at 1.70kg, it's easy to carry around campus. The weak CPU won't bother you if your heaviest task is a 20-tab Chrome session.

For anyone doing video editing, programming that involves compiling large projects, or any kind of gaming, look elsewhere. The Core 3 100U will frustrate you. The integrated graphics are a non-starter for anything beyond basic 2D work. And that 250-nit display with 45% NTSC color coverage means photo and video editing is a guessing game. You'd be better off with a used gaming laptop or a machine with a Ryzen 5 or Core 5 chip, even if it means less RAM.