[Video Review] ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED (K6502) – there’s a hidden feature in it
ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED (K6502) in-depth review
Once you start seeing the word "creative" appear on the official Web page of a laptop, then, you immediately know its target group. However, once you dig deeper into the specs, you will find out, that there is more to it.In fact, there is one feature that stood out among the rest, and it is the MUX switch. Halt! Pull the handbrake! Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We don't yet know what is powering the machine, and here we are talking about switches and stuff.First, you get the full treatment - 45W Alder Lake CPU in the form of the Core i5-12500H and Core i7-12700H, or the more cooli[...]
Pros
- Fantastic battery life
- Antibacterial coating
- 100% sRGB and DCI-P3 coverage + HDR support
- Accurate colors in both the sRGB and the DCI-P3 color spaces
- 120Hz refresh rate + fast pixel response times
- Deep blacks and virtually infinite contrast ratio
- Fingerprint reader
- Thunderbolt 4, SD card slot, and many more
- Noise cancellation
- MUX switch
Cons
- Uses PWM below 110 nits (fixed by the My ASUS app)
- Small Arrow keys
- CPU
- Intel Core i9-13900H #24 in Top CPUs Intel Core i9-11900H #90 in Top CPUs Intel Core i7-13700H #36 in Top CPUs Intel Core i7-12700H #43 in Top CPUs Intel Core i7-12650H #71 in Top CPUs Intel Core i7-11800H #86 in Top CPUs Intel Core i5-12500H #89 in Top CPUs Intel Core i5-12450H #109 in Top CPUs Intel Core i5-11400H #159 in Top CPUs
- HDD/SSD
- up to 2000GB SSD
- M.2 Slot
- 1x 2280 PCIe NVMe 4.0 x4 See photo
- RAM
- up to 40GB
- OS
- Windows 10 Pro, Windows 11, Windows 11 Home, Windows 11 Pro
- Battery
- 70Wh, 3-cell, 50Wh, 3-cell, 70Wh
- Body material
- Plastic / Polycarbonate, Aluminum
- Dimensions
- 356.3 x 235.3 x 19.9 - 20.0 mm (14.03" x 9.26" x 0.78")
- Weight
- 1.75 kg (3.9 lbs)
- Ports and connectivity
- 2x USB Type-A
- 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps)
- 1x USB Type-C
- 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps), Power Delivery (PD)
- 1x USB Type-C
- Thunderbolt 4, Power Delivery (PD), DisplayPort
- HDMI
- 2.1
- Card reader
- SD
- Ethernet LAN
- 10, 100, 1000 Mbit/s
- Wi-Fi
- 802.11ax
- Bluetooth
- 5.0
- Audio jack
- 3.5mm Combo Jack
- Features
- Fingerprint reader
- optional
- Web camera
- FHD with privacy shutter
- Backlit keyboard
- Microphone
- Microphone with Cortana and Alexa voice-recognition
- Speakers
- Speaker with Smart Amp Technology, harman/kardon
- Optical drive
- Security Lock slot
All ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED (K6502) configurations
With its OLED display and portable form factor, the new Vivobook Pro 15 OLED K6502 is designed to meet the demands of creative professionals who are often on the go. ASUS has put a lot of thought into finding a balance between performance and versatility but there’s also one hidden feature you won’t find in the specs sheet…
[Intro]
On the outside, the Vivobook greets us with an aluminum lid, bearing Vivobook branding and a plastic chassis. Both of them combined give you a weight of 1.75 kg and a profile of 20 mm. The more interesting part is the antibacterial coating, which covers the entire base and prevents the growth of more than 99% of organisms that make contact with it within a 24-hour period. The lid opens with one hand and can also lay completely flat.
As you can see, the bezels of the laptop are very thin. The top one has an FHD webcam with a shutter, along with a triple-array microphone with AI noise cancellation.
[Input devices]
The keyboard is excellent, with a NumPad, long key travel, and clicky feedback. It’s got a backlight as well, for more comfortable use during nighttime. The touchpad is quite big, so accurate tracking really helps when traversing its surface.
[Ports]
The port selection is full of stuff, split between the two sides. On the left, there’s a 5-gigabit full-sized USB port, an audio jack, and an SD card reader. This leaves the bulk of the ports on the right, with one Thunderbolt 4 port, one 10-gigabit USB Type-C port, one more 5-gigabit USB port, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a LAN port.
[Display]
There are two panels to choose from: either a 144Hz 2K IPS display or a 120Hz 2.8K OLED panel. Focusing on the OLED panel, it reaches a peak brightness of 400 nits, as well as 100% DCI-P3 coverage. Accuracy is great out of the box, as you get a delta E value of 1.2 with the stock settings, thanks to the Pantone validation. The display is very quick, with a response time of just 2 ms. It also delivers excellent and deep blacks, with HDR500 TrueBlack certification.
On the other hand, there’s harmful PWM usage up to 80 nits. If you want to get rid of it, you can apply our Health-Guard profile, which keeps the accuracy and coverage intact. We’ll leave a link to it in the description below.
[Battery]
Pairing the laptop with a 70Wh battery unit and an Alder Lake H-series CPU results in 8 hours and 2 minutes of Web browsing, or 7 hours and 2 minutes of video playback on a single charge.
[Performance]
More importantly, the Core i5-12500H delivers incredible performance from its 12 cores and 16 threads. And if you need even more power, there’s the Core i7-12700H. Both in 3D and 2D Rendering, you’d hardly find anything that comes close to Intel’s offering.
The RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti that are available offer a 65W power limit. And here’s the surprising feature we talked about. Although it’s not a gaming notebook, this Vivobook Pro 15 has a MUX switch, allowing you to unleash the full potential of the GPU. It lets you connect the display directly to the NVIDIA graphics, thus greatly increasing the GPU performance.
It does however come at the cost of some battery life. The RTX 3050 is great for 1080p gaming, and you can get even better results in DLSS supported-titles. Obviously, the main job of the GPU is to render videos and in that case, you’d find it more than suitable.
[Cooling]
On the inside, the cooling setup mimics the ones inside gaming machines, with two heat pipes covering the CPU and GPU, and two fans on the left and right. It takes good care of the Core i7-12700H, both in the short and long runs. We saw spikes of up to 85W and 3.08 GHz, while in prolonged loads the chip easily maintains 50W.
The GPU is handled pretty well, with a constant 62W maintained, along with a clock speed of 1755 MHz.
The cooling does ramp up and can get loud when in Performance mode. However, temperatures and hotspots remain cool and under control, so we’re quite happy.
[Teardown and upgradeability]
The Vivobook Pro 15 OLED uses up to 16GB of soldered DDR4 memory, while also bringing one SODIMM slot for future expansion. There’s one M.2 slot for Gen 4 SSDs hidden behind a metal bracket.
We have a separate teardown video, which shows how to access both the RAM and storage slots.
[Verdict]
The Vivobook Pro 15 OLED is an amazing option for Creators, bringing some of the best available hardware, along with a fantastic high-refresh-rate panel. Having a MUX switch is a great addition as well, allowing you to squeeze as much performance as possible from the GPU.
The Editor’s choice award shouldn’t come as a surprise.