TechRadar Verdict
The Asus VivoBook 17 M712 laptop is great for large-screen productivity boasting impressive internals and an ample selection of ports. It also offers decent battery life paired with fast charging. For users who prefer working from home on a big laptop, the Asus VivoBook 17 M712 won't disappoint you. But be wary of the weight and lack of a fingerprint scanner.
Pros
- +
Performance
- +
Large display for productivity
- +
Ample port selection
Cons
- -
Bulky
- -
Low display brightness
- -
No fingerprint scanner
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The Asus VivoBook 17 M712 is one of the few laptops in India to come with a Ryzen 5 5500U processor and as you’d expect from a top-notch processor, the performance here is excellent. Adding to the performance is the big screen here. While 17-inch laptops are not very popular among the crowd, the VivoBook 17 M712 is for those who are in the market and looking for powerful performance.
Priced around the Rs 60,000 mark in India, the laptop is a great option if you want excellent performance. While the display might not be the best when it comes to colour accuracy or peak brightness, it does the job fairly well.
Furthermore, it brings a host of options when it comes to the port selection 一 which is a big plus and most of the laptops tend to compromise here these days. In terms of battery life, the laptops can easily last a day but don’t escape more than that. A 65W fast charger is a neat addition to the setup.
The design of the laptop is quite hard and rigid, it is strong and feels premium while using. But, this laptop might not be everyone’s cup of tea as it is quite bulky and not that easy to travel with. It also misses out on certain aspects such as a full-size SD card slot, a fingerprint scanner, and also privacy shutter. But, if these are not your concerns, the Asus VivoBook 17 M712 might be the one for you.
Asus VivoBook 17 M712 price in India and availability
The Asus VivoBook 17 M712 is priced at Rs 62,990 in India and the laptop is available on Flipkart as well as Amazon. However, the pricing on both e-commerce platforms keeps varying, so be sure to check out the current offers. The machine is available in a couple of variants with up to 16GB of RAM.
Design and display
Right off the bat, The Asus VivoBook 17 is a huge and bulky machine to work on and carry. The laptop weighs 2.3 kg and this is one of the bulkiest laptops welI have used personally. Considering the large screen estate the VivoBook 17 offers, the weight is justified 一 however, the weight might be a deal-breaker for many as it adds a lot of bulk on your back while travelling. For what it's worth, the laptop can be packed inside almost all backpacks that are capable of carrying a 15-inch model, but again we’d not recommend this for frequent backpack travellers as this might affect them in the long run.
The laptop is made up of quality polycarbonate material which does feel good when you touch it and the machine comes in a sole transparent silver colour option. The 17-inch notebook feels sturdy and hard which is a good sign. On the right side, you get a DC charging port, USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, a Type-C port, headphone jack, and a MicroSD card slot. On the left side, you get 2 x USB 2.0 Type-A along with a Kensington lock, battery and charging indicators.
On the back of the Asus VivoBook 17, you get rubber pads, speaker system and on the front of the machine, you can see the Asus branding engraved. The laptop uses Asus’s ErgoLift mechanism which raises the angle of the laptop base and therefore the keyboard when opening the laptop. This also offers better thermal flow and an easier typing experience. Lastly, one-handed lifting of the laptop lid isn’t possible as it is very stiff and heavy.
Furthermore, the Asus VivoBook 17 M712 features a large 17.3-inch display with 1,920 by 1,080 pixels Full HD resolution. It is an LED panel with a 60Hz refresh rate and DCI-P3 coverage of 42%. The display is quite large which helps for better management of multiple tabs and keep up with multiple applications open at once in split-screen if you prefer that. The display isn’t the brightest out there nor is the colour accuracy the best. But, when it comes to watching content on YouTube, Netflix, Hotstar, etc, the laptop does a pretty good job, but nothing exceptional and it also offers a decent viewing angle.
It is a matte finish display that helps in reducing reflections. The big screen was also convenient for us to multitask with multiple tabs open and also play with multiple apps. Overall, the display on the quality is good for day to day work and media consumption, but we would not recommend it to people who work in outdoor environments or people who use the laptop to edit photos or videos.
Keyboard and trackpad
The VivoBook 17 comes with a full-sized keyboard and a regular-sized trackpad as well. Additionally, taking advantage of the large form factor, the laptop also comes with a dedicated numpad on the right 一 which is a handy tool for many. However, we did not like the fact that even with ample space, Asus has settled for half-sized upper and lower arrow keys. This might be because we are used to full-sized direction keys on our personal laptop for years.
Leaving that apart, we enjoyed using the keyboard and the typing experience was excellent for us over the testing period. The key travel onboard is good and so is the sound produced while typing. The palm rest area is also good and long typing hours won’t be an issue.
The laptop also comes with backlighting which can be accessed from Fn + F7. The trackpad was responsive and smooth, but the size of the trackpad isn’t any different from another laptop. In fact, to our surprise, it is the same dimensions as a 13-inch laptop. But, this isn’t a deal-breaker as it turned out to be a good one.
Performance
The Ryzen 5 5500U powering the VivoBook 17 is the star of the show here and this is also a handful of laptops in India available with the Ryzen 5000 series. Our unit is packed in 16GB of DDR4 RAM 一 Asus tells us the memory isn’t expandable on the machine. You get 512GB M.2 NVME PCIe Samsung SSD and the company is offering an expansion of SSD(up to 512GB) as well as 1TB hard drive.
The machine secured 1810.76 MB/s sequential read and 1381.59 MB/s sequential write speed in the CrystalDiskMark test 一 these are just average scores. The IdeaPad Flex 5 with Ryzen 5 4500U scored a much better score in the same test.
In the synthetic benchmarks, the laptop did well too, which isn’t too surprising. Here is how the laptop performed as compared to the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 (Ryzen 5 4500) and Acer Swift 3 (i5, 11th gen) 一 both of which are priced around Rs 65,000.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | VivoBook M17(Ryzen 5 5500) | Flex 5 (Ryzen 5 4500) | Swift 3 (i5, 11th gen) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geekbench (Single core) | 664 | 1081 | 1312 |
| Geekbench (Multi core) | 4147 | 5020 | 4087 |
| Cinebench R23 (Single core) | 1175 | 1081 | 1184 |
| Cinebench R23 (Multi core) | 5883 | 5020 | 4164 |
Keeping aside the benchmark scores, the real-life performance of the VivoBook 17 was top-notch and handled anything we threw at it with ease and came out in flying colours all the time. Our usage included the usage of Wi-Fi all the time, occasional Bluetooth usage, writing mail, usage of Google services such as multiple Chrome tabs, Google sheets, docs, communicating on Slack, and watching videos. We had no issues doing all these throughout our time with the Asus VivoBook 17 M712.
It is also worth mentioning that the disk read and write speeds aren’t that impressive here. While the machine doesn’t come with a dedicated GPU, the integrated Radeon GPU could only handle some games with low to medium settings. Games such as Valorant, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive ran fairly well in low settings. It also handled photoshop without any hiccups. At the end of the day, if you are looking for raw CPU performance, this will not disappoint you. But, if you are a gamer, you have a lot more options out there.
Battery life
On the inside, the Asus VivoBook 17 M712 is powered by a three-cell 47Whr battery and it is backed by a 65W fast charger in the box. The notebook lasted us one full work throughout our testing period. On average our screen time was anywhere between six hours to eight hours which includes usage of Wi-Fi, 80% brightness, apps such as Slack, Photo editor and a bunch of Chrome tabs running in the background.
On multiple occasions, we started our day with 100% and ended our day’s work with about 10% to 20%. While the battery life is good enough to last for a day, we expected the machine to pack in a slightly bigger battery considering the size of the machine. For charging, the included 65W takes a little over 90 minutes to charge the laptop, but the first 50% will be done in just 30 minutes 一 which is pretty impressive.
Everything else
In terms of audio, the Asus VivoBook 17 M712 is packed with SonicMaster audio 一 two speakers are present on the bottom of the device and they are quite loud and enjoyable but, not too good to listen at full volume as it tends to fizz a bit and also it misses out on punchy bass or offer depth.
Also, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity were stable all the time and the machine currently runs on Windows 10 OS and will be eligible for Windows 11 update later this year as well.
The absence of a physical fingerprint scanner on the laptop was something we missed since Asus has added the same security feature to many of its laptops under Rs 40,000 also. Lastly, the built-in 720p webcam is good enough for all meetings and video conferencing calls, even with artificial lighting.
Should I buy the Asus VivoBook 17?
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
First reviewed: July 2021
