Asus VivoBook 17 M712DA: A better screen and a bigger battery would come in quite handy

Asus sells the 17-inch VivoBook 17 M712DA for a little more than 600 Euros ($660), which is not much. At first glance, the low price is reflected in the simple plastic case, which we do not think is very rigid. Upon booting up the device, we discovered that the colours looked awfully washed-out. The reason for this is that the display has a very limited colour volume. At the end of the review, we uncovered yet another weakness, which is very poor battery life. This weakness is especially galling, because the large chassis of the VivoBook 17 has plenty of space for a big battery. 

Above all, the last two drawbacks are the most consequential. Other manufacturers put displays with better colour space coverage in notebooks with a similar price tag, and more battery life could also have been squeezed out of this kind of hardware. All in all, the VivoBook 17 M712DA does not look like a notebook that was built with the AMD Ryzen 5 3500U in mind. 

In normal operation, the temperatures never get too hot. The performance is not impressive, except for a single good score right at the beginning of our Cinebench R15 stress test. Thanks to dual-channel-enabled RAM, the integrated AMD Radeon RX Vega 8 graphics cut a fine figure in our benchmarks. This graphics chip can run older games smoothly, but not at very high resolutions. 

At the end of the day,  the VivoBook 17 M712DA will only be attractive  to those who do not need a colour-accurate display and good battery life. The performance is high enough for running office applications and simple image editing software. However, the VivoBook 17 can only be used for image editing by hobbyists, because of its colour-inaccurate display.