ASUS VivoBook F512 Thin and Lightweight Laptop, 15.6” FHD WideView NanoEdge , AMD R5-3500U CPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Backlit KB, Fingerprint Reader, Windows 10, Peacock Blue, F512DA-EB51

I originally bought this computer with the intentions of programming on the go.Let's get the bad out of the way first. This laptop is not designed, nor advertised for gaming by any stretch. You'll be able to get away with some older games but forget about getting reasonable performance at reasonable graphics levels on anything more modern. We're talking just barely getting 60fps on Spyro: Reignited Trilogy at 720p, lowest graphic preset. But that's impressive for not being a gaming laptop. Just keep your expectations in line.The good: This thing is blitzing fast in practically every other regard. This is where the SSD and CPU really take center stage. Everything is incredibly responsive and installs are very painless. Overall usage had me forgetting I wasn't on my desktop at times, so I give this a laptop a solid A+ in that regard. Boot times are damn near instant and restarting to finish installing applications happens in under 10 seconds.Battery life has yet to be tested very well so I can't comment too much on that just yet. I'll update when I get more usage out of the battery but from the get go, it seems pretty standard.Screen quality is again very standard. It's not winning any beauty contests compared to a decent ISP panel but again, it's not advertising itself as being anything spectacular in that regard. You get what you pay for and with this laptop, you're paying for the SSD/CPU performance which it absolutely nails.Style: I absolutely love the way this laptop looks. It's clean, sleek, and professional. Nothing over the top but doesn't look or feel cheap. Build quality is very solid. Obviously it's no MacBook in terms of build quality but it's also less than half the price of a MacBook so again, you get what you pay for.Sidenotes: My first unit had an odd manufacture defect on the screen; A white blotch that was only visible under certain conditions, namely over more muddy colors like off shades of white, dark blues, etc. It was incredibly distracting but I contacted Amazon who stayed on the line with me while we discussed possible solutions with ASUS and ultimately resulted in Amazon sending me a replacement unit in less than two days. The new unit has none of these issues and looks to be exactly what I was looking for in the first place. So good on both ASUS for making a decent laptop and Amazon for honoring the exchange.

I bought the Ryzen 5/ 256GB SSD variant. At $479 in Nov of 2020, with a 15'6 screen, backlit keyboard with numeric keypad and these specs, this is a fantastic laptop for the money. The quality of the screen is great and the keyboard pretty comfortable. The sound is also remarkably good, in case you need to watch something through the built-in speakers.I installed Linux straight away, so I can't review its performance under Windows, but on Linux it works definitely great. This configuration means 8 cores, and everything got recognized and was working flawlessly from the start (at least on Arch Linux, you may get different results with more conservative distros). I haven't come around configuring and testing the fingerprint sensor yet though.My usage is mostly browsing, office tasks, watching movies and programming.I am not a gamer, but do play Minecraft with my son from time to time. It does work pretty well, once you reduce the max framerate from the default 160 or so to a more reasonable 30FPS. The video card setup is definitely not good if you plan to play other more graphics intensive video games, but for the ocassional game, this would also do.As other user reported, the looks are also great, surprisingly good at this price range. It does have some Macbook vibes, which is always nice, and definitely not expected at this price.My only negative remarks are that despite the extended keyboard, the insert key requires pressing the Function key, so there is an extra complication if you use the Ctrl+Ins, Shift+Ins for copy and paste. Also, as reported in other comments, out of the 8GB of RAM, 2 are dedicated to the video card, so you actually have 6GB for the system. Wait till you receive it, and open it to check if you have the one with a SODIMM module of 4GB. I did so and ordered an 8GB module for not much, to upgrade it to the max possible total of 12GB of RAM (10GB for the system).All in all, another perfectly rounded laptop by Asus. At this price and specs there is really no other competitor. Very satisfied with my purchase.I don't have time to write many reviews, but this laptop definitely deserved a good one.