Finally we are seeing a laptop with AMD components! it's powered by an 8 core Ryzen r7 1700 cpu which has 16 threads so it is ideal for those who want serious multitasking and anyone who has software that takes full advantage of the many threads.
I will show you how it performs in such a workload and compare it to my 6 core Sager NP9877. Now for the graphics it has the RX 580 with 4 gigabytes of vram. This amount of memory can be a bit of a restriction at max settings even at its default 1080p resolution so it's a shame that AMD doesn't put the RX Vega 56 in here.
Now it is a 17 inch system and surprisingly lightweight at 7.1 pounds or 3.2 kilos. But since it uses a 330 watt power brick its total weight with the brick is 10.1 pounds or 4.6 kilos and you'll need to carry this brick around with you as the battery life is only 90 minutes. The build quality reminded me very much of MSI laptops with a black brushed aluminium lid that is pretty much a fingerprint magnet. It has the ROG motif and markings on the back of it which these glow red and they can't be turned off.
Now fortunately with it being made of aluminium it is easily cleaned. The palm rest is the same bushed aluminium but with red stereo speakers and red accented keys. On the whole I find a lot to be laptop to be very nice and at the $1,500 price point it's perfectly fine! The panel is a full HD 60 hz IPS with freesync support, wide viewing angles.
It is very good and the good news is there's no PWM flicker. Even at 25 percent brightness at 100% brightness it is up there for the brightest besting the Alienware 17. Even at 75% brightness that is still brighter than the HP omen X! It made it a joy to work on. In fact I would say video using my video editing software it looks sharper and clearer compared to my Sager.
Its color accuracy is fine too but it's not class leading but it's perfectly usable. The screen does have a bit of flex but in day to day use I had no issues. On the left hand side we have the power port so it doesn't get in the way of your mouse hand, but if this electrical socket is behind you, the cable can block the adjacent ports. So I would prefer to have had it on the back of the laptop. We have the Ethernet jack, mini display port, HDMI, USB C, USB 3 type-a and combo headphone mic jack. On the right hand side we have the Kensington lock, 2 USB 3 type-a ports, and an SD card reader.
Now if you put an SD card in you will see that it sticks out quite a bit which I didn't like.
It performs well though same as my Sager NP9877. Round back there are no ports but just the heat exhaust vents and the wording Republic of gamers. Storage wise we have a SATA 256 gigabyte SSD wit which has a boot up time of 23 seconds read speeds of 530 megabytes per second and write speeds of 460 there is only one M.2 slot so storage expansion is limited but it does take a PCI Express Drive if you want faster speeds. There is a one terabyte Seagate drive for games and larger files. My unit has 16 gigabytes of ddr4 2400 mega RAM it's running single channel but another stick can be inserted to give 32 gigabytes but access is awkward as it is underneath the heat pipes.
The CPU is here with 4 heat pipes and a large fan and the GPU is here you'll notice there is a heatsink on the heat pipes as well here we have this CMOS battery which is nice and accessible. Finally we have the Wi-Fi card that is also easy to upgrade the trackpad uses Windows precision drivers and the integrated mouse buttons have worked very well.
The keyboard does have a little bit of flex and some people find that the keys are a little bit mushy. The ASWD keys are highlighted in red but there is also an embossed marking on the W key which makes it very easy to find in the dark. The backlighting is red with 3 levels of brightness. You have a separate number pad with one key dedicated to bringing up the calculator and a key that's also dedicated to activating your ROG gaming center software.
You can use this software to alter the fan speed or alter screen color using their splendid technology. Game first allows you to optimize the network bandwidth. You also have expert Game Center and also sonic radar which allows you to show on screen where you know gunfire's coming from or bombs and footsteps with the sonic SEZ audio software you can alter sound output and select various profiles and enhancing your audio for streaming this utility also shows useful information such as CPU and GPU clock speeds and temperatures harddrive and RAM usage.
You can create game profiles assigning their the splendid setting you'd like and whether to free up memory resources when it is launched. Finally you can install the rog gaming app to monitor information on your mobile device. The other piece of installed software is the Radeon settings here you can assign settings for each individual game including whether free sync should be active or not. You can set one of several video presets such as sports outdoor or cinema you have an AMD reel this is a bit like nvidia shadowplay which you can use it to record or broadcast your gameplay and clicking on the display tab allows you to turn on free sync or enable virtual super resolution which is AMD's implementation of down sampling.
It's a process that renders an application that high-resolution and then resizes it to fit on to your native display textured details become more pronounced and it eliminates jaggies without the need of using anti-aliasing. Free sync in combination with vsync works well the vsync caps the frame rate to refer to the refresh rate of your monitor and then the free sync kicks in when the FPS drops below that.
Under load the laptop pulled 254 watts and that's certainly more than the equivalent GTX1060 model and hence the need for this beefy 330 watt power brick. Looking at the average power consumption we see that the CPU and GPU both pull around about 68 watts under load and at no time was there any throttling the GPU boosting up to 1,077 megahertz clock and the CPU maintaining its 3194 to 3742 megahertz clock. In my tests it's generally stuck at the lower clock rate.
The gaming temperatures were also very good both the CPU and GPU being around about 80 degrees and that was with the auto fan. Turning on the max fan would generally bring this down to the low 60s. Now this translates into quite decent chassis temperatures to the center of the keyboard at 32 degrees Celsius the AWSD keys about 27 the number pad 28 trackpad 27 and underneath about 34 degrees although just over where the CPU is it gets to about 40 degrees Celsius.
It does have stereo speakers which actually take up quite a bit of space within the chassis but they aren't particularly great at about 70 decibels which is less than many 15-inch laptops and there is no subwoofer. Personally I suggest that you use headphones as the low fan is quite loud about 54 decibels making it hard to actually hear the gameplay. webcam is 720p and average.
To test the multitasking power of this laptop I use handbrake to encode a video I used Adobe's Lightroom to create a video slideshow I use bandicam to record some gameplay whilst also running cinebench and playing rainbow six siege at max settings all at the same time and I'm still getting around about 45 FPS with no lag. The CPU did get to admit 4 degrees but the GPU was only at 79 I think this is excellent brilliant performance!
and indeed when we look at playing the same game by itself we average the same 45 FPS so we actually take no hit doing all these other tasks in the background! in comparison the GTX 1060 gets 47 FPS so as expected this laptops that is this laptops gaming competitor but I know no other laptop in this $1,500 price range that can multitask like this! In my hand brake test where I encode a 4 gigabyte file to mp4 the asus handily beats Intel's quad-core offering even when there's overclocked to 4.5 gigahertz like on omen X it annihilates it even the desktop i7 7700K at 4.7 gig it's got beat by 20% only the twice expensive i7 8700 K equipped sager I was able to give it a match narrowly beating it by by a minute at stock settings and three minutes when overclocked.
With the autofan the CPU reached 92 degrees but the max fan brought it down to 64 degrees Celsius now if only Asus allowed the CPU to be overclocked and unfortunately AMD overdrive was not compatible but still this is a mighty fine performance! Better was to come by using Adobe's Lightroom converting those 50 photos to a video slideshow I would record a record-breaking 8 minutes 10 seconds the extra cores on this laptop must really help!
Now interestingly using the GPU to do the work resulted in a similar time the CPU is I had a good temperature at 83 degrees now Cinebench is a synthetic benchmark and it shows that it matches the six core i7 8700 K at stock locks and an Intel actually will be launching mobile six core CPUs very shortly and the A7 8720 HQ will have a base clock of 2.4 and boost up to 3.6 gigahertz but it is clear that it won't be a match for this AMD CPU. An important test for me though is video rendering I use magic software to do more of my videos and I did see an improvement when we from a quad-core to a six core CPU but unfortunately I didn't see any benefit with a Ryzen CPU.
It was about fifty percent slower where which was strange as all the calls were being used and indeed the overall CPU overhead was that it was actually less. It did remain pretty cooler 56 degrees Celsius with the max fan turned on. Now because your mileage may vary perhaps you could get a better showing.
Now on to some gaming first up is VR I tried the vive and it worked great I then did steam VR via mixed reality and that worked ok - you know head motion was fine but the controller tracking was a little bit you know a little bit iffy so to be honest I would recommend sticking with either the rift or the vive in player unknowns battleground at all the settings we pretty much match the gtx 1060 at 55 FPS gameplay was smooth and it fits in nicely with the display 60 hertz refresh rate in battlefield 1the DX12 ultra settings we get 64 FPS again being similar to the gtx 1060 laptop with the fast CPU like the a aorus x3v7
I played doom using both OpenGL and vulcan and are surprised that using Vulcan the GTX 1060 in the Aorus it's got double the frame rate still switching to OpenGL it only took a forty 14 percent hit but at ultra settings you know 74 FPS is just fine. Finally in rise of the Tomb Raider dx12 it again matched the gtx 1060 in the arrow 15. 68 FPS is a perfect match for this display so to conclude I would have to say this laptop is great value sure the battery life sucks and the speaker's suck but it's multitasking performance is second to none! It runs cool which is amazing considering it's got desktop components inside and it's gaming performance combined with free sync is very good.
Now should you get this over another 17 inch gtx 1060 laptop you know I would say yes! If you can live with its shortcomings I would definitely do that well you only wishes are that I would if I could overclock the CPU and overclock the GPU I did try using sapphire tricks for the GPU and the Mac stock I could get was eleven hundred megahertz but when I you know it would be set itself to default when I open something else up.
Anyways thank you for reading and remember to smash that upvote button if you found this interestingor helpful!