So you want a thin and light gaming laptop with muscles but don’t want to carry a huge 17 inch monster that weighs 10 pounds around? and your thin GTX 1060 doesn't quite cut it? Well NVIDIA has the max-Q GPUs with lower power consumption to allow a thinner and quieter laptop. is this just fiction or fact? Let’s find out!
Here we have the Asus GX501 Zephyrus it combines the diminutive stature of the likes of HP spectre 360 or yoga 720 being about only 17 millimeters thin but packs the power of an MSI gt73VR. Even against the standard 15-inch gtx 1070 laptops like the MSI 62vr it looks positively tiny. It has the max-Q version of the GTX 1080 a TDP of 110 watts that's slightly below that of the 1070. To help keep temperatures in check it uses it uses a non overclockable CPU you can either have a $2,700 8 thread i7 7700 HQ CPU as in my unit here or an i-5 7300 HQ 4 thread CPU which will be in future models it has 16 gigabytes of ddr4 2400Mhz Samsung ram expandable to 24 gigabytes and a 512 gigabyte pci express SSD which is also made by Samsung. It is very fast and speedy the boot time of nine seconds write speed of 1.6 gigabytes a second and read of 3.2. This is actually one of the fastest I have actually seen and unfortunately there is only one SSD slot.
It has a 120 hz IPS g-sync 1080p panel which is not glossy and it's not optimus the panel ID is auo42ED according to the spec sheet. A 60 hz panel may also be available.
Color accuracy is similar to competing models with 96% of srgb 73% of Adobe RGB and 67% of NTSC it's actually quite bright at 270 lux which is the same as the QHD Alienware 17r4 and impressively it maintains a good brightness level all the way down to 50% which is still higher than the GT73VR. I’d compare it to the HP Spectre 360 which had a bright 4k display.
Viewing angles I find are very good and even outdoors there are minimal reflections and that high brightness will help if you are playing near windows or under bright fluorescent lighting. The big downside is if you want to conserve battery life by lowering the brightness because it actually doesn't actually change it all that much and with only a 50 watt hour battery and Gsync don't expect the users laptop as your business daily driver. At 25 percent screen brightness, power saver, and battery saver on I stream YouTube for about 2 hours 22 minutes. Applying an undervolt of about 120Mv to the CPU did increase that by 10 minutes. I think this is quite respectable for a gaming laptop with this amount of very powerful hardware in there and it's actually comparable to some 17 inch monsters but compared to say the a aorusX3v7 that had 7 hours of runtime and also games perfectly well at 1080p yeah it doesn't quite come close.
By itself it does weigh 4.1 pounds and this is the same as a less powerful Aero 15 this is pretty a good achievement with a power brick only weighs 6.1 pounds and even if you carry a portable battery pack at 8.4 pounds it weighs less than the sagers NP1973 with it's huge 230 watts power brick.
The power brick for the zephyrus is only 230 watts the same as used by the GTX 1070 notebooks it's a great looking machine not only because it is thin where the pushed aluminum lid and aluminum chassis it doesn't actually really scream gamer it even with the rog logo subtly embossed on the lid. This is until the unit is powered on. There are two very bright red LED lights shining greatly from underneath the rear edge and believe me they can be seen from a long way off. This hinge their mechanism however is quite ingenious and it is about time we saw some changes in cooling design.
When you open the lid it raises the back up by about six millimeters and opens up an air vent through which air is drawn into. A small amount of air is also drawn into the upper chassis where the keyboard normally is and through a series of small perforated holes. Hot air is actually expelled by two heat sinks in the the back above the beautifully designed Asus backplate but it's also expelled at the side.
There are some downsides to the rear hinge mechanism design. Often I would get my mouse cable stuck in the gap there which would hinder airflow and second it doesn't allow you to attach an external monitor and play with the laptop lid closed. As soon as you close the lid the framerate drops into the 20s as the clock rate of the GPU is slashed. So if you plan on no doing this make sure the laptop lid is open.
So how does the cooling perform? doing CPU intensive tasks such as video encoding, rendering, or photo work it is actually pretty good! 71 degrees Celsius cooler even than the same size aero 15 yet the more powerful GPU. In fact it was the same temperature as the AC predator 17 X which is a large 17 inch laptop with the same CPU. Using the i7 7700 HQ was probably a wise choice to keep temperatures in check. As soon as you use the overclockable i7 7820 HK temperatures are much harder to control.
How about gaming? Well again the CPU is fairly cool at 84 degrees under voting by 120 millivolts pulled that down by 6 degrees it was still cooler than the arrow 15 and same temperature as the Acer predator 17 X. The CPU didn't throttle averaging 3465Mhz. The GTX 1080 was also very cool at 73 degrees not quite as cool as their similarly powered gtx 1070 in a 17 inch laptop but amazingly cooler than the GTX 1060 in the equally a slim Aero 15.
I think this is quite an achievement!
In terms of clock speeds the GTX 1080 peaks at 1709 megahertz but applying a overclock it had an average peak speed of 1902 megahertz which to be fair isn't bad! Even playing at a warmer environment such as 80 degrees it handled it very well! The CPU reached 86 degrees and the GPU reached 81 degrees again with no throttling. To stress it further I ran prime95 and the heaven benchmark simultaneously the power pull from the wall was 188 watts.
The CPU reached 92 degrees and the GTX 1080 reached 79 degrees again with no reported throttling. To say I was surprised at its current performance is an understatement. I expect other similar designs to follow suit by other manufacturers. The max-Q design also promises quiet fans and indeed it does there's no fan control so it is all automatic at low it peaked at 37 decibels which is comparable to say the yoga 720 or even the normal fan on the Aero 15 but the normal fan on the air 15 doesn't even keep it cool you have to use at least a gaming fan profile there and that is much, much louder. The quietest a 17-inch GT X 1080 laptop I used was the acer predator 17 X and that produced similar noise levels and temperatures. So I think that performers quite is quite amazing. At idle the Zephyrus is whisper quiet too. One would expect that with these low temperatures and high performance the perhaps the chassis temperature must be getting hot.
Well yes and no.
The keyboard is cool the WASD keys at 29 degrees and the typewriter 30 degrees the logo above the heat pipes was actually hotter at 44 degrees but underneath was a toasty 48 degrees. Due to the keyboard positions I doubt you would actually be playing this on your lap anyway. The keyboard is pushed forward to make room for the extra cooling this actually makes typing on your lap pretty awkward. Not too bad for a two-finger prodder like myself but if you type touch type it will be difficult as it does tend to tip of your legs. On a desk it is fine and asus even provides a rubbery support! They also include a USB to Ethernet port dongle and a screw driver in case say you need to open it up to open it up.
First you need to remove the black add a plastic back cover by removing four screws and gently pull it away. You then remove several t5 screws, with the lid open press down on the hinge area and lift off the keyboard to reveal its innards.
You will see there are five heat pipes and three heat sinks the ones that are rear actually are quite deep. To replace the Wi-Fi card you will need to lift up the cooling systems. I think that is a strange design choice. There is one stick of RAM available to upgrade with a second on the other side of the motherboard. Looking at the battery it actually does take up quite a bit of space so I'm not really sure how they could improve it further. On left-hand side we have an air vent, a DC in, HDMI 2.0, 2 USB ports and a combo headphone microphone jack. On the right hand side we -have a new USB-C Thunderbolt 3 port, 2 more USB 3 ports, and a Kensington lock. Now I really like that it has four USB ports many ultra portables only have two at most and even the Alienware 17R4 only has two. The other thing I would have liked to have seen is an SD card reader.
There's a 720p webcam, the Zephyrus has two small speakers located at the different edge. Now they are not super loud and in fact to be honest are probably one of the lower ones I've actually tried. But still at least they're front firing and since the fans are quiet you can still hear any action that is there going on or you know, you can use headphones as Asus includes its sonic studio 2 software. So you can choose profiles such as gaming, music, or movies you can customize the equalizer by various presets either by game genre or game type or music genre you can turn surround sound on, off, auto reverb, bass and voice clarity. Now looking at the keyboard the action keys on the left are highlighted and I have always been a fan of the oversized spacebar. There is a fair amount of keyboard flex and there's also not much distance of a key travel and to be honest with you they feel rather mushy.
The trackpad is over to the right-hand side which of course is a little bit awkward if you're a left-hander. It did take me a little bit while to get used to it but to be honest I did get used to it and I didn't mind it in the end. I have used an MSI laptop like this in the past though.
I think most of their users will probably use an external mouse anyway. Scrolling and pinch-to-zoom worked well as it uses windows precision drivers. Now the trackpad also doubles as a number pad unfortunatly there's no tactile feedback. but it works ok. There is a separate key to bring up the ROG gaming center software. This software allows you to look at their system information including a CPU clock speeds on each core and the temperature of each core. Lets you look at the memory speed and GPU clock speed and temperature you can also see how much SSD space you are using and how much RAM you are using. You can also create different game profiles each with a different lighting configuration. The RGB keyboard lighting can be changed using the aura app pressing f3 and f7 allows you to adjust three different brightness settings you can create three customize their light settings and have a number of presets to choose from such as breathing, static, or color cycle. You can change the tempo to slow, medium, or fast and within the zone mode you can apply lights to either all of the keyboard, WASD keys or the key q w e R keys. Taking on their other zone brings up their color wheel which allows you to pick whatever color you like.
Right, now in gaming the 1080 Max-Q does lag behind a traditional 1080. It can even lag behind a 1070 in games like Battlefield 1 at 100 FPS VS 130 for the 1080 and 120 for the 1070. In most games it’s around 5%-10% of a GTX 1070 more or less. These laptops might be 1 lb more but $700 less. The 1070 laptop is where you’re value is going to lie, especially overclocked with an overclocked CPU. Both are in similar spitting distance of the 1080. This won’t let you down gaming though.
Whisper mode caps FPS around 30-40 while bringing noise down to 29 db if you’re playing in a library, in bed, or just need to hide what you are doing.
There is an awful lot to like about this laptop if you’re a gamer. Finally full desktop gaming power in something the size of a macbook! Build quality, low fan noise, fluid screen. What’s not to like? The price $2799. There’s thin and light gaming laptops with the GTX 1060 that at 1080p will provide 60 fps+ gameplay while getting much, much better battery life at $1000 less. If you’ve read any of my reviews before you’re going to know I’m going to suggest you get one of those and build a PC at home with a desktop GTX 1080/1070 with the money you’ve saved, or even get one or those and an EGPU. The Aorus gaming box for example comes with a 1070 for $569.99 if the 1060 isn’t enough for you. 2 hours of battery life wouldn’t cut it for my lifestyle but maybe it’s fine for yours. The keyboard position makes it hard to use on your lap. The speakers are anemic but I’m definitely hyped by what future Max-Q designs are capable of as well as future revisions of the Asus GX 501 Zephyrus!
(Images from Asus site...I only have a camera phone and no good lighting, see my other articles)
