Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX502 assessment: at the moment’s high silicon in a compact package deal

Asus is again on the skinny and light-weight game with the ROG Zephyrus GX502, in any other case often called the ROG Zephyrus S. This premium, top-spec skinny and light-weight is fitted with the newest Intel ninth Gen Core i7 and Nvidia RTX graphics, and absolutely able to transportable 144Hz gaming or a little bit mild ray tracing motion.

Having expanded a little bit for the reason that preliminary high-end Zephyrus, the GX501, took to the cabinets, the GX502 is a two entire millimetres thicker than the previous mannequin at 18.9mm. How will we cope? As a commerce off, the GX502 weighs 0.2kg lower than its predecessor, which is able to total have extra affect on total consumer consolation than a slight improve in depth.

The GX502 is constructed for gaming and content material creation; we count on nothing much less from a £2,500 laptop computer in 2019. Packing a 144Hz, 3ms, 100% sRGB Pantone-validated G-Sync IPS display screen, the Zephyrus simply tops the accuracy and color depth of many gaming laptops in the marketplace at the moment. It’s not fairly skilled depth by a few of at the moment’s extra stringent color areas, nevertheless it’s fairly darn correct by gaming requirements.

The 144Hz mannequin isn’t obtainable to buy within the UK, nonetheless. Instead you’ll need to go for the overkill 240Hz panel.

Asus has finished away with the copper highlights of the primary era mannequin, changing it with a matte black plastic end. This development, aided by the beehive-like construction on the inside, feels sturdy and flexes comparatively little even when making use of some weight. There’s additionally area to relaxation your wrists these days because the keyboard has been shifted again to its standard place.

The signature lever-action cooling resolution can be making a triumphant return on the GX502. It’s now a little bit sturdier, rather less precarious, and, most significantly, kitted out with two RGB LEDs.

But there’s one factor lacking from the GX502’s body: a webcam. Anyone prone to make heavy-duty use of a webcam is certain to have a discrete unit, however if you’re one of many few informal or enterprise customers that, on the off likelihood, would possibly beam your mug out to the world, you could be a little bit miffed on the lack of an built-in unit. There’s additionally no SD card reader, which once more could be a little bit of a bugbear for enterprise customers or content material creators.

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Moving on from the outside, on system startup there’s a reasonably loud slashing sound programmed into the ROG splash display screen. You can flip off this super-nifty function from the BIOS beneath “animation post logo audio.” And I extremely advocate you do.

Performance varies from parity with bigger RTX 2070 fashions to some 10% slower in some titles on common. The GX502 did disappoint a tad throughout artificial benchmarks, equivalent to 3DMark Time Spy and ray tracing-rehearsal Port Royal. Our finest guess would attribute this to thermal constraints inside the Zephyrus’ diminutive chassis. We skilled an identical artificial rating drop-off on the 17.8mm Razer Blade 15, too.

The Zephyrus wouldn’t keep down for lengthy, nonetheless, clawing out of the trough and again into high-performance territory throughout gaming workloads.

In the set run of the Metro Exodus benchmark, each RTX on and off, the Zephyrus shined brightest. That efficiency dropped considerably in Far Cry New Dawn in comparison with its thicker competitors, dropping out, understandably, to the Strix Scar II, Alienware m17 with RTX 2080 Max-Q, and the immense Aorus 15 X9 geared up with RTX 2070 Max-Q.

Provisions for warmth could make for dramatic disparity in efficiency throughout even equivalent graphics silicon. The RTX 2070 ought to outperform its Max-Q sibling, nonetheless, with Nvidia GPU Boost 4.Zero on Turing, the power-limited cell variant could take the lead with the proper cooling resolution in hand. As made evident between the Zephyrus and Max-Q Aero in Far Cry New Dawn.

We additionally ran our benchmarks on the default balanced preset. In addition right here’s the choice for silent, turbo, and handbook from with the ROG Armoury Crate software program, accessible by way of one click on of the devoted ROG emblazoned key. Turbo mode additionally permits ROG Boost clocks, taking the height clock pace we skilled from 1,575MHz on balanced to 1,635MHz. Noise cancelling headphones really useful.

The GX502 fares much better in CPU benchmarking, particularly artificial benchmarks equivalent to Cinebench R15. Intel is a bit miffed with the intensive use of this benchmark proper now, however on this case it adequately demonstrates the ninth Gen Intel Core i7 9750H confidently topping its eighth Gen predecessor, the Core i7 8750H. And it even comes awfully near the i9 8950Ok in single-threaded efficiency regardless of the Zephyrus’ dainty body.

Asus has seen match to do extra with the Zephyrus than a easy swap to the newest Intel and Nvidia silicon, the 2019 redesign has additionally supplied the corporate an opportunity to tweak the skinny and light-weight method for the higher. The laptop computer feels sturdy, fully-featured, and its materials development is worthy of its premium price ticket. But you may be paying so much for this laptop computer, roughly £2,499. As such, there’s little to no wiggle room for something lower than obsessively thought out.

But not like most high-end gaming gear, the Zephyrus GX502 just isn’t over-provisioned. It can’t afford to be when each gram and each millimetre is a aggressive benefit ripe for rigorous advertising on all sides. You are paying to shave off that little 0.2 of a gram right here, 0.1 of a millimetre there, whereas nonetheless retaining a absolutely specced GPU.

The resolution for full-fat graphics makes for sturdy 1080p gaming, even when that top refresh fee panel could also be beneath utilised for something bar the least graphically demanding esports titles. It’s additionally a fairly thirsty design, however none extra so than opponents’ comparable package.