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ASUS G501 Review - Better than the UX501 for Gamers?

2015-08-19
hey how's it going guys this is Dave 2d so a few months ago I did a video on the asus ux305 0-1 and at the time never bothered making a separate video for it just because a lot of the technical specs and even the design aesthetics are very similar between the two but recently ACS put a really important patch for the g50 one and I thought I should make its own video now this is a really brief video I'm just going to highlight some of the more important differences between the 2 as well as just give you my overall thoughts on the g50 one all right let's do it I'm going to start with a quick unboxing here because well the box itself is different between the two so everything inside is basically the same but the one extradition in the g50 one is that ACS gives you a free ROG Mouse now the most obvious difference is the finish the aluminum is anodized black and on the top there's a distinct Republic of gamers logo so this is the asus rog line it also has a brush to linear finish instead of the radial finish on the UX 5:01 something i noticed pretty early on though is that things like fingerprints smudges and dust like we just show up very readily on this block finish like very readily a lot of people don't care about stuff like this but if you're someone who likes to keep their devices clean and fingerprint free let me tell you it is not easy on this device you can't just wipe it with a microfiber you need to get some water going around the sides the ports on the g50 one are the same and they're also in the same locations as the UX so there's three USB s some display outputs and an SD card slot if you notice there's like a red accent that's visible from the side which runs around the whole perimeter of the notebook so this is actually the rubber trim from the screen it's a simple change to switch it from a black rubber to a red rubber but because of the location that trim it really changes the look of book it's actually pretty smart I kind of wish they'd done it in blue and like before that SD card slot is still really shallow and barely holds half the card but it works mechanically the keyboard is the same there's a number pad on the right here which kind of shifts everything over to the left and once again there are arrow keys that are surrounded by keys that you don't want to press but aside from these two annoyances once you get used to the shift and positioning it's actually a very nice keyboard to type one there are a couple things that are different here though first the sides of the WASD Keys they have a red finish on them it kind of gives up the whole gamer look and the keyboard backlighting uses red LEDs instead of your more standard white ones the trackpad is the same it's a pretty decent trackpad for Windows machines but I don't love it I mean there's tons of other devices with crappier trackpads but this one's not amazing a quick look at that bonus most that ACS gives you it feels pretty comfortable it's got some soft rubber on the scroll wheel and in the thumb rust so I use it to play some games it's a little lighter than I'm used to and lighter than I like but it tracks well and it's a freebie so I can't complain ok so the screen if you'll remember the ux 5:01 had an extremely glossy screen it was a decent screen otherwise but that glossy finish was really difficult to work with in bright light now the g50 one has a matte screen it's 4k it's bright it's vibrant and viewing angles are pretty good but it's not a touchscreen if that matters to you personally I almost never use touch screens on notebooks and I prefer matte finishes so I really like this screen now when this notebook first launched there was a really big problem with the screen basically whenever you played games the screen would flicker and there'd be weird lines and stuff it was pretty horrible now Asus finally patched this in early August with BIOS 209 and now post patch I haven't seen a single glitch of the screen in two weeks so I'm pretty sure they fixed it color accuracy is okay it's not amazing we're getting a 96% srgb and 74% Adobe RGB off of a spider I mean it's pretty similar to the UX 5:01 but because there's no glossy finish on that screen the viewing experience is just better overall all right let's talk about performance so spec wise it's almost identical to the UX 5:01 drive speeds are also identical just super fast the only real difference is that in this model the g50 one it has four gigs of video RAM which is double what the UX 5:01 has but after running a bunch of tests and benchmarks it really feels like the extra two gigs of ram doesn't do much I mean it's almost identical and performance in everything I did video renders were the same even rendering with multiple Luntz had the same speed so that extra video RAM didn't seem to do much for video editing in Premiere Pro for gaming you'll have to watch the UX pfizer one video for full details but the extra video Ram didn't seem to affect frame rates at all so witcher 3 still ran poorly at 4k but it ran smooth on medium settings again at 1080p and less demanding games like yours of the storm ran really smooth as well I didn't notice any significant improvements going from two gigs to four gigs of RAM speakers are the same temperatures are the same fan noise is the same battery life is basically the same the screen on the g50 one is a little brighter and I imagine it would use a little more power but I still get around four to five hours of regular use or watching movies and when playing games at max brightness I was still getting around an hour of battery life so I chalk them up as a tie okay so recap g50 one it's got a black aluminum shell with red accents a matte 4k screen that isn't touch enabled but it's still pretty nice and off center keyboard with red LEDs that's comfortable to use once you get used to the position an okay trackpad 16 gigs of ram eight of which are non-removable 512 gigs of insanely fast storage 2 down firing speakers that sound but not great it's got a 2.6 gigahertz quad-core i7 and a gtx 960m it's also housing a 96 watt hour battery that gives about four to five hours of regular use all for $1,500 okay so some closing thoughts here between the UX and the g50 one I would consider them functionally identical the g5 is where one has that extra gig of video RAM which is really cool on paper but it doesn't translate to anything useful for the average user video renders are the same speed games play at the same frame rates so don't purchase the g50 one just for that extra video ram now that being said if I had to recommend one of these notebooks to people just openly it would be the g5 S or one just because of that matte screen the glossy finish on the UX 5:01 was a little bit annoying and since the patch the g5 zero one has been really rock-solid and there's been no issues with the screen so I think that's the better of the two devices that's the end of this video I hope you guys liked it if you did give me some thumbs and if you loved it give me some subs it's been nice I'll see you guys next time
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