Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave - Dee and this is my review of the Asus GL 7 5 - so this is their mid tier mid-priced 17 edge gaming laptop it's from their rog line so they're Republic of gamers line and its new for 2015 it's not replacing a 2014 model or anything it's got skylake it's got a bunch of cool features let's take a look it comes in a big red box with a handle and inside you get the laptop itself some pamphlets some accessories like a cable tie and a cleaning cloth and the AC adapter the top surface of the laptop is aluminum it actually comes on a plastic version but this one is aluminum and it feels pretty nice and it doesn't show fingerprints readily there's a pretty large Asus logo up front as well as an ROG logo and this lights up from the backlighting of the screen so the brightness of the screen affects the brightness of the logo the bottom of the laptop is plastic and this obviously feels way less premium but it's very rigid and it's durable there's also a subwoofer up top we'll get into that later and there's four rubber feet here which are for grip there's a hatch here that you can open up when you remove a couple screws and then when you do you have access to two memory slots and the hard drive which you can easily upgrade there's also an area for a second drive and this would be for the m2 PCIe stick so you can put in some really fast drives in here so if you're doing video editing or if you're recording some gameplay footage having a second drive here is nice but if you don't need a secondary drive you can always put in a caramilk bar no I'm kidding it should be a crispy crunch okay so the screen has some flex it's not any more than I'd expect and actually first screen this wide I kind of expected it to be more flexible so it's not bad and the chassis is solid the whole keyboard area doesn't have much flex and the hinge also feels well-made it's covered with a piece of plastic but it feels strong going around the sides on the left side you get the power connection a huge exhaust vent mini DisplayPort HDMI port an Ethernet jack and use b3 and lastly a USB 3.1 type C on the right side we have a headphone jack a microphone jack a pair of USB 2 ports and a DVD drive okay so the configuration I'm reviewing has a skylake quad i7 running a 2.6 gigahertz a 17.3 inch 1080p screen a gtx 960m with two gigs of video ram 16 gigs of DDR 4 RAM and a one terabyte hard drive and all of this is going for around $1,000 u.s. it's a pretty large laptop it actually doesn't fit any of the bags that I have you really need like a dedicated 17 inch laptop bag or laptop sleeve to hold this thing opening it up the palm rest is a really smooth plastic material and it shows fingerprints and smudges a little more than I'd like the keyboard is okay I mean I've used several keyboards with this kind of layout like the ux 501 the g 501 and the msi p 60 so i've gotten used to this kind of split but if you're new to this kind of layout it's a little disorienting first that whole number pad thing shifts everything over to the left so if you've never used one before it takes a little bit of time to get used to it and the arrow keys can feel a little weird because it's surrounded so tightly by other keys but typing on it isn't bad it's got one point eight millimeters of travel which feels good and the three-stage backlighting is bright but it's red so if red isn't your thing you won't love it the trackpad is okay it actually feels a lot like the trackpad on the UX and the g50 one and it can skip around once in a while when you're tracking but the texture is nice and the buttons are responsive it's not the best trackpad but it is a gaming laptop so you'll often have a mouse connected to it anyways the screen is a 17.3 inch IPS non touch panel with a resolution of 1920 by 1080 the viewing angles are okay it's not a particularly bright panel but the color range is really good thankfully it's a matte screen so you don't have to deal with too many crazy reflections it's a solid screen for the price of the laptop but if you need really good color accuracy for photo or video editing I would highly recommend calibrating it but if you just plan on using this laptop for games you're good to go right out of the box the webcam up top is a 720p camera the image quality isn't particularly good and the colors feel a little washed out but it works with me one the drive that this model comes with is a 7200 rpm one terabyte hard drive I was actually pleased with the performance so if you edit videos you don't want to use this drive you want to grab an external or use the MT socket but 1080p edits are smooth and 4k edits are pretty good you just need a 4k monitor to see the extra pixels but the drive that it comes with is not bad for just like regular use for gaming and there's regular stuff so speaking of which games run well on the 960m games like counter-strike go you're just going to rip through them you're rarely going to see a drop below 100 frames per second with everything maxed out on 1080p slightly more demanding games like hot so if I put this on extreme graphics so everything's turned up here laning will still be like 70 80 frames per second but a full teamfight can drop this to under 40 frames per second so if you're competitive and you play this stuff for serious business play on high graphics because even really messy teamfights will still get around 55 maybe 60 frames per second on teamfights remember these numbers are for team fight numbers if you're solo laning it can be easily double these numbers but I don't care about those numbers I'm talking about where it matters for team fights so fallout 4 plays nicely on this laptop you can get around 50 60 frames per second on medium graphics but bumping it up too high drops us to 3540 frames per second so the sweet spot is definitely on medium setting for Fallout 4 rust is even more demanding it's actually one of the most demanding games that I play and you have to drop your graphics setting too simple to get around 50 60 frames per second it's doable and the game still looks alright but you lose a lot of the detail the speakers are up on the keyboard area and they sound really good the sound is clear it's directed right at you and it can get pretty loud obviously it's not as good as an external speaker but they're nice and I'm not going to lie I thought the whole subwoofer thing on the bottom was a little gimmicky but it's actually really cool like you can definitely hear and feel lower frequencies at least much more than the average note the fan noise of the system is reasonably quiet it's about 25 26 decibels at idle like most of that noise is coming from the mechanical Drive and it's around 35 decibels under load thermals are also respectable it doesn't go much above 100 degrees when it's under load it's a 120 watt charger and charging at the battery takes less than two hours now battery life is really poor so this laptop has powerful components in there with the gtx 960 and there's a big screen to light up but it only has a 48 watt hour battery which is really small for a 17 inch laptop so battery life on normal use was around 2 and a half hours and this is just like regular use using the web doing a little bit of work and playing games was under an hour now most of the problem here lies in the fact that there's a DVD drive it's cool to have an optical drive but it really eats a precious real estate inside that laptops oasis was kind of forced to put in a smaller battery and this is what you get ok let's do a recap asus GL 7 v 2 decent build quality with a mix of aluminum and plastic the 1080p screen isn't that bright and it needs calibration if you want to do any kind of color accurate work but it's nice and big for games the keyboard is comfortable to type on once you get used to the whole shifted layout and the trackpad is OK it wouldn't be bad if it didn't skip around but it skips around and on the inside we have a speedy skylake i7 and a gtx 960m that handles most games really well and video editing a DVD drive that takes up a lot of space 16 gigs of ram that you can upgrade to 32 gigs an upgradable one terabyte SATA hard drive an m2 slot that you can put a drive into and lastly a really small 48 watt hour battery that'll last you about 2 to 3 hours of normal use okay so the GL 7 v 2 was obviously meant for gaming and it does a pretty good job he's running a 960 M so you're not getting crazy graphics but it's pretty solid I don't love the inclusion of that DVD drive though it's something that I would have left out if I was designing these things it's 2015 I feel like a lot of people won't be using this drive and it's using up space inside the laptop that could otherwise be used for batteries the other thing I don't like is how thick it is it's not like the thickest laptop in the world but it's pretty thick but I can forgive this all because of its price its price it a little bit over $1000 and that gets you into a pretty solid system that has incredible upgrade potential it's got to drive spaces that you can upgrade it's got fully upgradable RAM it's pretty solid so if you're looking for a 17-inch gaming laptop this is a really good option I'd take a look at it that's the end of this review hope you guys liked it thumbs if you liked it subs if you loved it it's been nice I'll see you guys next time