Gadgetory

just a few short months ago a Seuss announced their first ROG Strix gaming laptop the light and compact GL 502 as you might expect from a strict branded laptop the GL 502 means business but surprisingly isn't over the top and certainly is an overpriced Asus gone with a high quality yet compact 15.6 inch display in spite of the modest footprint this thing also packs a real punch with the core i7 6700 HQ at its heart along with a very capable geforce gtx 970m while there's also a 980 m model as well so Core i7 processor GeForce graphics card this Sol sounds really expensive in a gaming laptop but surprisingly it really isn't over in the u.s. potential buyers are faced with an asking price of $1,250 down from 1,500 just weeks ago well that's Ozzie's can snag one for as little as 2,100 so what's the capture here you ask well let's find out the ROG streaks GL 502 certainly looks and feels like a quality laptop so no corners have been cut here right away the brushed aluminium black top cover grabs your attention as to those nuclear looking neon orange highlights I can't say this would be my first design choice but I have to hand it to a soos it's anything but boring towards the back of the top cover you'll find a nice-looking fluorescent Republic of gamers emblem in the center as much as I do like this lead design it does come with one drawback it's a fingerprint magnet go anywhere near this thing with oily hands and you'll instantly leave your mark so neat freaks would want to keep microfiber cloth handy at all times underneath the laptop we find a durable plastic backing which has been given a rough yet nice feeling texture again the fluorescent orange highlights are on display here in the form of four very funky looking rubberized feet lifting the dual hinge lid reveals this mobile gaming station and all of its black and orange glory the 15.6 inch display features a fairly large plastic bezel featuring a 1280 by 720 HD webcam in the top middle the bezel also features a number of rubberized buffers that help avoid marking the screen when the laptop is folded up moving to the keyboard area we find more plastic this time given the same brush texture as the aluminium lid of course the room more orange highlights here which include another ROG logo as well as some aggressive looking speaker grills the full sighs chiclet style keyboard also features fluorescent orange text which is red backlit for a seriously cool effect there are three brightness levels and of course the backlighting can be disabled entirely to save battery life the WASD Keys are orange with black lettering and weld after screams gaming laptop doesn't it that said what doesn't scream gaming laptop is the complete lack of dedicated macro keys hardcore gamers might frown at the chiclet keyboard we'll have to admit it feels quite good for a laptop keyboard the keys feature a travel distance of 1 point 6 millimeters which is slightly better than your typical chiclet keyboard while they require 55 grams of pressure to actuate the keys feel firm with no wobble and provide satisfying feedback when pressed the keyboard does feature a numpad and the power button has been integrated into the top right hand corner which I guess is kind of neat the touchpad which for the most part is going to be disabled on a gaming laptop is surprisingly large at 105 by 75 millimeters it's nice and smooth while offering responsive jitter free cursor movement the click pad has been integrated into the touchpad itself and while it does produce nice loud clicks you can't for example click the left button hold it down and then click the right button it's very much a one button at a time deal overall it's a nice looking layout and despite being a small gaming laptop the GL 502 doesn't seem to give that impression in total it measures 388 millimeters long 266 millimeters deep and just 22.8 millimeters thick these modest dimensions mean that it weighs in at just 2.1 kilograms or 4.8 pounds getting inside the laptop to make upgrades is relatively easy the entire bottom panel can be removed once no less than 10 Phillips head screws have been removed the CPU and GPU are both soldered directly into the main PCB so there's no chance of upgrading either of these components in the future I should also note that there's only a single s Odom slot available for expansion this means the pre-installed a gigabyte module which is on the opposite side of the PCB and not easily accessed without dismantling pretty much the entire laptop is there to stay still this means by adding a relatively inexpensive a gigabyte ddr4 module you can double the laptops memory capacity perhaps just as important is the fact that you'll also be enabling dual channel memory which will significantly increase the available memory bandwidth upgrades can also be made to the storage the GL 502 can be purchased with pre-configured second one terabyte 7200 rpm hard drive though this particular model I have doesn't feature any kind of two and a half inch storage at all the primary storage device is however an m2 SSD and while the base configuration for this laptop is a 128 gigabyte model the version I have features a 256 gigabyte drive the particular driving questions the super snappy Samsung S m95 1mv mas s team when it comes to connectivity I would say the GL 502 is reasonably well equipped naturally there's no connectivity at the front or rear a soos is stuck everything towards the back of the left and right sides which helps neaten things up starting with the left side we find a DC power input gigabit ethernet port with clip cover mini DisplayPort HDMI USB 3.0 port and a single USB 3.1 type-c gen 2 port which sadly doesn't support Thunderbolt 3 meanwhile the right side features a Kensington lock SD card reader 2 more USB 3 ports and a three-and-a-half millimeter combo audio jack the USB ports are spread far enough apart that you can access them both simultaneously using wide thumb drives and dongles the 15.6 inch display for me is the highlight of the GL 502 the model I have does feature a 4k display which I feel is overkill for the gtx 970m GPU but it does look amazing for those wondering you can purchase the laptop with a 1080p screen and this is what I recommend you get something else that I can really appreciate is the matte finish no highly reflective gloss screen here the only possible drawback I see is the lack of juicing support is this would have been the perfect pairing with that GeForce GPU the display features in-plane switching technology inverse the brightness of 300 nits in a contrast ratio of 900 to 100 which are very respectable for a laptop screen throwing up a solid black image full screen with the brightness set to max I couldn't detect any backlight bleeding around the edges naturally there were no dead pixels though if you are unlucky here asus does offer a zero dead pixel policy as you'd expect from a quality IPS panel the colors are rich and the blacks were very black overall I'm very happy with the quality of the display complementing the impressive visuals are a pair of small upward facing speakers that hide behind these orange grilles that I spoke of earlier the speakers are certainly loud enough and the quality is decent though they do lack bass almost entirely which does detract from the experience somewhat that said most gamers are nerd yeah I'll be rocking your headset so given the price point this certainly isn't a deal breaker before we jump into the benchmarks let's just go over the full spec list as well as the alternate options as mentioned previously in my model which is the GL 502 VT fi0 470 comes loaded with a core i7 6700 HQ geforce gtx 970m with 3gb of VRAM eight gigabytes of ddr4 2133 memory a 256 gigabyte nvme SSD and a 15.6 inch 4k IPS display the two and a half inch storage options include a one terabyte 7200 rpm or 5400 rpm drive we're alternatively a 2 terabyte 5400 rpm drive none of which are in the model I have there are also options for 128 gig or 512 GB SSD and some models come with 16 gigabytes of memory as standard there is also the option to purchase the GL 502 with a core i5 6200 HQ though I haven't seen that model on sale yet at least not down under those wanting more GPU horsepower should seek out the 980 m model though we recommend avoiding the Ultra HD 4k version all models receive wireless networking support via an Intel dual band wireless AC m2 module capable of theoretical transfer rates of up to 867 megabits per second the module integrates bluetooth 4.2 and wider as standard we experience no connectivity or dropout issues during our testing the same internal force cell 15 point 2 volt 4240 milliamp hour lithium-ion battery pack is featured inside all models the battery can be replaced but you have to remove the back cover much like what you do for a memory upgrade should you purchase a new battery I should point out they aren't exactly cheap starting at around 130 ozzie now let's get to the good stuff how does this thing perform in our tests I've run a few benchmarks in some of the latest games to give you a good idea of how it stacks up unfortunately I don't have a lot of gaming laptops to compare it to but you can get a good idea about how performs relative to our desktop GPU results all tests would run of course at 1080p with the maximum in-game quality settings first up we've got call of duty black ops 3 and here the GL 502 performed as expected right on par with the gigabyte P 57 W that featured the same GPU this man has slightly edged out the desktop GTX 960 I'm a server FPS behind the unknown 380 it was good to see the laptop get over 60 FPS on max settings next up was rise to the Tomb Raider and the results were similar for the most part we saw an average of 56 fps with a minimum of 36 and this was a little faster than the uh 9 380 this time and exactly on par with the gtx 960 moving up the food chain the r9 390 was well ahead on 78 FPS the third game tester was the rather demanding Tom Clancy's the division here the GL 502 was only good for 35 FPS with the ultra quality setting and this was again on par with the P 57 W and the gtx 960 the r9 380 jumped ahead again this time by 9 FPS on average keeping the GL 502 humming along or a pair of 60 millimeter blower fans each of which is connected to its own array of copper fins these copper heat seems to connect it to one another via a pair of flat heat pipes which pass over the CPU and GPU the GPU VM is also covered by a copper heat spreader it's an elegant solution seems to work well and the light load the fans very quiet and based on my crude measurements never generated much over 30 decibels under load when gaming the fans do creep up quite a bit as you might expect and in the process generate around 40 decibels volume wise GL 502 is fairly typical for a gaming laptop I did appreciate how the fans only spin up gradually so you don't get that annoying fan surging noise over and over again causing the fans to spin up R of course the CPU and GPU which generate quite a bit of heat under load given that this is a very thin gaming laptop we expect to the GL 502 to run very hot indeed when gaming our temperature gun reported a maximum surface temperature of 62 degrees for the keyboard side and 66 degrees for the bottom it's actually not bad though like most gaming laptops it'll become quite uncomfortable in the life during the summer season the 180 what power brick is big but not ridiculously big so you won't have too much trouble transporting it around in total there's a little over three meters worth of power cord as for the battery life a suits claimed six hours with the Wi-Fi constantly active in the screen brightness set to 50% we consistently got around five and a half hours out of the GL 502 which isn't bad given the hardware inside once fully depleted the battery takes a little over 2 hours to fully recharge coming away from this review I'm extremely pleased with this rog streak slappy given the timing isn't great to be checking out a laptop sporty Maxwell GPU but at 1,250 us the GL fiber 2 is difficult to pass up I should point out that the model New Ager selling doesn't come with the SSD but that said it does boast a 1 terabyte hard drive and 16 gigabytes of memory so still an amazing deal of course you can still add an m2 SSD which opens up a huge number of possibilities the cheapest gtx 1060 enabled laptops start around 1550 dollars with most price much closer to 2000 us frankly if a 1080p gaming gtx 970m is still more than capable and while i really love what the gtx 1060 has to offer mobile gamers for the money the GL 502 is just too hard to pass up the truly awesome news being that the GL 502 is destined to receive the gtx 1060 is a soos prepares to release the GL 502 vm while the GL 502 V s will spot the gtx 1070 no doubt they'll cost considerably more than the 970 m model though sadly down under we aren't saying the same discounts as us shoppers though it has to be said even at $2,100 the ACS GL 502 is competitive in our market in Northland the GTX 1060 gaming laptops seem to be coming in at around $2,500 with most priced a few hundred dollars more the only slight hiccup for an otherwise perfect product is the limited 12 month warranty which comes as standard meanwhile the larger yet similarly priced gigabyte P 57 W that I reviewed recently comes with a two-year warranty and this has become a standard for most new gigabyte laptops the asus warranty is top notch in the sense that it covers even a single dead pixel or accidental damage the only issue being the duration when compared to a key competitors such as gigabyte keeping pricing and everything else in mind the asus rog Strix GL fiber - is without question a keeper the new clear orange highlights are fun the 15.6 inch IPS panel is beautiful the performance speaks for itself what do you guys think let me know in the comments I'm your host Matt as 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