Gadgetory

hey guys and welcome back to hardware unbox today I've got a video for you on a gaming laptop so you guys actually might consider buying this time it is the asus rog Strix GL 502 vs this is a 15.6 inch gaming laptop powered by the nvidia geforce gtx 1070 so it comes on the upper end of the performance and price scale but is certainly very well suited to 1080p gaming at above 60 frames per second before I dive into the design I will just talk briefly about the hardware in my review 'not here this is an Intel Core i7 7700 HQ processor with 16 gigabytes of ddr4 Ram there's also a 256 gig SSD pad with a one terabyte hard drive and of course there's the gtx 1070 in there ports and GPU power this is the only configuration available to you in australia if you're in the united states again there's just one configuration but the 256 gig SSD is swapped out for a 128 gig SSD instead as this is a 15.6 inch laptop it's reasonably portable as far as gtx 1070 gaming laptops are concerned it's 30 millimeters thick so that's around the same thickness as comparatives from MSI and gigabyte and even Alienware but it's actually a quite a lot lighter at just 2.2 kilograms where most other laptops of this class are pushing up to v3 kilogram mark so you definitely get a more portable experience and you'll find from some of the other options available and of course it's not a 17 inch laptop so you might be able to actually fit it into your backpack but don't forget that if you are taking around this laptop you will have to carry the 200 plus what power brick which clocks in at 650 grams so that adds to the heft of this unit a little bit but you'll find that on all gaming laptops with such powerful hardware inside a suit has used a primarily plastic construction for the GL 502 vs to keep its weight down but this leads to a look and feel that is just a little bit cheap especially compared to its competitors that use a lot more metal around the body there is some metal to be found on this laptop the lid is quite a nice brush black design but a Sousa has tried to imitate this with the plastic used around the keyboard and it doesn't quite hit the mark here at least in my opinion I quite like the use of a black base color with some vibrant orange highlights it is pushing into the gamer style territory especially when you factor in those odd patterns that are sources used here in some of the awkward angles but compared to the silver model that is available for the gel 502 vs I definitely prefer this black and orange design it's reasonably good as far as gaming laptops are concerned what I wasn't as impressed with is the keyboard which has a surprisingly shallow travel distance in a laptop that's 30 millimeters thick all of other gaming laptops tend to push the boundaries as far as travel distance is concerned and that gives you a better tactile experience while gaming but the GL 502 vs has pretty much an ultrabook keyboard I don't think that gives the best experience in gaming it also has a reasonably cramped arrow key so they've shoved in between the right modifiers and the numpad the inclusion of a numpad is quite handy on a 15.6 inch laptop but I wish they would have pushed some of the travel distance up a little bit so that it gave you a better feel in games the trackpad it's not too bad it has a decent tracking experience and a reasonable click to it I don't expect anyone will be using it for gaming but it's nice to know that it works effectively for the times that you are not using this laptop with an external mouse the i/o on the GL 502 vs is pretty standard on the left hand side you'll find mini DisplayPort HDMI Ethernet USB 3.0 and a USB 3.1 gen2 type-c port on the right hand side there's an SD card slot to further USB 3.0 ports and a single 3.5 no audio jack I probably would have liked to see Thunderbolt 3 here as well as an additional 3.5 an audio jack but I think the range of USB ports and display outputs will satisfy most gamers here I'm pretty happy with the display that a suit is opted for here is a 15.6 inch TN LCD with a resolution of 1920 by 1080 because it's TN you can't expect fantastic color performance or viewing angles and that's certainly the case with this particular laptop it doesn't quite hit the marks in terms of our color performance tests but the key feature here is it's 100 Hertz refresh rate and support for g-sync the gtx 1070 in this laptop can often push frame rates above the 60fps mark so the back of this laptop can run at 120 Hertz with some nice smooth adaptive sync means you were getting a really good gaming experience if it comes at the expense of slightly weaker color performance you still get 313 it's of brightness and a contrast ratio of around 1200 to one but again I wouldn't be using this laptop for color accurate work and now it's time for the section that all you guys are interested in the performance and we'll start off by diving straight into our PC mark workloads starting off with the home sweet here as you can see here the ROG GL v o 2 vs performs quite well with its i7 7700 h2 and the sort of lead that you'll see over some gtx 1060 laptops is carried over into the creative workload which is a bit more GPU bound some of the other pc mark workloads we're going to be work score and the rog GL 502 vs disappointed a little bit here if it's score of under 3000 taking a look at the results in Cinebench and again you'll see very similar performance from VI 770 782 in this laptop compared to some of the other gang laptops we've reviewed with the CPU inside this is a pretty similar scenario that you'll see in our x264 encoding benchmark again this laptop obliterates some of the ultrabooks you'll see thanks to its extra cores and you know it's a multi-threaded workload so you'd expect to see very strong performance on the i7 7700 HQ moving on to win raf again you see very similar performance from the i7 7700 HQ here compared to some of the other gaming laptops we reviewed with this cpu inside and a very similar situation in matlab as well taking a look at our simulation workloads which are mostly single threaded this laptop performs very well here thanks to its high clock speeds on the i7 7700 HQ before we dive right into our gaming benchmarks and we'll take a look at one 3dmark workload and we've chosen time spy because it is the most intensive workloads that you will find it's score of over 5,000 is pretty decent for a gtx 1070 and laptop it comes in 50% faster than some of our x10 60 laptops and just 18% slower than our GT X 1080 laptop so this is pretty much what you'll expect to see in the most GPU bound games that you'll find today such as rise of the Tomb Raider which we'll talk about a little bit later moving on to games performance now and one thing that you guys have been requesting is 1% low results for laptops and this is definitely something I've been working on I don't have enough data to put up comparisons just yet but I will be stating the 1% lower results for all of the games that you'll see here today starting with Tomb Raider an older tile which pushes 80 frames per second on average making it 46 percent faster than our GTX 1060 laptops and a 1% lower result of 60 FPS makes it quite smooth gaming performance overall moving on to Metro last light is very high benchmark and we're looking at over 100 FPS average here which is 31% faster than our GTX 1060 laptops with a 1% lower result of 50 FPS so a bit of a low 1% low result here that's pretty typical for laptops that we've seen revealed to BioShock Infinite and we're starting to see a small CPU bottleneck here 126 FPS average at its maximum 1080p quality settings 26% faster than the GTX 1060 and a 1% lower result of 56 fps Middle Earth shadow of Mordor again it tends to perform quite well on laptops 124 FPS average here 40.6% faster than the GTX 1060 with a 1% load of 80 FPS so a really strong performance here in this game movie oh do Grand Theft Auto 5 and another strong result for the gel 502 vs with an average of 86 frames per second making it 38 percent faster than our GTX 1060 laptops and a 1% low of 58 FPS is very respectable here in Batman Arkham Knight 78 FPS average meaning that it is 39% faster than our GTX 1060 laptops and that 1% lower rate of 43 is pushing it a little bit low in this title but it's not too bad nonetheless concern Jessica laptop rise of the Tomb Raider the most intensive title in our benchmark suite we're looking at a 48 FPS average in the dx12 mode which makes it a huge 63 percent faster than our gtx 1060 laptops however the one percent low FPS count of just 21 means that we're not seeing too smooth performance ii and you will want to bring that quality sand down to about a high level which results in 1% low 45 FPS in our testing if you want to play this game or sort of the more smooth the frame rates that you'd expect from a pc gaming experience Deus Ex mankind divided ultra settings average frame rate hear of 57 fps making it 43 percent faster than our GTX 1060 laptops and a very strong 1% low result here at 47 fps so not too far away from that average result and again it's strong performance here from the gtx 1070 we don't have too much comparison data for the following games but you can enjoy some in-game footage here as we go through some results in a hitman 94 FPS average with a 1% low of 57 FPS and it's 1080p ultra settings in DirectX 12 senses a game that runs really well on the GL 502 vs civilization 6 CPU limited here so we can't expect too much from your i 770 700 HQ but as 1080p maximum quality settings in DirectX 12 we can still see a 53 FPS average with the 1% low of 38 fps goo results here in this game and one of the most intensive titles except for either the tomb raider watchdogs 2 and it's 1080p ultra preset and average FPS of 51 and a 1% low of 37 so if you have it edit ultra preset you're still getting a good gaming experience in watchdogs to opt for quality settings and gsync helps out a little bit to make that experience nice and smooth one thing you may have noticed across all of our benchmarks is we do have another gtx 1070 laptop to compare it to and in general the gel 502 vs was around 2 to 7 percent slower that other Asus laptop you see there has a more powerful CPU and that can result in slightly higher framerate on average but a strong performance results from the gel 502 vs nonetheless and just briefly let's take a look at the SSD performance it was disappointing to discover that it uses just a micron 1100 SATA drive so not a PCIe nvme SSD like we see in a number of other gaming laptops and this leads to limited sequential performance e sequential read speeds of just 435 megabytes per second it's quite a lot lower than some other gaming laptops that we've seen and you'll see similar performance results in our random results again performance profiling a little bit below what would expect from other gaming laptops now as we've covered the before let's just take a look at how this laptop performs from a cooling standpoint and we opened up the GL 502 vs I was surprised to discover how small the heat sinks are considering there's a gtx 1070 inside it seems the de Souza's opted for a fast fan design that pushes air aggressively through that small heatsink which is attached to the GPU and CPU through some pretty massive heat pipes surprisingly though this laptop isn't too loud under load it's certainly no louder than any other gaming laptop I've used and the fan noise profile is reasonably Pleasant meaning that there's no high pitched jet engine whine and if you're using say external speakers or you know a good pair of headphones you won't notice the fan noise too much over your ingame audio and that's a pretty decent result from this gaming laptop as far as thermals are concerned in the intensive I 64 stability test with both the CPU and GPU being Werner choosing Mac's the CPU sits at around 90 degrees Celsius and the GPU at 80 degrees Celsius with only limited CPU throttling this represents a very very intensive and worst-case scenario for the GL 5 OG vs and in actual games like watchdogs to the CPUs it's more like 80 degrees Celsius with the GPU as well and 80 degrees Celsius with no thermal throttling in sight so despite the fact that those heat sinks are quite small the actual thermal performance of this laptop in games is very decent and I don't see any reason for complaints as far as the design of the cooling solution is concerned perhaps the most attractive aspect of the GL 502 v8 is its price at 1,700 US dollars this is the cheapest current-generation gtx 1070 laptop you can get and this is mostly due to the use of a 128 gig SSD compared to 256 gigabytes in competitors from msi gigabyte and so forth with those laptops costing around 100 US dollars more so if you want to really tight budget and you can't simply spare that extra 100 bucks the GL 502 vs is the best option and for those of you in Australia it costs around $3,000 redo so again a pretty competitive price point in my local region and this price point you get a very decent gaming experience I was a bit disappointed with the SSD performance but the core i7 7700 HQ and the gtx 1070 are well suited to playing today's games at 1080p Ultra settings at frame rates above 60fps the display it's a 120 Hertz g-sync panel so again very well suited to this gtx 1070 laptop because often you'll be pushing those frame rates above 60fps that's where the 120 hertz refresh rate really comes into its own I was reasonably impressed with the cooling solution despite the fact that inside it's actually a pretty tiny heatsink and the main downside I guess this laptop is it's designed not too much of a fan of the plastic body that they've used here and even though it is reasonably lighter just 2.2 kilograms in fact it's the lightest gtx 1070 laptop on the market i just wish that the design was a little bit more premium for this price point but that said again you'll be mostly concerned with the hardware in the GL 502 vs and a soos has really delivered a great gaming experience on this laptop here anyway that's it for my review of the GL 500 2 vs check out the full review on textbook comm links to our patreon are below and we will catch you in the next one