Gadgetory

hey guys and welcome back to hard brown box so gaming laptops have become increasingly popular over the last few years and that's all down to one simple thing you can now get a laptop that provides a desktop light gaming experience in a highly portable form factor go on are the days of big bulky ridiculous gaming laptops because consumers were never really interested in buying them but now that portable gaming laptops like the GTX 1060 powered razor blades are readily available demand for gaming laptops is increasing this is what makes max Q one of the most interesting initiatives to come from in video this year the company has realized the buyers wants slim gaming laptops so they've worked to create a hardware platform that brings even more powerful components and their respective cooling solutions down to the size of current gtx 1060 systems if you look up max Q and video will tell you all about the optimizations they've done to power delivery components coolers drivers and so forth to put powerful GPUs in slim laptops it's interesting from an engineering standpoint but for people looking to actually buy a max Q laptop here's the basic information you need to know max Q brings the GeForce GTX 280 and gtx 1070 into an 18 millimeter thick chassis with a cooler noise target no higher than 40 DBA in other words laptops that were previously only able to include a gtx 1060 can now feature up to a gtx 1018 with the cool that isn't going to blow up your eardrums these suits are OGIS effort E is the flagship model for max Q it comes with a fully fledged GTX 1080 along with an Intel Core i7 7700 HQ and 16 gigabytes of RAM inside a chassis that 17.8 millimeters thick and two point three kilograms heavy this makes the Zephyrus the slimmest GTX 1080 laptop on the market and by a significant margin - with this sort of hardware it's no surprise the Zephyrus costs twenty-seven hundred US dollars is standard configuration my review unit which bumps up the ramp to 24 gig and SSD from five to over gig to terabyte pushes the price even higher now that I've had extended hands-on time with you it's time to dive into the unique zephyrus design the most immediately obvious aspect is the position of the keyboard we sit at the bottom of the base in order to make room for a large slab of components at the top we've seen this designed before in laptops that include deep mechanical keyboards but here is purely to maximize space for the slim cooler key to hitting in videos Mac's key requirements the cooling solution has another unique component and that's the base that splits apart when the lid is open to ensure maximum air flow when sitting on a desk it's a great idea from a functional standpoint as it allows the laptop to remain slim and prevent the fan intakes from being obstructed but from a visual standpoint the way the base splits apart and the flimsy plastic construction to the extended section makes the zephyrus look kind of broken even though it's not this part of the Zephyrus design is in stark contrast to the rest which is very solid and premium in both look and feel most of the base is constructed from a single piece of metal with a matte finish and thankfully it's without the crazy game elements or unnecessary angles that a soos usually includes in there ROG designs the zephyrus looks quite sleek and understated for what is a very powerful laptop of course there are some areas that a soos simply couldn't resist to embellish there are red LEDs that illuminate the underside of the laptop and a red highlighted ROG logo on the otherwise nice brushed metal lid with the cooler placing vents along the rear and on the left side of the laptop most ports are found towards the front of each side on left is the power port HDMI 2.0 2 USB 3.0 ports plus a 3.5 mm audio jack and on the right you get a further two USB 3.0 ports and a Thunderbolt 3 port the zephyrus is simply too slim to include Ethernet though a soos does include a USB to Ethernet dongle in the Box one of the biggest concerns I had with the Zephyrus design is the position of the keyboard laptops I'd previously used with front mechanical keyboards weren't exactly comfortable to type on thanks to the higher than normal position of the keys and lack of a wrist rest but a Susur solved both of those problems with this laptop firstly the Zephyr is a slim machine so the keys are a reasonable height of the desk secondly they include a rubber wrist rest in the box that can be placed along the bottom edge of the laptop for additional comfort the rest doesn't attach to the laptop physically in any way but just positioning it under the keyboard can make a difference the keyboard itself is pretty similar to most other ultra portable keyboards in that travel distance isn't fantastic the keys do have a nice tactile response considering the limited space available some of the modifier keys are shorter than usual to fit in the slightly above-average speakers on the sides of the laptop though this didn't seem to affect the usability of the keyboard the spacebar is certainly very generous as well the trackpad is another point of contention due to its odd location on the right side of the keyboard personally I don't mind the trackpad in this location I find it pretty easy to use and tracking performance is good though naturally it won't be for everyone it's good to see ass ignoring this too and even including a wired mouse in the box for gaming the trackpad also doubles as a numpad and this functionality works far better than a similar implementation I use recently on an MSI laptop the display you get with the Zephyrs is pretty decent and well suited to the hardware inside its a 15.6 inch 1920 by 1080 LCD panel from a Optronics with the refresh rate of 120 Hertz and support for g-sync the display uses IPS technology so viewing angles and contrast ratios are better than at an equivalent while pixel response times are okay putting the display through our usual array of tests reveals a maximum brightness of 310 nits along with a contrast ratio of 1225 to 1 the display is a bit too cold for color accurate work due to a color temperature of 71 26 K though a grayscale Deltora mm value of 2.69 isn't terrible saturation and color check averages of 3.36 and 3.92 respectively aren't suitable for color accurate work either though neither is outrageously terrible for a gaming laptop of course the big selling point to the Zephyrus is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 you get inside although there's also a gtx 1070 more available the GTX 1084 laptop is identical to the desktop variant with 2560 cuda cores a rated Bruce clock speed 17:33 megahertz and a gigabytes of gddr5 x clocked at ten thousand megahertz with nvidia smack secured design though the gtx 1018 may not necessarily run at the same clock speeds as other desktop variants or even laptop variants the design principles behind max q are centered around delivering a quality gaming experience within certain size thermal power and noise constraints Nvidia made it clear that max q laptops use different performance and clock speed profiles embedded in their GeForce driver to ensure their targets are met and for that reason we won't see max Q GPU clocks that are as high as more beefy gaming systems can deliver anyway before I look into gaming here's how the zephyrus performs in productivity tasks while the Zephyrs is a slim and sleek machine slenderness has never been an issue for the core i7 7700 HQ and as such the Zephyrus performs almost exactly on par with other gaming systems that use the 7700 HQ of course a range of productivity workloads typically the Zephyrs was anywhere from a couple of percent slower to a couple of percent faster and that's you know margin of error type stuff the smle 61 is a pretty speedy SSDs one terabyte variant - pushing above the usual one gigabyte per second read and write barrier we like to see in modern laptops while random performance doesn't blow us out of the water or anything achieving above 50 megabytes per second random reads is a decent result obviously though you're all interested in gaming results so let's get right to it normally I'd started here with some older games but let's be honest no one is using a GTX 10 ahead of that top to play Bioshock instant so let's cut right to the chase in rise of the Tomb Raider the zephyrus performs pretty well average frame rates are 8 percent better than the ROG GL 502 PS which uses a gtx 1070 and the same cpu as the Zephyrus while minimum frame rates are a whopping 63% better you can see here the MSI gt70 3 VR as well which is a GT X 1080 laptop that unfortunately I only have average frame rate data for the GT 73 VR does have a faster core i7 6820 HK CPU the rise of the Tomb Raider is pretty GPU limited and here the GT 73 VR pulls away by a large margin no kind of item is one of the best titles here for than Sepphoris performing on par with the GT 73 VR and 18% ahead of the GTX 1070 minimum frame rates are strong as well so with the g-sync display you're getting a great experience here at ultra quality settings hip man performs strongly with maximum details averaging nearly 100 FPS and pushing near 60 FPS with its 1% low minimum frame rates aren't ahead of a gtx 1070 laptop there is a total ear cpu limited at time so this isn't a huge surprise another cpu heavy title is civilization of 6 which plays well on the zephyr a set to maximum detail levels 1% low frame rates are a good 18 percent faster than a GTX 970 gaming laptop although averages aren't significantly improves watchdogs 2 is one of the few games I tested that didn't see a massive performance improvement over the GL 502 vs only gaining a few frames on average and hitting the same 1% low before the tier is still acceptable at ultra detail settings but I suspect people purchasing a GTX 1080 laptop may have wanted better results the final game I looked at in detail is Mass Effect Andromeda which hits a strong average of 83 FPS and a 1% low of 52 FPS inside the demanding tempest area of again at maximum quality settings I don't have gtx 1070 data here though the difference is significantly faster than gtx 1060 laptops as you can see we're looking at average figures across all the games I tested there are some interesting things to note particularly when comparing the Zephyrs to a gtx 1070 laptop with the same core i7 7700 HQ inside here the Zephyrus was typically around 10% faster when looking at average frame rates though this expands to 15% we're looking at minimums comparisons between the GT 73 VR with its GTX 1080 and the Zephyrus do paint a more interesting picture here the GT 73 VI is 10% faster on average despite having the same physical GPU inside some of this is down to the faster CPU which can present a bottleneck at 1080p but some of the most GPU demanding title C games around that 10% mark the end result is that the GTX 1080 max Q is always exactly between the gtx 1070 and GTX 1080 in terms of gaming performance 10% faster than the gtx 1070 by the gtex 1080 takes its own 10% lead while this performance delta is certainly going to disappoint some that want the best performance out of their GT x 1080 laptop there are a few things to consider I've already talked a lot about this size and that's something to keep in mind as the MSI gt70 3 VR I was comparing the Zephyrs to is at least twice the size then there's also the fact you can I guess overclock the GTX 1080 in max-q laptops to bypass the max to power thermal and noise restrictions thereby unleashing the full power of the GTX 980 chip inside provided there's no thermal Headroom unfortunately I didn't have time to mess around with overclocking his efforts a su smartness reviewnit back pretty soon but I do believe there is plenty of headroom here under the load of either 64 stability test hitting the CPU and watchdogs to hearing the GPU the CPU topped out at around 88 degrees Celsius while the GPU hit 77 to 80 degrees Celsius now I wouldn't go overclocking the CPU here and well it's not even possible anyway but overclocking the GPU should be no trouble at all with these sorts of temperature figures provided you're willing to put up with faster fan speeds perhaps a bit of extra noise and higher temperatures the other thing to keep in mind though is the noise one aspect of max-q design is a noise target of under 40 DBA for the cooler and the Zephyrus easily hit this even under an IEEE 264 stress test as it's one of the quietest gaming laptops I've reviewed now it's not silent but most gaming laptops with this sort of hardware are outrageously laughs well under full load even slower gaming machines like the Razer Blade are deafening in comparison to this system you only need headphones with the surface and that's something I haven't been able to say about many gaming laptops even the laptops built-in speakers can drown out the noise of a sub topspin or as while gaming the Asuza rog Zephyrus is an excellent example of great engineering the ability to take a powerful GPU like the geforce gtx 280 and slot it into a laptop chassis previously restricted to gtx ten 60s while hitting reasonable thermals and outstanding noise targets is a huge step forward for gaming laptops anyone who purchases a Zephyrus should be very happy with the and I can't wait to see what other max-q products we get in the future the price for these efforts is just about perfect as far as I'm concerned the left up with the GTX 980 inside 16 gig of ram and a 5 to a gig SSD will set you back twenty-seven hundred US dollars it's a fair bit more expensive than mid tier gtx 1070 laptops but cheaper than other gtx 1080 laptops by several hundred dollars i was actually surprised to discover that the Zephyrus price fits in so well with other laptops considering its performance I was fully expecting it to cost just as much as other gtx 280 laptops but with the excuse that it comes with reduced performance as a trader for increased portability so there's no doubt that the service is an expensive laptop but what it provides it's hard to think of a better product on the market right now anyways that's it for this look at the seuss rog zephyrus if you're interested in this laptop has links to check its price on Amazon in the description below and of course we will catch you in a next laptop review