Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unbox today we're looking at the brand new Asus ROG Strix scar to GTL 504 GV a gaming laptop with a long product name but some of the latest Hardware inside including the new NVIDIA GeForce r-tx 2060 I've already posted an in-depth benchmark review of the RT X 2060 so check that out if you haven't yet because today we're more focusing on what this overall gaming laptop package provides like a lot of refreshed RT X laptops there hasn't been a significant change to the design or most of the internal hardware previously I reviewed the 15 inch scar 2 and it either came with the GTX 1060 or gtex 1070 while now you'll either get an RT X 2060 or our Tex 2070 albia at slightly different price points my review unit is the GL fiber 4gb here so we're seeing the RT X 2060 model and it's priced at eighteen hundred US dollars or 2700 ozzie other hardware is largely unchanged compared to the previous model we're still looking at Intel six core Core i7 8750 H CPU for most models 16 gigabytes of ddr4 memory and a 15.6 inch 1080p 144 Hertz IPS display the primary storage options have been bumped up a tear across the board so previously where you received a 128 gig SSD in the entry model you're now up to 256 gigabytes and so on my laptop and the main option available on Newegg and Amazon comes with a 512 GB SATA SSD in terms of design what we're looking at here is the same as the previous cartoon moral which I guess makes sense because both have the same name aside from the brushed aluminium lid most of the laptop uses a plastic construction with the soft touch coating applied around the keyboard this soft touch area has a carbon-fiber design with half of it getting a camera print I'd probably prefer if the camera wasn't there but a Sewell has to do that sort of thing yes there's RGB here too you get a strip along the front edge of the laptop plus the off center a soos ROG logo on the lid both controllable through a Seuss's or a software the front RGB strip is directly linked to the four zone RGB keyboard backlighting you don't get perky RGB here but the basic four zone effect is nice enough the keyboard itself has a bit of a spongy tactile response I'd personally prefer something more clicky but travel distance is decent for this sort of laptop plus you get a numpad and none of the keys are truncated to fit it in the trackpad is great and I love the inclusion of the two separate click buttons well I thought of gaming laptops these days you're also getting a slim bezel around the 15 inch display which keeps their laptops footprint quite compact although the still a sizable bezel below the screen unfortunately a soos is gone probably the worst webcam placement possible offset and low below the display I think it's slightly thicker top bezel with the camera above the screen would work better that sort of design has been used previously with MSI laptops this chassis is your typical mid tier option it's not a slim and light system like the asou Sepphoris but it's not a chunky beast like some of the big boys whose models it clocks in at 26 millimeters thick and 2.4 kilograms heavy so it's somewhat portable but not quite in that super portable tier that comes at a higher price the main limitation for portability will mostly be the smaller 62 watt hour battery versus near 100 watt hour units you can get with systems like the Aero 15 I Oh is very solid though 3 USB 3.1 type-a ports 2 of those a Gen 1 one of those is Gen 2 plus a USB 3 point to gen2 type-c port there's no Thunderbolt 3 here unfortunately you also get hdmi 2.0 B that's full sized mini DisplayPort 1.2 Ethernet and SD card slot and a 3.5 minute or do jack internal connectivity comes in the form of an Intel altitude at 11a C 2x2 Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth 5.0 combo solution before talking about performance here there's a few notes to be make the first is relating to a suit of software suite which is called the armory crate there's all the standard stuff in here but the important thing are the fan profiles windows silent balanced and turbo plus a manual mode for game testing I used the bounce mode because I didn't spot any difference in performance between it and the turbo mode for productivity apps I did use the turbo mode though it's a louder but does increase the power limit on the CPU which for long workloads like video encoding led to a small performance increase however while the turbo is nice what's not nice is getting just a single 16 gig team of ddr4 2666 memory this means the laptop in its standard 16 gig configuration is running in just a single channel mode which leads to much lower memory bandwidth than dual channel laptops and therefore lower performance it does leave a dim slot free if you want to upgrade to 32 gig down the line but that's come at the cost of performance for buyers out of the box I'm not going to go into detail on the performance of the core i7 8750 H because I've covered it plenty of times in other reviews it's a very popular 6 chord CPU used in most gaming laptops and it's the option I'd choose for productivity and gaming workloads without getting into those crazy large form factors the Zeus GL fiber for GV performs roughly on par with the typical Core i7 8750 H laptop that's down to a few notable differences that both favor and disadvantage the system due to the turbofan mode longer workloads tend to throttle less than standard 8750 H performance so we're seeing up to a 10% advantage for longer multi thread workloads like handbrake this laptop can sustain higher clocks for longer on the flip side due to having single channel memory this laptop gets disadvantaged in our memory heavy benchmarks so that includes seven zip compression MATLAB and Adobe Photoshop serous blur it evens out to being about equal to other laptops but depending on what you're doing you'll either see better or worse performance so a bit of a strange one as usual here's our comparison between the core i7 8750 H and the last gen quad core Core i7 7700 HQ due to higher clock speeds and more cause we're looking at over a 50% advantage in some multi-threaded workloads as well as higher single thread performance you won't see this sort of improvement in every workload but if you're coming from an older quad core system the 87 58 will be a notable upgrade this is the chart for those wondering whether they should buy a larger 15-inch gaming system or a portable 13-inch Ultrabook for their productivity tasks generally the 87 58 absolutely smokes a 15 watt CPU like the core i7 85 65 you delivering more than double the performance in some cases throw in proper GPU acceleration for for something like premiere encodes a gaming laptop is an order of magnitude faster comes to gaming I already have a full video breaking down how the r-tx 2060 performs in this exact system so if you want to see individual game performance across a handful of titles plus an in-depth look at this new laptop GPU from Nvidia that video is what you want to check out however for that RTX 2060 review I loaded up the GL 504 GV with dual channel memory as it comes in the box you only get 16 gigabytes of single channel memory which has a noticeable performance impact in most games so the performance you see in my art X 2060 laptop coverage is better than what this laptop delivers out of the box on average the single channel configuration of this GPU is 13% slower than the dual channel config that's a significant difference simply from not having that second stick of memory in there some games are barely impacted such as dirt for watchdogs to and Wolfenstein to others like prey Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Resident Evil to see a 25% performance cut or more as the limited memory bandwidth chokes these games there's no doubt that dual channel memory is significantly better for gaming at 1080p in terms of an actual FPS impact in a game like hitman 2 we're talking about going from a 70 FPS average down to 50 FPS with single channel memory in Assassin's Creed Odyssey a 60 FPS experience is cut down to just 45 FPS it's not a good performance loss this also impacts the margins between this RT X 2060 laptop and other GPUs comparing dual channel to dual channel the RT X 2060 is about 28% faster on average than a gtx 1066 gigabyte but this single channel RT x 2060 laptop compared to a dual-channel gtx 1060 system is only 12% faster and is actually slower in some games and then compared to something with the gtx 1070 inside again with dual channel ram it loses by more than 20% leaving that second dim slot free is a really costly trade-off to make it easy for buyers to upgrade their RAM in the future I have to wonder how many people actually open up their system and Chuck in that extra stick surely the number isn't high enough to justify cutting performance for most owners what I'd have liked to see is the laptop come with 2 8 gig sticks by default that would lead to much better performance from the r-tx 2060 and for the small percentage of people that one upgrades our 32 gig in the future they can swap out both eight gig Stix sold them or something and swap in a two by 16 gig kit it's not as good for upgraders but I take that trade-off for better out-of-the-box performance every day if you are thinking of buying the GL 504 GP and want to solve this problem you're looking at spending $100 or so for a second 16 gig ddr4 2666 sodium stick not a huge cost but something you might want to factor in looking at the cooling solution nothing much has changed since the last scar two models using the balanced fan mode for gaming which delivered the performance you've seen so far the cooler is pretty loud under load pushing up me 48 DBA in our testing it also tends to ramp up and down a fair bit while you're gaming so sometimes the cooler is quieter than this figure but to be honest the frequent changes are just as annoying as running at the maximum 48 DBA all the time however temperatures are very good which indicates the bounce mode is perhaps ramping the fan up too high I recorded a mere 73 degrees on the GPU and 83 degrees on the CPU in an extended watchdog's to session which is well below other laptops with similar noise outputs i reckon some manual Fantini would go a long way to bouncing out temperatures and noise here for storage amirev unit there's a kingston MTPA nvme SSD with a 512 gig capacity this is a mid tee performer not as fast as some of the Samsung Intel SSDs i've seen used in other gaming laptops but still fast enough to deliver a performance advantage over basic SATA SSDs internally there's also a free 2.5 inch drive bay if you want to add in a further hard drive or SSD but unfortunately there isn't an additional end up to drive spot the display used on this laptop is good it's not going to break any new ground and you've probably seen something like this in other systems but it is a decent 15.6 inch 1080p IPS with a 144 Hertz for a fresh rate peak brightness is up around 300 nits which is acceptable for a gaming laptop and it has a contrast ratio of around 1000 to one in terms of color performance this is an sRGB display so no fancy wide gamut here not that you really need that for gaming my main concern here is the incorrect my point Susie's using approximately 7,500 K rather than the correct 6500 K which gives the display a colder bluer tone this leads to average delta is between 3.0 and 4.0 which isn't accurate but isn't hugely inaccurate either against a gaming laptop so I don't think this is really a significant issue so that's all the data I have on the Asuza ROG Strix car to GL 4gb honestly it's a perfectly fine laptop it's got a good design with a good trackpad a good keyboard and good i/o it's got a good display has good upgrade ability it has good internal hardware and good performance I won't say anything is particularly special it's just your run-of-the-mill mid tier gaming laptop that's designed to be accessible for all and deliver a decent 1080p gaming experience for the most part I think that's what buyers will get with the RT X 2060 version of this system it's not overly portable it's not overly chunky it just nicely fits into that value but not crappy laptop category my only major concern with the GL 500 4 GB is coming with single channel memory out of the box it doesn't impact productivity workloads too much but it does shave around 10% off the gaming performance you'd normally get from a dual channel system it is fixable $100 sick of memory added into the second slot immediately gives you that performance back but I'd rather that performance was included by default however while there aren't too many glaring issues with this laptop itself the real downside is the price at $1,800 us for this model it's very very hard to recommend when you look at the performance you're getting it's a lot more expensive than gtx 1060 laptops with a similar cpu display storage and other components which retail for around $1,100 or so these days so for 63% more cash you're getting a system that's only 12 percent faster or 28% faster if you add in a second stick of RAM it's also not competitive with gtx 1070 laptops in fact the predecessor to this very system that GL 504 GS is only $1,500 right now so that's 17% cheaper for a laptop that's faster sometimes considerably so of course laptop prices change a lot over the months after launch so those watching this review in the future will be faced with a completely different situation it's likely that gtx 1070 laptops won't be available anymore and who knows where this system will be priced among its competitors right now it codes the exact same price tag as other RT x 2060 laptops and without testing the others it's really hard to know which is the best choice other than to say that this one we've tested here is perfectly fine as it stands today to recommend the RT x 2060 sky 2 it'll have to be priced at 1300 to 1400 dollars which is a fairly hefty price cut on where it currently sits I definitely wouldn't be happy paying $1,800 knowing that as far back as the second half of last year I could have spent $1,800 on a faster gtx 1070 system well before RT x laptops were on the horizon and Pascal went on a fire sale I just don't like the idea of a new product being worse valued than something last gen so the absolute maximum I could justify for this laptop is probably around $1,500 in a world where Pascal laptops are no longer available after you factor in an extra hundred dollars to get dual channel memory that would make it 11 percent cheaper than the last gen gtx 1070 laptop for about 11 percent less performance so a stalemate but a better position than today's pricing I'm honestly not sure who is responsible for this price II normally I would say a soos because they've made the laptop but every other RTX 2060 system on Newegg is around this price as well it doesn't seem that anyone is able to make a laptop with the same specs or roughly the same specs for around that $1500 mark is that invidious fault for selling the 2060 to OEMs at to higher price will prices come down it's pretty hard to say all I know is that it's not good value right now and that kind of sucks that's it for this review of the GL 500 4gb I really wish I didn't have to end this review on a bad note because technically the laptop is quite decent I guess there's no bad products just bad prices you can subscribe for more laptop reviews I've got two more gaming laptops here waiting to be tested with our text graphics inside consider supporting us on patreon to get access to our discord community and I'll catch you in the next one