Gadgetory

I looked at this particular laptop all the way back in May when we were at Computex and I couldn't wait to get my hands on it we have got a rise then based laptop sporting a full fat 1700 risin 724 gigabytes of ddr4 as well as an rx 580 with a free sync panel so I think in terms of paying for buck and performance and portability this is this is gonna be a package that seems to have all of it so the resin 7 1700 is AMD's first CPU in the 8 core lineup it's a 65 watt chips that makes it perfect for something like this in a mobile platform but it's got all 8 cores all 16 threads but it's a it's the full 3.7 turbo clock with the 3.1 gigahertz all core turbo clock on here 24 gigabytes of 2400 megahertz ddr4 and of course an rx 584 gigabyte model now you can step up those specs a little bit you can add more RAM up to 32 gigabytes it's it's a pretty impressive package because when you draw a Venn diagram when it comes to laptops there's very little overlap if you're looking for something that's got price to performance performance and portability you can easily get two of the three but it's hard to get all three where usually if you want performance then with it you're also getting a little bit less portability this might be bigger heavier bulkier if you want performance you'd certainly not gonna get cheap so it's hard to make that Venn diagram really line up but I think they've done a pretty good job here with this particular model because the 1700 again as I said 65 watt chip it's not too expensive it's still got all eight cores 16 threads so it definitely turns and just obliterates your professional workflows now in terms of weight and form factor it measures 1.3 inches high at its highest point it's a 17.3 inch panel and it weighs in at 7 pounds so it's not the lightest laptop but certainly not the heaviest by any means but in terms of the panel tech it is an IPS panel so that's a plus alright oftentimes you'll see high-end hardware go with a TN panel or something like that because of a higher refresh rate but IPS tech has definitely moved along so this has got an IPS 75 Hertz freesync panel built-in so you've definitely got all the stuff you would certainly want to go along with your you know your gaming and professional laptop now in terms of build quality there's a lot of plastic on here but it doesn't feel rickety it doesn't creak when you push on it is very little flex it doesn't make noises it doesn't feel cheap at all but on the top of the laptop it does have a brushed metal finish with these accents so it's not in-your-face doesn't have all these colors and lights everywhere so ah it's basically a dual purpose laptop where if I still worked in my professional environment I would have no problems taking this into a board meeting or a meeting this looks elegant but also can play your games and do all your work with no problems now speaking of color once you open it up the speaker grilles right here do have a little bit of red color accent to them the keyboard is a red LED backlit it's not our GPS you can't change the color so you can of course turn the backlight off if you want and you've got this red Asus logo right here and some white lettering that says Republic of gamers but it's not in-your-face and over-the-top and gaudy so no problems with that also - and speaking of hinge quality the hinge keeps its position and the nice thing is it's weighted and balanced just enough to where if it's flat on the table you can open it up without the base lifting up right you can see it kind of wanted to right there some laptops the hinge is too tight so when you go to pick it up and open the lid the whole laptop folds back but not in this case here in terms of connectivity we've got quite a bit going on here we've got a full size Ethernet port right here but the cool thing is when you're not using it sort of flips up and out of the way but if you want it this little hinge pushes down exposing the full opening of the Ethernet port full size HDMI which is perfect for VR and your HMDs and your headsets because this is very V already the plenty of horsepower to run your VR games no problem of course we've got a USB type-c another USB 3.0 and our headphone jack flipping around to the other side here we have got full-size well an SD card reader so that's nice and then we've got two USB ports right here as well as Kensington lock so it's pretty standard in terms of connectivity but it's not lacking which a lot of laptops as they shrink them down you start giving up some of this connect but not in the case right here now let's talk about what everyone's gonna care about in gaming honestly it games like any desktop with a 1700 in it and nrx 580 the RX 580 even the 4 gigabyte model although I'd like to have seen an 8 gig rx 580 has no problems pushing 1080p whatsoever which is exactly what this panel is the freesync definitely comes in handy because the RX 580 at 1080p even with high settings on games like rise of the term raider rise of the term raider who rise of the Tomb Raider pray GTA 5 all exceed 60fps by quite a bit so the 75 Hertz free sync panel is definitely doing some work and the free sync is definitely smoothing out those frame rates but in terms of noise it wasn't very loud it wasn't very intrusive the fans do indeed ramp up but most of the time when you're gaming anyway especially with a laptop you're probably wearing headphones anyway because although the sound quality on this is very good most people I know who game on laptops wear headphones anyway so the noise isn't gonna be too intrusive now in terms of heat it all exhausts out the back of the laptop you've got pretty ample ventilation right here it goes right out the back how are you gonna be doing is blowing heat at your neighbour it's not your problem it's theirs now it pulls in from the bottom of the laptop so you're definitely wanna make sure that you're not blocking that off with your lap or something you want it on a flat surface but as I said annoy your neighbour not yourself blow the heat their way now in terms of battery performance I mean it's not terrible it's a 65 watt TDP chip at least the desktop version I assume this one's the same because it's got all the same specs as the desktop version rx 580 is not the most efficient GPU out there but it's certainly more efficient than like a full-size desktop Vega but you're gonna probably get a couple of hours of gaming out of this not the greatest gaming experience though because I'm battery power it really does pull back its coarse beads and stuff unless you'll just leave it in performance mode then it will just run balls-to-the-wall until it goes into power-save mode where everything then ramps down to like it's base clock and farther back for instance the CPU on battery power will go all the way back to 500 megahertz so 0.5 gigs is what you're going to get on battery power but that's on the you know conservation mode when it's below 10% because what it's trying to do at that point is give you enough time save your work and shut down the system or plug it in without a critical shutdown that's just gonna lose your work but you know I think for most gamers though they're not too concerned with battery power gaming because we're gonna plug it in anyway because we want all the FPS right what's the point of having a precinct panel if you're gonna be gaming on battery but you could for a little while anyway now some final thoughts here in terms of pros and cons it was really hard for me to find anything I would change with this laptop it really comes down to a couple of things one with the amount of cooling in here the heat pipe design the independent fans would have been nice to see at least some level of overclocking available to this like we see on some other laptop models because we know that the 1700 does overclock well without adding too much more voltage and too much more heat I think we could have gotten this guy up to four gigs on in a laptop without too much of an issue or at least 3.7 with all course rikes 3.7 is only one or two cores 3.1 is the all core turbo clock I think we could have got 3.7 on all cores the RX 580 what I'd liked to have seen an 8 gigabyte version be standard but I understand the reasoning for having two different versions and giving a little bit of a cost you know tier system here so that you can make it more affordable to more people and definitely definitely needs faster memory 24 hundred megahertz although not a slouch we know that rise ins infinity fabric takes a direct performance impact on memory speed so the faster memory you have the faster the Infinity fabric works the better performance you're going to get so 3,000 megahertz plus is the sweet spot and where you want to aim for at least give us the ability to overclock the so-dimms a little bit to see if we can get there would have been nice but that's pretty locked down so you can't really touch any of that you can change the memory but then you're buying memory that you're gonna change anyway which kind of affects the cost of performance in the long run but that's really all I got I don't have a lot that I would really change with this I mean it got it has everything you want eight cores 16 threads putting it on par with something like the old 59 60 ex from Intel in a laptop plenty of ddr4 in here storage wise it's expandable we've got a 256 gig SSD and a one terabyte hard drive which is what all the games are suffer on here performance on gaming more than enough for 1080p 1080p IPS free sync panel I mean what more can you ask for if you guys have any comments put them down in the comments below obviously I've been waiting to get my hands on this all year and it didn't disappoint it's an amazing performer and the cost of performance on this is great so check links down below you guys can see links on where to buy and how to outfit it and all that but that's all I got if you guys got any comments or suggestions for a soos or this laptop of what you guys would like to see moving forward make sure you sound off down below subscribe you guys are new around here and as always I will see you in the next one you