Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 RTX 3070 Review:-
The future has arrived bringing good things for a change yes this is the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 or pronounce it rogue or republic of gamers.
Whatever you want Asus ROG Zephyrus g15503 what is that the 2021 edition of their 15.6 what is that the 2021 edition for their 15.6” inch thin and light king of a classy gaming laptop with the NVidia RTX 3000 series graphics and AMD Ryzen Zen tree Cezanne in here,
We have got the Ryzen 9 5900 hs 8 core 16 thread CPU inside for a lot of performance in a thin package. How are the thermals and all that sort of thing, wait there’s one more exciting thing before you even worry about that this is has a wide gamut Qhd 2560 by 1440 display which was NVidia’s promise with the RTX 3000 graphics card saying that that is the new minimum you know if you want to play you should enjoy your higher resolution.
We have got that here too we are looking at it how well you can tell I’m pretty excited by this laptop while the RTX 3000 series gaming laptops there aren’t a lot of them out yet but they haven’t been as super exciting as desktop cards.
Because they don’t get as much performance improvement as desktop cards because the desktop cards got that performance boost by using more watts more power something you really can’t do much of on laptops this is the intel’s principle for CPU and my intel’s got a little trouble lately
So here speaking of that we have AMD Ryzen and that is a superior CPU right now in terms of using less heat having better battery life and wonderful performance in multi-core, particularly where intel always edges out a little bit on single-core the multi-core rocks
But that display let’s talk about that again there is a Qhd matte is three millisecond response time 165-hertz wide gamut display here and it’s very natural looking if you want Oled you want the garage you want the over the top this isn’t. its Pantone calibrated and its pretty colour accurate.
But it’s nice and it’s sharp looking I mean whether you are going to play games and you want to see more details for example when I play shadow of the tomb raider, I enjoy that higher resolution. Because all those three leave the details everywhere it’s a much prettier game so that’s a step in the right direction, that’s also sharp for everyday use If you are doing photo editing for example great use for this laptop.
In terms of the building where this machine sits in amongst the competition the Zephyrus line is there ultra-thin and light it is one of the thinnest and lightest 15-inch gaming laptops it was just a little bit less than not just the razer blade 15 advanced but the 16-inch MacBook pro at 1.9 kilograms which is 4.2 pounds and quite then significantly under an inch 19.9 millimetres.
It has a magnesium alloy top and keyboards deck at the bottom so as I can is abs plastic on this and it has the 8000 dots on the lid instead of having the Led’s underneath as an optional thing like they did with the Zephyrus g14 they have mylar film underneath
So when you move the lid back and forth you will see colour shifting and sort of like having RGB lights without having RGB lights and without using any power and all that sort of thing that is what it is, I think it’s a very clean look obviously this design here is very similar to last year’s g 14 Zephyrus model which is one of the best gaming laptops for value and for what you got for the price the looks all that sort of thing and again this one is not super cheap,
But for what you get it’s cheaper than the competition and that’s nice too our model is the best buy edition is what we call the united states it’s 1799 and that gets you the Ryzen 9 5900 hs NVidia RTX 3070 graphics the Qhd display 16 gigs of ram and a fast one terabyte nvme SSD not too bad.
Now you could go up to a 3080 and double your ram to 32 gigs while you are at but that’s like 700 more and the performance gain just isn’t that much especially a thin and light chassis so I would stick with the lower end model
So when you compare this to something like the razer blade 15 or 15 advanced as a competition or the MSI gs 66 stealth which right now is just a full HD display by the way there’s no Qhd option, it’s hundreds of dollars cheaper while still being pretty premium and focusing on the things that many of us care about the most like the better quality display the Ryzen CPU inside that sort out thing for the keyboard you have single zone RGB backlighting that means you can choose any colour you want
But it’s going to be all one colour at a time that’s fine with me there’s no bling there’s no rogue Strix RGB body lighting anywhere again with me that’s fine because I like the staid kind of modern and futuristic look but at the same time very chill design that’s going on here we have a very large Microsoft precision trackpad on this no number pad which for a 15-inch laptop.
Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 Specs:-
| Specification:- |
| 15.6 QHD 165 Hz 3 ms wide gamut matte IPS non touch Display |
| AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS (Zen 3 with Radeon RX Vega 8 Graphics) |
| RTX 3070, and 3080 are both 80 watts with a boost to 100 watts |
| 16/32GB Dual-channel DDR4 3200 MHz RAM, 1 slot |
| 2 × M.2 SSD slot |
| PCIe 3.0 |
| Intel WIFI 6 + Bluetooth 5 |
| Single-zone RGB keyboard |
| MS Precision trackpad |
| Fingerprint reader in the power button |
| Price: $1,799 for our RTX 3070, 16GB RAM |
| $2,499 for RTX 3080 & 32GB RAM |
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Personally, I like and that’s up to you so if you need it to want it others don’t like it the keyboard on this has a great feel if you are a content creator who makes use of the written word you’re going to like this thing
It’s also fine for gaming too but a nice deep keystroke on this tactile feel springing back it’s like good old days of keyboards without getting too thick and it’s quite unlike the rug strict scar which has an optic mechanical sort of keyboard this one is quite so within a light gaming laptop some of the things often take a hurt are a sound well.
They have got six speakers on this including force cancelling subwoofers or whatever it sounds quite good. I’m still not sure is as good as the 16-inch MacBook pro, particularly for the depth of the bass,
But compared to just about every other windows laptop or gaming laptop and this size on the market it sounds a lot better and the multiple drivers combined with Dolby Atmos can give you the sense of surround sound that’s very nice some people have said that they hear at high volumes of the bass particularly rumbling farting making funny sounds mine is not doing that it sounds to me like that’s probably a driver issue.
but I don’t know speaking of driver issues this machine is on the bleeding edge and out of the box two weeks ago there were so many driver updates firmware updates bios updates I’ve already gotten two bios updates be sure to run those updates including my ASUS app for bios updates they do make a difference.
When I first got out of the box with the shipping bios it did crazy crackly things like sometimes would say the charger wasn’t plugged in the right which got me worried that was purely a bio sync,
Because they are working on USB-c 100 watts charging to get that going which is not something that you are going to use when you are gaming but if you need to use it as productivity or a streaming laptop on the go that be sufficient and ASUS is supposedly going to sell 100-watt power adapter that’s USB-c based
So it’s all sounding roses and puppy dogs so far what about cooling that probably sucks right is it thin and light well no thanks to Ryzen which runs a lot cooler than intel which is your basic egg frying machine.
Normally your intel laptop these days for a gaming one in most games I saw CPU temperatures for demanding aaa title in the range of 80 to 84 degrees centigrade which is way better than the near 100 degrees.
Thermal throttling max that you will see on the equivalent intel CPUs for 10th generation 11th isn’t out yet so for the 45 watt so we can say for the 35-watt Intel has started shipping their h35 wide’s and this is considerably faster those are only four cores on the intel side for their 35-watt products so well obvious reasons why there,
When playing games like cyberpunk 2077 good job here. If you turn on ray Tracy of course the frame rate is going to drop in most any games I tested it with and without ray tracing I was seen the mid-60s fps frames and that is playing at native 2560 resolutions so sweet that DLSS will help improve things a bit for frame rates but overall and by the way that was on the highest setting of cyberpunk nice,
So I compared that to my Alienware area 51mr2 which has a desktop intel core i7 10700k and an RTX 2070 supermax p full wattage you know what the Alienware had about four-five frames higher using the same setting
But it was only playing at 1080p resolution which is the native resolution of the panel on that laptop that’s when I thought we are making the progress we might not be thrilled that the RTX 3000 isn’t more than 15 to 18 faster than the RTX 2000s.
But you look at this over the evolution of several years and not for somebody who’s going to upgrade from last year’s laptop but several years ago and for something this thin and light it’s just madness so what about surface temperatures and fan noise then surface temperatures are very good on this machine, actually, I was surprised of course it helps that the CPU and the GPU are not killing themselves,
So typically NVidia GPU are capped at somewhere on 75 to 77 degrees centigrade so there’s that but anyway the only hot spot is dead centre above the keyboard where you are not going to be touching it I mean ideally you know you don’t throttle this by putting it on a bed comforter that sort of thing but I had it on my knees and it didn’t cause me pain.
The ventilation on this is the on the bottom very specific there are two cutouts for the fans so try not to block those by the way fan noise well this is still a thin and light gaming laptop so I’m playing something like cyberpunk 2077 or far cry 5, yeah you will hear the fans,
They are not grading annoying whiny or anything like that but there’s plenty of air being moved I played most games in performance mode you can play which isn’t the highest performance mode despite the name in ASUS armoury crate software there’s turbo which is a notch up above that and I would get about three frames per second more four sometimes five at most it also runs a bit hotter and a bit louder not hugely or you can custom tune it yourself which I like to see.
So, what about the GPU itself. This is thin and light so NVidia has done away with the max q max p thing and I wish they hadn’t because we all understood what that meant so this is functionally a max q GPU so it runs at 80 watts and boosts to 100 watts.
So it’s not as so powerful as something like the MSI leopard with the RTX graphics card 3070 that we review that’s a full max p it’s fair given how thin and light this is and performance on it is so darn good that I’m all right with it that speaks to the RTX 3080 though that has the same power limit which is why I’m saying I wouldn’t spend money on that so much because it’s power constraints another thing some people won’t be thrilled about
But I will give them a pass because again the Zephyrus is the thin and light ultra-portable line there is no mux switch there’s no way to switch hardware-wise over just to d GPU mode which typically can get you five to ten frames per second more in games which is nothing to sneeze at obviously but the battery life on this and the temperatures are more of a concerned, so they didn’t go with that plus we have an AMD Radeon integrated GPU and it’s running free sync which is their version of g-sync.
So that’s why they are running it through it, so if you are playing on the internal panel you are going to have NVidia Optimus basically if you use the HDMI 2.0 b port it’s still using NVidia Optimus if you do want to go just d GPU mode only use the USB C port, which supports display port 1.4 out
And you can also get a USB C to HDMI adapter that plugs straight into the dedicated GPU with an external monitor you can get max performance so there is one little caveat there that’s not super unusual for thin and light gaming laptops so we have Optimus the other one is internals there’s nothing wrong with the internals.
The design dual fan design the number of heat pipes like six is very good on this we have not one but 2 m.2 SSD slots these are PCI three, no PCI for like the upcoming Intel 11th gen alas but we have what ASUS has been doing for a while which is one ram slot and some ram soldered onboard.
So the best buy 16 gigs model has eight gigs soldered onboard ddr4 3200 megahertz and one 8 gig module if you go for the RTX 3080 model with 32 gigs of ram you got 16 soldered onboard and one 16 gigs module so anything above what it ships with you knows so you get a 16 gig model if say you decide to upgrade that 8 gigs module to a 16.
The first 16 gigs will still run in dual channel mode but anything above 16 gigs will run the single-channel if you are running a game probably that’s ok just load your game first it will get the dual Dual channel memory but for those who are doing video editing and that sort of thing, we can actually use more than 16 gigs and possibly even more than 32 at times then it could be a concern and again ASUS has been doing this for years with the Zephyrus line I kind of wish they wouldn’t
But I suppose their tradeoff between that and otherwise giving us a smaller battery or fewer ports or whatever, it is.
You know we all complain they still do it again the ASUS rogue Strix does have two ram slots for those of you who want that’s about a pound heavier more RGB bling on it different kind of laptops sort of you get the idea for WI FI, we have an intel WI FI six with Bluetooth five there is a fingerprint scanner and that’s embedded in the power button and much like the ASUS Zephyrus g14 it doesn’t work if maybe 25 of the time it works for me.
Well so how about the competition you are looking at spending significantly less money for some pretty cool stuff here including the Qhd display that may not even be an option in some of the competitors in the premium thin and light range
So that’s the plus for this the Ryzen is a plus it’s going to run cooler it’s going to have better battery life there are the ASUS Strix and Strix scar machines those are a bit bigger and Havier and more blingy but well they do get you things like two ram slots and however pretty much those are just being sold with full HD displays right now which is there’s the Alienware m15r4 which is their refresh with RTX 3000 series graphics and a bigger footprint machine
And if you think having half your ram soldered onboard well it’s worse with Alienware they are soldering all the ram on board and WI FI card solder so you know there’s a lot to be said for this machine right here then there’s the razor blade which is going to cost you more money and has perhaps the most boutique and cleanest looks hard to argue with that one there’s even a Qhd display option again you will be spending more money for that one too port selection on the machine is are excellent.
We have USB c 3.2 gen 2 which means you have got display port 1.4, you have got power in and out and no thunderbolt because well that’s an intel’s intellectual property, we have a two USB a 3.2 gen 2 ports HDMI 2.0 b wired directly to the integrated GPU. We have a gigabit ethernet port and micro sd card slot of course a headphone jack onboard too.
So not bad about the only thing missing is a display port but you can get that via USB c. so battery life well, AMD Ryzen that start to say it all does and that fact we have a large 90 watt-hour battery inside not quite as high as the MSI gs66 stealth with its 99.9-watt hour battery
But still very good and rayzen is so power frugal that if you are doing productivity work streaming video a little of photoshop that sort of thing you can expect anywhere from six to nine battery hours of runtime on this which is superb of course it’s going to be running on the integrated GPU and you can control that sort of with the ASUS army crate software there don’t explain it well
But there’s that so for a gaming laptop insane the charger is also relatively speaking very light and fairly compact it’s a 200-watt charger that comes in a lot lighter than the competition with this which lightens your load which means that your super-light laptop doesn’t suddenly become super heavy because you have got the humongous and heavy charger going along with it.
Those quarter runtimes are with AMD’s very bright option turned off in the AMD Radeon software do go there and do turn that off it doesn’t help battery life much but it does reduce not just the overall brightness of the display when it’s unplugged it reduces the colour gamut too.
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Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 Review Conclusion: –
So that the ASUS republican of gamer or Asus ROG Zephyrus g 15 model 503 for 2021 with NVidia RTX 3000 series graphics and AMD Xen 3 CPUs inside Ryzen so you can tell I like this laptop.
But honestly, for the price a thin and a classy looking gaming laptop like this with great battery life a Qhd display that’s wide gamut and a high refresh rate and they can play any aaa title at a 2k resolution of around 60 frames per second if not higher I mean what’s not to like about that stuff. For more info visit: asus.com