this right here believe it or not is the fastest single GPU gaming laptop that we
have ever had in our office the zephyrus
gx701 is an absolute beast rocking a six
core core i7 processor and a GeForce rtx
2080 max q that's clocked closer to a desktop spec than the laptop one
but how the heck have they managed to cram all of that power in here and
has the extra performance been worth the uh
interesting design choices that uh
you know like the keyboard placement wait
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the zephyrus gx701 does an excellent job of looking both classy and gamery at the
same time blending eye-catching details like the colorful rog logos and RGB
keyboard with a very sturdy black magnesium alloy chassis that gives the
device a distinctly premium feel
now the zephyrus does look a bit like an
oddball but at this point we've pretty much come to expect it's small offset
vertical trackpad it's shifted keyboard and the ventilation flap party trick
that opens up the back of the chassis for improved airflow speaking of party
tricks in the box you get a little metal sculpture of the rog logo which is cool
i guess but honestly ASUS i would have much rather there was a
gigabit Ethernet dongle in here it's the only port that's really notably missing
from what's otherwise a very solid assortment of i o with usbc with
charging and full-sized HDMI all making appearances now let's get into
performance as we discussed in our review of the MSI gs75 NVIDIA's mobile
rtx cards can have extremely varied
thermal and power targets with about half of their performance depending on
laptop manufacturer's ability to completely optimize both cooling and
power delivery so with that in mind before we proceed
with our testing we need to disable the illuminated logo right here above the
keyboard because according to ASUS it's possible to see a 3 degree increase in
temperatures while it's on and when push comes to shove it turns
out that we are not actually willing to give up real
performance for RGB lighting
and we don't have to in the 3dmark port
royal test our gx701's graphics core managed 1600 megahertz for the duration
of the test time which is shockingly close to desktop performance and
side note absolutely smashes the MSI gs75
this translates into real-world performance that just runs circles
around last-gen laptops enabling high refresh rate gaming and aaa titles that
previously would have run closer to 60 FPS than they would to 144. now we
haven't got any other max-q laptops in yet so we don't know if others on the
market will be equally fast but we do know that they won't be faster for that
you would need something truly massive like the rog mothership or the alienware
area 51m and there's more good news the FPS isn't
the only thing that's been turned up here so has the screen size with a 17
inch thin bezel display sitting where a 15.6 inch one used to be
but this did come with a sacrifice not only
is there no webcam up here there isn't one anywhere else on the
machine blasphemy now ASUS's solution
was to pack a 1080p 60fps webcam in the
box with the logic being that well we
have to choose between one of two options including a barely usable webcam
like what MSI did with the gs75 stealth
or include one that doesn't fit in the laptop's chassis but is frankly good
enough for twitch streaming well okay fair point but here's my take why are
you guys acting like there are only two ways of doing something why is it my job
to come up with something else here's an idea free of charge you make an indent
here and you put a camera bump there the smartphone industry has been doing it
for years and then we could have even better front-facing cameras or i mean
while we're thinking outside of the box instead of this going on like this how
about magnets there is no reason that they couldn't have run a usb 2 interface
up here had little contact points that power it and handle data and you just
put it on there and it snaps into place now in fairness as it is the quality is
great the best that we've seen on
a gaming laptop but the implementation is
truly clunky back to the display though
this thing is very impressive it's a 144
hertz ips 1080p panel with g-sync 3
millisecond response times and factory calibration from pantone frankly it's
awesome to game on and it's got other benefits too ASUS astutely noticed that
a lot of people purchase gaming computers like this for professional
tasks like cad music creation and video
editing so they actually tuned the display to be more suitable for these
tasks and it's great because video editing on laptops used to be a giant
bag of suck nowadays honestly for basic cutting you can't
tell the difference and even for some late after effects work they are pretty
darn capable of course for more professional or
creative work CPU power is key which is why desktops still have a lot of life in
them by the way i mean any system with a core i7 8700k will destroy the zephyrus
for a lot less money but ASUS has done
quite a bit to make the core i7 8750h in
here more potent its 1200 score in cinebench is higher than most core i9
laptops that we've tested and under an all core synthetic load the CPU gets
toasty while it's turboing then settles down to a more reasonable level at
around three gigahertz sustained that's not bad the only way to get more
performance out of a laptop would be to buy something much thicker which is kind
of becoming a recurring theme here and along with its strong CPU
performance the gx701 can be equipped with up to 24 gigs of RAM eight gigs
soldered while the remaining 16 is on a sodium slot and a one terabyte NVMe SSD
from samsung that really impressed us like this machine regularly loaded games
and completed tasks faster than the two raid zeroed ssds in the gs75
but performance only gets you so far let's return to the questionable
keyboard and trackpad placement i'm actually going to let alex
who did up the review on this field this bit over the last two years here i've
used a ton of laptops and i have to say this design choice of putting the
keyboard right here is not nearly as bad as you'd think like using it on your lap
is a really bad time and so is going from one side of the
screen to the other with this trackpad but beyond that i'm always surprised by
how quickly using the trackpad on the right of the laptop becomes natural to
me after a day of using the zephyrus i suspect you'll be reaching for the
numpad on other laptops instead of the usual trackpad placement the only real
improvement i would have made is to bring back the front firing speakers
from the last zephyrus and use this space to make the trackpad even wider
but Linus and i ended up just debating of whether we'd end up giving up the
surprisingly good sound quality ASUS has been able to squeeze in here
one thing we agree on for sure though is the quality of the keyboard it's got a
bit of an unusual feel but the strokes while short have a nice tactile feel and
the keycap stabilization is well above average making it pretty forgiving for
inaccurate typists it's solid and ASUS
was actually particularly proud of their volume knob which
really does have quite a nice feel and
satisfying click for mute you guys hear that
all right so that's all fine and good but the biggest problem with the
zephyrus has always been its portability
it's small yes light
ish but the last model had a wimpy 53
watt hour battery that struggled to get three hours of light to moderate use in
our testing to address this shortcoming ASUS has finally upped the battery
capacity to 76 watt hours
now to get the most out of it you're going to have to make some tweaks you're
going to want to switch out of dedicated GPU mode which means disabling g-sync
and allowing the Intel igpu to take over for lighter tasks and of course you're
going to have to dial back your RGB and knock the screen refresh rate down to 60
hertz but if you do all these things it adds
up to letting this guy run for about 5 hours on battery with light to moderate
use not too shabby and the type-c usb
charging also helps in this regard because it allows you to pack a much
smaller 65 watt charger if you don't plan on gaming saving you a pound or two
in your backpack so as long as you have a desk wherever you're planning on
working the zephyrus is now a much more compelling option than ever before
as for upgradability well no one's perfect opening it up and
replacing the RAM or storage is possible but there's only one RAM and one m.2
slot making upgrades more wasteful and therefore expensive which in turn makes
it harder for us to recommend the spec down versions of this guy if there's any
chance that you might need to upgrade them later which i guess brings us to
the conclusion for our model here coming in at an eye watering 3 300 us
dollars it's expensive so if you want something
cheaper the MSI gs75 is a solid option
and the zephyrus gx531 still gets you the same CPU for about 1300 less
but the gx701 still walks out of here with a solid recommendation thanks to
ASUS's zero compromise approach to cooling battery life and build quality
with extra marks for the pantone calibrated display
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