Desktop performance... In THIS??
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,403 words · ~7 min read
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so we're coming back at you from ces 2019
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where ASUS brought the ces show to us
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this is the zephyrus s
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gx701 the latest in their lineup of
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hyper thin and yet super powerful gaming
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laptops you might not be able to tell from the outside or from its weight or
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even from the inside unless you're like some kind of electronics engineer and or
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you know this heat pipe design means anything to you but this is going to be
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one of the most powerful gaming laptops
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out there we're going to show you all around it
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and our ces coverage this year is brought to you by dbrand you can check
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out dbrand's new second gen grip case this is a drop proof case we've got that
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linked below as well as their prism hammer proof screen protector if the
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links in the video description it links at the links
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i'm standing by
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so from the outside the new zephyrus inherits a lot of the traits of its
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15-inch predecessors it's super thin
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you've got your exhaust ports here here here and here because there is a lot of
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heat to dissipate and you've got actually pretty ample selection of i o
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with the one thing that's notably missing being an rj45 jack because the
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thing is quite honestly just too darn
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thin to fit it but there are some really cool new additions that are obvious
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before we even open it up so while it does have a power in jack it can also
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accept boom right there usb type-c power up to 65 watts so that
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means you can actually top this thing up on the go or at the very least extend
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your gaming time by a little bit another
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thing that's really cool here is that they have made some not too obvious
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changes to the thermal design they're not strictly speaking new to this
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generation of zephyrus but they're definitely worth mentioning so these
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fans here are now made using a liquid crystal polymer which is presumably to
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make them like super mega hyper thin and
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the shrouds for them have been redesigned as well so right here they've
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got like a dust collection chamber so you won't gunk up the fins of your
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heatsink and they've added
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kind of a little pout to it that is to say they've got a little lip
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on the bottom that keeps here we go
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a typical zephyrus fashion that keeps the cool air that's being drawn in from
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this flap that opens up at the bottom when you open up the screen from mixing
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too much with the hot air that's coming out here and here because it wouldn't do
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you a lot of good to exhaust the hot air if you just sucked it right back in now
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let's get it opened up and this is where things get exciting these bezels are
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hyper thin so even though it's a 17 inch
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display the laptop itself is crazily
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actually not that big and there's a couple of options there's a 144 hertz
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1080p version and that guy is going to be obviously for the gamers out there
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but even not quite because it's pantone certified so you could do some light
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content creation on it and they're going to have a 400 nit peak brightness HDR
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display with local dimming so that's right 400 nitpeak brightness
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right so a little bit higher yeah good try
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now one disadvantage to this thin bezel approach that you might have picked up
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on is that uh
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i tried to launch the camera app and oh wow
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it doesn't have a webcam so ASUS's rationale here is that most gamers
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don't care about the webcam anyway so they went so far as to not even include
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a crappy one down here but to rip it out entirely assuming that anything you
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could build into a tiny little bezel or anything like that wouldn't be
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acceptable anyway and they might as well just ship
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a standalone webcam and it appears that
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it mounts that's the standalone stand for it well
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you know what i've had enough of your crap jeff
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it goes like that oh look how much of your screen it covers can it kind of bite onto it like
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that okay so it's an imperfect solution but
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it's better than nothing you know which is quite literally what you have if you
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don't put this on i've been informed it is at least 1080p 60 FPS so
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now let's talk specs this little puppy is equipped with a six core 8750h
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our particular model has 24 gigs of RAM for some reason and you can get it with
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either a gtx 10 20 70 or 20
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max-q did i say gtx the first time damn
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it so this thing is equipped with an rtx
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2070 which i don't know if it's equivalent to the desktop version
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because NVIDIA won't tell us a damn thing about it or a 2080 max q which i
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also don't know a damn thing about because NVIDIA won't tell us anything
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about it so i i don't know how neutered the 2080 max q is although presumably if
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ASUS bothered to do two skews it's either because NVIDIA twisted their ARM
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behind their back or because even with the max q variant the 2080 is still at
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least a little bit faster than 2070. either way what we know
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is that you can turn rtx on and have glorious 40 to 55 FPS gaming
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on this machine and there's a few other extras so the
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keyboard backlight is now brighter than ever this wheel right here adjusts the volume
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and uh oh it has a 50 bigger battery yes my friends ASUS used a bunch of the
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extra space they have down here to put a 76 watt hour battery in this thing so
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now you can game for even a little bit more over an hour
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on battery fabuloso now in fairness to ASUS it does
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include the same GPU switch button that'll actually trigger an entire
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restart of the machine and switch between g-sync discrete graphics mode
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and optimus mode where you can't have g-sync but our testing on the zrsm
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yielded something like 54 minutes of battery life in the pcmark battery test
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even in optimus mode so i'm still not expecting this to be like you know the
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machine for meetings at the office or whatever unless your office has very
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very short meetings it's for gamers come on look at the logo it's rog anyway what
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do people expect it doesn't have Thunderbolt no Thunderbolt
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i disapprove but i approve of this message from
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dbrand without dbrand our trip to ces 2019 wouldn't have been possible so a
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big shout out to those guys go check out their new second gen grip at the link in
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the video description it's grippier than ever so no dropping even for me and it's
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65 thinner than the first generation it
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offers military-grade impact protection along the full case and it's easy to
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customize the back plate also you can protect the front of your phone with
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dbrand now too with their prism screen protector that you can literally smack
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with a hammer and it won't break obviously there are limits to this
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technology we don't recommend trying it at home but it's a heck of a lot better
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than nothing and it's got a nice glass like feel even though it's an impact
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resistant screen protector that's pretty cool go check that out at the link below
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as well so don't miss any of our ces 2019
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content i think the rest of it will actually be on the show floor so we'll
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like see you guys there i'm gonna like warp in between this video and the next
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one to vegas and uh by subscribing to Linus tech tips