Laptops

ROG Zephyrus S GX531GX In-Depth Review – The slimmest gaming laptop in 2019!

Towards the end of last summer, a new line of laptop’s emerges, claimed to be the thinnest gaming laptop and although time flies in this market, 6 months later, I still believe that ASUS ROG Zephyus S holds true to the Taiwanese company’s statement.

Powerful, compact, thin gaming laptop

Performance - 8.5
Build Quality and Materials - 9.5
Display quality - 9.3
Design - 10
Keyboard - 9.5
Ergonomics - 8
Cooling System - 9.5
Noise - 7
Connectivity - 9.5
Battery - 7.5

8.8

The performance is great for a compact and thin laptop. It can also be used in Turbo mode if you have well-insulated headphones. For the more demanding folk I recommend Silent mode (don’t be too hopeful, it's not exactly silent when we talk about 4500rpm in load). Silent mode is on average 12% slower than Turbo, so I strongly recommend it if you can’t stand noise. The Zephyrus S GX531GX is probably the smallest, coolest and most advanced 15" gaming laptop on the market with the Intel i7 8750H processor and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q.

User Rating: 5 ( 2 votes)

Design and Build Quality: a 15″ laptop that fits into a 14″ backpack!

The Axe Effect of IT, folks. We laugh, but when it comes to design, you can’t deny the new Zephyrus GX531.

The laptop measures just 16mm at its thickest, with the lid closed, and when the lid is open the bottom part, which shelters all the gaming arsenal – from the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q video card to the Intel processor, memories, motherboard and everything else, including the 60Wh battery – is just 1cm thick! This is the thinnest gaming laptop. Actions, not words, people.

Practically, the chassis of the laptop has the size of a 14.2″ laptop, made of an aluminum and magnesium alloy with premium, flawless finishes. The cover is anodized in two phases, creating an exciting effect that gives the laptop an elegant look, akin to the ZenBook range. As a bonus to fans, the ROG eye, the backlight, is enough to be noticed and admired without disturbing with powerful LEDs and you can turn it off if you like.

All good so far, but there’s still a niggle of doubt in my head: How can such a beastly GeForce RTX 2080 Max Q GPU and top-of-the-line Intel i7-8750H six-core, 4.1GHz CPU with its 45W thermal design power rating, fit in there? How’d they pull it off? Well, stay tuned to find out. Let’s see if any compromises have been made to the heat at bay.

But before we do that, we still need to answer another important question: How did ASUS succeed in creating a 15″ high-performance gaming laptop, while keeping it so compact? First off, like other ultra-compact laptops – such as the recent excellent ZenBook 13 – the Taiwanese manufacturer has thinned the edges of the screen to the minimum: approx. 7 mm lateral and a 10 mm upper bezel, slightly thicker, in order to accommodate the webcam.

Touchpad? Numpad? Both!

The second element that helped drop the size of the laptop was the revamped Touchpad / Numpad system. The touchpad also serves as a Numpad, the switch between the two done by pressing a single button. Once the Numpad / Touchpad button is pressed, the numbers and symbols found on any numpad appear, obviously illuminated in the red, ROG style, because of course they are.

A new Zephyrus fashion statement is the moving of the keyboard to the bottom of the chassis, that is, bye-bye Palm Rest. This is ok because we have a very thin chassis, but if you don’t have the laptop on a desk, ergonomics suffers: it forces you to move your elbows backward, and you glue your arms against your body. When working on my laptop on the couch, felt like a T-Rex, with small, hilarious front limbs, tapping away.

The reason ASUS chose this design is obvious: the CPU and GPU require a complex cooling system, occupying the entire area between the keyboard and the base of the screen, with the battery hidden under the keyboard. Placing all the hot components away from the keyboard helps provide a better typing experience, as the keyboard area remains cool.

The keys have a very short 1.2mm stroke, but after a while, you get used to it and life goes on. And it will go a long way with this keyboard, as the manufacturer specifies a 20 million click lifetime for these keys (with n-key rollover technology). Typing is nice, I always appreciate that little “hump” before the key touches the trigger point. The WASD keys are well contoured and highlighted, so I’ll have little to whine about the small directional keys that are mostly sacrificed (the GL553 and GL504 still kept these at normal size…) but when your tolerances are scoped by the millimeter, you must compromise.

The backlight is also enjoyable. 4 independent zones, and even if the illumination is per-key, it is appealing and quite customizable: Armoury Crate’s AURA software can create various effects as well as synchronize the keyboard lighting with other AURA peripherals (mouse, headset, etc.).

And though it’s nothing to do with the AURA keyboard theme, I will mention the side lights that light up the moment you open the lid: in the ventilation slot, there are RGB LEDs that make your nights more colorful.

Under the hood: taking a closer look at the cooling system

A third, very important feature that has allowed the chassis size reduction is the unique ROG Active Aerodynamic cooling System, introduced for the first time in the Zephyrus series. As you can see in the picture below, when you lift the aluminum lid of your laptop, the hinge engages a system that opens the lid on the bottom of the Zephyrus to allow it to “breathe better”.

More precisely, with the 5mm slit that introduces cold air into the system, the ventilation system is 22% more efficient than that of a regular laptop, according to ASUS. The hot air is then expelled from the system through four exhaust vents on the left, right and back of the laptop.

I must admit, even gaming, advanced graphics editing, and rendering make the system noisy on Turbo mode (available from the Armoury Crate Control Center), neither the GPU nor processor have exceeded 70C! Wow. So yes, we can have decent performance and temperatures in a case worthy of Guinness Book pages. At least with headphones, because otherwise the airflow generated by the over-7000 RPM fans will have your family kick you out, or vice-versa. It takes 12V power to get the fans that fast but fear not, there are plenty of quieter operation modes (though obviously, performance will suffer a little).

IPS, 144Hz, 3ms Display: perfect for gaming but also good for photo and movie editing

The screen offers a Full HD, 144Hz, 3ms experience. No G-Sync, possibly to save space or battery times. As far as the Full HD screen is concerned, the framerate in most games will be very high, with little obvious tearing. Most of the time you will not feel the lack of G-Sync unless you go over 144 fps.

Colors are displayed correctly, the sRGB color space coverage is 100%, ideal for video as well as photo editing, and Pantone validated.

Performance: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q crazyness

We finally reached what we all care about, gamers. I passed the system through all the important tests to see the behavior of the processor, video card and SSD, but especially the system, so let’s find out how ASUS dealt with the rise in temperature.

I tested the laptop in three ways: Turbo to see maximum gross performance (good only if you are alone in a room with headphones), Balanced and Silent mode, which provides a very quiet operation at a 9 -15% performance drop from the maximum. The difference between modes is obviously due to the processor frequency, its voltage, etc. and hence temperatures and the need for better cooling. When in Silent mode, the processor is “asleep”, keeping to lower frequencies and so keeping the fans quiet.

The Balanced mode, unfortunately, is closer to Turbo, with fans spinning up to 5700-6000 rpm in intense scenes, which is quite noisy.

I would have liked a less aggressive Balanced Mode. However, the difference in performance between Turbo and Silent is not so terrible, I don’t really see the reason for the Balanced mode, it complicates matters unnecessarily (the Silent has about 2700rpm, but in some cases it rises to 4500rpm, without the noise becoming upsetting).

Storage: Good SSD, but quite small

Personally, it seems strange to me that a flagship Zephyrus gaming laptop only comes with a 512GB SSD. We installed 6 new games and poof, 100GB left. There is no second free slot, so… plan well what games you play, buy an external SSD or upgrade to a 1TB SSD M.2 NVMe. By the way, our test model (GX531GX with 512GB) has the SSD connected to PCIe3.0 x2, which may bottleneck a top-of-the-line SSD. Not the case for the 660p series on our model, but a Samsung 970 would have seen its maximum speed culled.

Connectivity: Top of the range wireless connectivity, decent wired LAN

Like other ASUS laptops I tested lately, this Zephyrus GX531GX also shines when it comes to wireless LAN. When all games download at over 50MB/s, whether it’s Steam, Epic Store, Origin or UPlay, I can only say, YES! Go ASUS! The Intel Wireless-AC 9560 did not leave me out to dry.

As for wired connectivity, things are also great here: 1xUSB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C with DisplayPort and charging, 1x USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type C, 1x USB 3.1 Type A, 2x USB 2.0 Type A, and an HDMI 2.0b port so you can connect to 4K 60Hz monitors. Unfortunately, a Thunderbolt 3 port is nowhere to be found on this Zephyrus. Perhaps it got shy when ROG engineers were putting the design together.

Battery: A tad too low

The 60Wh battery is a little tiny, literally and figuratively. The laptop’s autonomy – isn’t very. For example, working in Battery Saving mode, with screen brightness at 70%, I managed to browse YouTube for only 2 hours and 20 minutes (the screen isn’t very bright and working in a well-lit room with the window behind me, I just could not below this level of illumination).

Conclusion

I had to run 3 laptops’ worth of tests to understand this Zephyrus machine. You don’t get to fool around with such a small jewel every day, boasting a CPU with a TDP of 45w and which reaches 80-85% of the performance of my PC’s 8700K in Cinebench. Moreover, it has an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q, which, although gimped by NVIDIA, with clocks between 835-1195 MHz (only 100Mhz boost above base clocks), still has a 80W TDP. Overall, I’m impressed.

The performance is great for a compact and thin laptop. It can also be used in Turbo mode if you have well-insulated headphones. For the more demanding folk I recommend Silent mode (don’t be too hopeful, it’s not exactly silent when we talk about 4500rpm in load). Silent mode is on average 12% slower than Turbo, so I strongly recommend it if you can’t stand noise.

The Zephyrus S GX531GX is probably the smallest, coolest and most advanced 15″ gaming laptop on the market with the Intel i7 8750H processor and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q.

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