Asus Zephyrus S GX531GM
The battle for ultra-thin gaming rages on.PRICE $3,099
http://www.asus.com/auI
t’s time once again to present that
most tricky proposition: the gaming
ultrabook. Here’s an ultra-thin,
seriously designed piece of gear that
looks as capable of passing itself off in
a boring meeting as it is at offering up
a slice of gaming gateau. But can you
really squeeze everything you need for
gaming into a chassis that’s less than
15mm thick? Let’s find out.
This is actually an updated version of
the GX501, with an eighth-gen 2.2GHz
Core i7-8750H at its heart, and a 144Hz
panel. This panel may lack the G-Sync
cleverness of the original model, but as it
has a lower-powered GeForce GTX 1060
pumping out the pixels, this is less of an
issue, as you’ll be hard pushed to hit the
frame rates needed to make the most of
Nvidia’s screen-smoothing tech anyway.
The screen itself is a beautiful slice
of what’s now possible on laptops, and
the fact that it’s a 144Hz panel means
it’s silky smooth in operation. This is
an IPS-level screen with vibrant color
reproduction and great viewing angles,
and the decision to stick to Full HD, as
opposed a higher resolution, works in its
favor, both for usability in Windows and
as far as that GPU is capable of driving.
A key part of the gaming proposition
is the Armory Crate software, which lets
you change the system profiles. TheGAMING LAPTOPThe screen itself is a
beautiful slice of what’s now
possible on laptops
VERDICT:It’s a bit loud, and
has a more powerful bigger brother...
but this is still a fine choice for an
ultra-thin gaming laptop.^9- Solid design; ultra-thin
•Vibrantscreen
•QuietinSilentmode
•LoudinTurbo mode
•GPUlacksreal gruntkey idea here is that this enables you to
throttle back the performance of the CPU
and/or GPU in order to keep noise levels
down, or alternatively ignore such niceties
and go full bore. Normally, profiles have
only a slight impact on performance/noise,
but here they make a genuine difference.
For the most part, we’re devotees of
using the machine in Silent mode, which
isn’t quite silent, but it is notably quieter
than Balanced or the white noise of the
Turbo mode. Asus has clearly spent a
considerable amount of time honing
the cooling here, and the fact that it has
squeezed a top-notch CPU and a high-end
GPU into such a thin chassis and actually
made them usable is impressive. Having
said that, don’t be fooled into thinking this
thing is above the laws of physics—in
Turbo mode, it’s really freakin’ loud.
To give you an indication of the kind of
impact this can have, 3DMark produced a
score of 10,736 using the Turbo setting,
while the same machine managed just
8,097 when running in Silent mode. For
our main testing, we left the machine in
Balanced mode, which garnered a score
of 10,332 in that same 3DMark, which is
only slightly off the pace of Turbo setting.
If you’re looking to use this as a gaming
machine with the latest titles, you’re
probably going to want to invest in a good
pair of noise-canceling headphones.The build quality is generally excellent,
with the CNC-milled chassis and lid
producing a relatively heavy but solid-
feeling device. The way the bottom drops
down to aid airflow as you open the
screen is particularly pleasing.
There’s another version of this machine
available from Amazon with the same
name, featuring a GeForce GTX 1070
Max-Q in place of the 1060 here, but
costing exactly the same. Obviously, we’d
recommend bagging that instead, unless
you are, for some reason, averse to buying
from Amazon.
ALAN DEXTERWTECH REVIEWP