Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX701 Review – Absolute Geeks
Mục Lục
Asus ROG Zephyrus GX701
8.3
Design & Build
9.1/10
Performance
9.4/10
Screen
9.0/10
Battery
6.9/10
Keyboard
9.0/10
Noise
6.5/10
Pros
- Great Performance
- Good Heat Management
- Decent Keyboard
- Unique and Usable Webcam
Cons
- Poor Battery Life
- Noisy
- Poor Speaks
ASUS’s Republic of Gamers lineup keeps pumping out some pretty wild gaming laptops. Their desire to always push the envelope gives us some pretty great performing laptops. The ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX701 is just that good mix of sugar and spice. But is everything nice? Here is our review of the ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX701.
Design & Build
The ASUS Zephyrus S GX701 has a rather unassuming design when its closed and lying on a desk. Sure it looks great even then, but simply looking at it closed does not tell you anything about the theatre of it. In true ROG fashion, the Zephyrus S GX701 has a brushed aluminium body with the sharp lines and LEDs integrated all over. It looks and feed stellar.
When you open up the screen on the laptop, the laptop just has this beautiful flow to it. The keyboard side of the laptop rises smoothly. If you don’t know, the GX701 has a unique heat management solution which opens up the bottom of the body to allow better airflow through the laptop. This ensures that this thin performance beast still stays cool and doesn’t suffer greatly from thermal throttling.
The screen itself feels sturdy and doesn’t flex much. The hinge on the screen also feels built to last. With a very sturdy and durable feel.
The laptop is quite thin, but it all seems packed in tightly because it isn’t the lightest thing out there. It’s a big deceptive, but who cares when it looks this amazing!
The keyboard and mouse layout is rather strange for most people. While the typing experience is great, and I will talk about it later, the layout is focused around heat management. The keyboard is now at the bottom of the laptop and the trackpad is moved to the right side.
Performance
The Zephyrus adds to ASUS’s lineup of gaming laptops that supports the Nvidia RTX series of graphics cards. ASUS has done a great job cranking the systems up to the limit and even find unique and interesting solutions to save them from thermal throttling. Keep that in mind, the ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX701 definitely boasts the specs to be on the forefront.
The specific specs of the unit we had was:
- Intel Core i7-8750H – 2.2 Ghz Hexa-Core
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 (with 8GB GDDR6 RAM)
- 24GB DDR4 RAM at 2,666 MHz
- 1TB SSD (M.2 NVMe)
The specs are honestly through the roof. It’s like ASUS literally addressed the issues we highlighted in our review of the ROG Strix Scar II. If you got the stack, you can definitely get this to be part of your gaming stash.
CPU
Memory (RAM)
GPU
MotherBoard
We tested the Zephyrus with titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Call of Duty Black Ops 4. Both games ran really well when the system is cracked all the way. Getting up to a blistering 144 FPS at points in the game. Considering the screen the experience was absolutely sublime. Sure these frames are consistent and you could say we got an average of about 108 FPS on SotTR and about 120 for BlackOps. I would say, drop a bit of the graphics and really crank up the FPS to enjoy that buttery smooth graphics.
Just like the Strix Scar II the Zephyrus is seriously noisy. For normal usage you can put the laptop into Silent mode which will throttle the laptop and thus quiet it down. It’s quite silent in that mode.
One of the most unique aspects of the Zephyrus S is the unique cooling solution that ASUS has put into the laptop. As you open the screen, the bottom of the laptop opens up as well revealing the vents. It’s like two prongs push out the bottom of the laptop (on the back edge, right under the monitor hinges). This allows better airflow and thus better heat management.
Air intake from the top
The bottom opens up
Nvidia
This is great because the ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX701 gets really hot. This heat management is also the reason the keyboard and trackpad are confiered the way they are. The top of the laptop base is for airflow as the CPU and GPU are positioned there. The keyboard is thus moved down to be on those parts of the laptop that don’t require any special care.
Here are the benchmark tests we ran on the ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX701:
3DMark – Time Spy
PCMark10
Superposition
CPU-Z
Ports and What’s in the box
The port selection on the ASUS Zephyrus S GX701 is pretty extensive. You get the following:
- 1 x USB3.1 Gen2 Type-C with DisplayPort 1.4. Which doubles as a “charging port”, more on that below.
- 1 x USB3.1 Gen1 Type-C
- 1x USB3.1 Gen2 Type-A
- 2x USB3.1 Gen1 Type-A
- 1x HDMI 2.0b
- 1x 3.5mm headphone and microphone combo jack
There are two interesting parts to the list above. First, there is no Ethernet port. This can be a bit of a bummer if you heavily rely on it. If I was playing online regularly (which I don’t), then I would have to get a USB-to-ethernet adapter, since that the most reliable way to game online.
Second, there is a USB Type-C port that can be used to deliver power to the laptop. This is not the main power port though. You might be asking yourself “Why would they do that?”, and you are not alone. This port however, does not replace your power adapter as you can’t really charge the laptop from a power bank but instead you can extent the life by providing extra juice. This port also doubles as an external charger which allows you to charge your phones or other devices with.
ROG Gladius II
Ribbon LED Lights
LED Lighting all around
In the box you get a bunch of extras what are the same as that in ROG Strix Scar II. You get the ROG Gladius II mouse which, if you read our other review you would know, is a pretty great mouse. Here is what we had to say about the mouse:
It’s high precision and even has this lovely led in the base that just wows anyone who uses it. There are a bunch of gamer focused buttons as well, totalling up to 4 buttons, the scroll wheel and the right and left clicks. While the trackpad is great to use for normal tasks, this mouse is a perfect addition for gaming. The mouse has a detachable USB cable, which is great when travelling
From the ROG Strix Scar II review
You also get an over the ear pair headphones, once again they are the same modular headphones you get with the ROG Strix Scar II. It comes with a detachable dedicated mic. It has an in line mic (yes that means two mics), audio jack extensions and even a headphone and mic splitter.
Screen & Battery
The monitor on the ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX701 is the buttery smooth 144 Hz monitor. It has a 1920×1080 resolution, which as you might know I both like and prefer for gaming. Frames and HD Gaming over 4K gaming. At this price point you look at the higher refresh rate and not the number of pixels.
Keeping with the ROG tradition, the bezels on the screen are really small. With the external camera, ASUS has further pushed the envelope.
ASUS is very proud of their screen and they should be, the matte finish and high quality panel does make playing games alot of fun. My only issue was the brightness, it just barely gets bright enough to play in normal sunlight. No, I’m not talking about outdoors, even indoors it’s not bright enough.
The battery on the ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX701 was quite a let down. On normal usage, in silent mode, the laptop was barely able to pull off 4 hours. When gaming on high loads you can get about 2 hours, which is not that great, but if you plug in an external power bank then you can push this a bit further.
Keyboard and Mouse
The laptop on the ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX701 was actually quite good in my books. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s a great keyboard, I’m saying its good for a thin gaming laptop. The keyboard felt nice and responsive and has a relatively decent amount of travel. It doesn’t feel mushy or annoying, even while using for a long time. I could see myself using this keyboard for long durations.
The Keyboard has the same LED brilliance you would expect in a gaming laptop. The LEDs are bright and have some cool effects. But as seen in my previous review, the software is where you are let down. There aren’t many configuration options and leaves a lot to be desired, especially when compared to other manufacturers.
The trackpad being on the right side actually makes good sense as its more of a natural placement of an external mouse and keyboard. Having said that, the mouse being on the right side might not seem like a big issue for most users, but on the other hand (sorry couldn’t help myself) it feels like a rather big issue for left handed users. Since I’m right handed it’s not an issue, but would love to hear feedback from any left-handed gamers.
The trackpad itself was respectable, its responsive and quite decent to use for navigating Windows. The moment you get into gaming, you quickly want to move to the external mouse provided in the box.
The trackpad does come with the cool calculator feature. With the push of a button the trackpad transforms into a calculator with this cool overlay on the trackpad. This is a great feature since I would almost always use an external mouse and instead of rendering the trackpad useless, it doubles as a calculator. The best part is that it actually works really well.
Webcam and Speakers
The GX701 had to do something strange with the webcam in order to ensure that this gaming laptop doesn’t fall short where others do. You can say with certainty that most of the webcams on gaming laptops are… shit. Not only is the quality poor, the location of the webcams seem to almost purposely built to view your nose rather than face. Thankfully ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX701 has tried to not fall victim to those issues.
ASUS has done this by doing away with the inbuilt webcam and taking it off body. All this is to say that you get an external webcam which has its own inbuilt mic. The webcam is a 1080p HD camera and I can honestly say that it’s pretty decent. It won’t win you any awards, but the webcam can actually be used for video streaming in a well lit room
The design is quite unique such that you can put the webcam on the desk or even camp it to the top of the laptop monitor and
The speakers on the Zephyrus S GX701 is really nothing worth writing a review about. Especially with the noisy laptop, the sound doesn’t really get through when gaming. The speakers are loud, but the sound stage is nothing great. Very tinny sound that can serve adequately when the headphones are not around and you have no other solution.
Other Points
The ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX701 solves some of the issues that we at AbsoluteGeeks have seen on ASUS’s other gaming laptops and are very happy with those changes.
There are other issues that seem to have regressed or not improved, but that’s the compromise manufacturers like ASUS must make.
From the point of view of software, especially LED controls, things are basically the same and that’s a bit of a let down.
Volume Changer
Dedicated Buttons
The dedicated buttons on the Zephyrus are a volume control slider, the profile switcher, the mousepad/calculator changer and the power button. Everything else are Fn buttons at the top of the keyboard merged with the F row on the keyboard.
