Asus Zephyrus S GX531GS Review

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Part of Asus’s high-end Republic of Gamers lineup, Asus’ Zephyrus S GX531GS is a top-shelf gaming choice that pushes the boundaries of what we’ve come to expect from gaming laptop design. It’s wildly different in more ways than one, and we’ll explore them all posthaste.

Design

The Zephyrus S features a design that’s ostentatious at times, outrageous at others. Let’s start with the chassis. Crafted from a mix of aluminum and magnesium, it’s a slim slab of black metal (just 20mm thick, the thinnest laptop in this comparison) with a striking diagonal pattern on the upper lid that’s solid matte on one side, brushed metal on the other. The screen’s hinge isn’t placed quite at the rear of the machine, but rather about an inch forward, giving it a small ledge to rise above when opened. Oddly, Asus doesn’t use this extra room to place all the ports on the rear, but rather dots ports around three sides of the machine. When the screen is open, a special vent opens along the bottom rear of the laptop, allowing for improved cooling and exposing interior LED lighting inside the machine. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever encountered before in a notebook… and things continue their bizarre twist when you turn to the keyboard. The keyboard is not pushed forward on the chassis as it is on a typical laptop, but rather pulled all the way forward to the front of the machine. The touchpad is moved to the far right, next to the keyboard, a radical design change that takes some real retraining in how you work, but which eventually starts to feel more natural.

Features

Got an external mouse? Press a hotkey and the touchpad turns into a touch-sensitive numeric keypad. Critical operational features can be accessed via another hotkey, letting you see everything from CPU load to the internal temperature and the speed of the two fans on the system. Fan speed can be controlled with yet another key. The keyboard offers full-color backlighting, with the keyboard divided into four large zones. While you can’t tweak the backlight color for each key, thanks to some optical trickery, its shifting, rainbow-like backlighting looks almost as good as keyboards with per-key lighting. Finally, two speakers are embedded into the hinge cover, so they’re always facing forward, ensuring they’re plenty beefy and loud.

Specs

Though it looks like it’s from the future, the Zephyrus S has a fairly standard spec list, and it’s perfectly workable for this category. Key components include a 2.2GHz Core i7-8750H CPU (eighth generation) and 16GB of RAM, plus an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 GPU. The included 512GB SSD might be small for some, but it helps to keep the weight of the system (at 4.6 pounds) on the low side. Expansion ports are solid, including two USB-C ports, three traditional USB ports (one USB 3.1, two USB 2.0), and HDMI output. All that’s really missing is a memory card slot.

Performance

The Zephyrus turned in a performance that was remarkably close to the average, almost across the board, with most scores – including graphics tests and general application tasks (which comprise web page rendering, business productivity applications, and digital media creation work) – with a couple of percentage points of the mean. The Zephyrus did outpace the field by 10 percent on my Monster Hunter test and was 5 percent faster at running the Heaven 4.0 benchmark. Screen brightness was also the best in this comparison, by a considerable margin.

Adeel Arshad

Battery

On full-screen video playback, the Zephyrus S pulled out 4 hours, 21 minutes of running time, which is an acceptable score – though not nearly as high as some of the other laptops in this roundup. That said, that score should offer plenty of longevity for just about any gamer while they’re away from a power source.

Conclusion

The jury’s out on whether moving the trackpad to the side of the keyboard makes any sense at all. I never fully got used to it, but since most gamers use an external mouse, I’m not sure it matters anyway. The rest of the Zephyrus, which is striking in its design, are quite appealing, and performance is solid. The kicker is the price: For just $1799, one of the cheapest price tags in this comparison, it’s almost impossible not to recommend.

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