Strixly Gaming

THE TECHLIFE TEAM TESTS THE LATEST TECH GEAR AND PCS, STARTING WITH ASUS’S SURPRISINGLY-AFFORDABLE NEW GAMING LAPTOP.

ASUS Strix GL502VT A FUTURE -PROOFED GAMING LAPTOP THAT COSTS LESS THAN YOU MIGHT THINK.

ASUS’S STRIX GL502VT is far from heavy. Not everyone will like its appearance, but you couldn’t call it bad-looking. And while it’s not quite a bargain, it’s reasonably priced for the specs on o er. In many ways, we were expecting the GL502VT to be a commonplace upgrade of something like the GL552W (reviewed in TechLife 51, page 52) that would lead to a decent middle-of-the-road gaming laptop, but once you get past the facade, the di erences seep in and they throw that idea of normalcy out the window.

We’ve noticed a trend of late of laptop manufacturers only installing SSDs in their gaming-oriented models, and that’s the case here, too. at’s a bit of a double-edged sword, as makers are o en sacri cing much larger HDDs in order to do so and it can be a design decision that makes the gaming laptop about as useful as a holey bucket — at least if you want to have more than a few games installed at a time. While we can certainly understand the appeal of the Samsung PCIe M.2 SSD that ASUS has used here — with its 2,000MB/s read and 400MB/s plus write speeds — that 256GB capacity is likely to leave you wanting more space sooner rather than later — especially if you’d like to throw some HD movies and TV or other big media les on there alongside your games.

e other notable upgrade of the GL502VT from the GL552W is the addition of a 4K IPS display. But again, a 4K display is a bit of a mixed blessing. Attached to a powerful desktop gaming rig, they can deliver a great experience, but you’re not going to be gaming in 4K on the GL502VT — the internal hardware is not that fast. So apart from having a sharper image and being able to stream 4K video content on it, the usefulness of this display is somewhat limited.

ere’s another downside to that screen — the strain it adds to battery life. e GL502VT netted just 2 hours and 33 minutes in our PC Mark 8 Home battery-life test — and that was with the battery-saver optimisations on. Switch to high-performance mode and you’ll only reach around 1 hour and 14 minutes.

e Intel i7-6700HQ CPU and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M GPU come together nicely here, easily pumping out respectable frame rates on the latest titles at 1080p. e GL502VT matched the scores of the 2016 Alienware Alpha (a device which uses a desktop-class GTX 960), with average frame rates of 59, 35 and 72 from Batman: Arkham Knight, FarCry Primal and Rainbow Six Siege on high and ultra settings. e chassis does get warm in certain hotspots above the keyboard when it’s under load, but the CPU and GPU both remained under 81ºC, a fairly safe level, throughout our tests.

e GL502VT’s keyboard is full-sized, yet it’s ditched any space around the number pad and even a few of the keys to make it slot in Tetris- style on the right of the directional keys. e speakers aren’t great, despite sitting particularly close to each of your ears on either edge of the base of the unit, roughly in line with the trackpad.

Still, we were surprised the street price landed at a reasonable $2,300 for the 4K model, which means it’s hard to be too harsh about the cutting-edge technology slicing both ways. And at 2.2kg, the beeer hardware hasn’t made the device unwieldy by any means either — this is a gaming laptop that’s not too painful to cart around with you.