ASUS ZEPHYRUS S

The battle for ultra-thin gaming rages on

Meet the new king of thin & light gaming

IT’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. The key 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. THE SILENT TREATMENT 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—although, to be fair, it was vocal in hitting that score.

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. And be prepared to annoy anyone and everyone around you. Alternatively, playing on Silent mode is a genuine option, and should still see you right in most games, albeit at slightly lower settings and frame rates.

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 is one area that isn’t so impressive—the plastic at the bottom of the screen panel is feeble in comparison to the rest of the machine, and flexes to the touch.

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—in which case, this model is absolutely fine. –ALAN DEXTER