Asus ROG Strix G15 gaming laptop

This is the Asus ROG Strix G15 gaming laptop that has a new AMD Zen3 mobile processor the ryzen 9 5900HX, that has the latest Nvidia mobile GPU, the GeForce RTX 3070. 

 

And that has a brand new 165 hertz Quad HD IPS panel. And even though the name Strix g 15 is new. 

 

This is a proper next-generation laptop and there are so many things to get excited about when it comes to this machine. 

 

But some things aren't as exciting as you might have thought and before you get ready to spend roughly 2000 euros or $1800 for this particular model. 

 

Let's see what you should realistically expect from this thing.

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Design, Materials, Build Quality

 

At first glance, this new G15 does feel very familiar and it looks very much so like a typical ROG laptop, but the chassis is new, and there are several differences between this one and the older G15 models. 

 

The first one is that the new 15 is a bit smaller in every way so it's about a centimeter shorter and a centimeter less deep. 

 

It did get a tiny bit thicker as a result but that difference is too small to even notice it is still a performance focus gaming laptop so it's not the thinness or delight this machine of them all, but in 2.3 kilos, it is still light enough to drag it around with you. 

 

And keep in mind that gives you space for that higher power graphics card, and of course, for a little bit of RGB as well. 

 

The top cover does have a nice layer of aluminum, which looks and feels very nice, but do keep in mind and most of this chassis is still made of plastic. 

 

I mean the quality is quite good but you know don't expect a MacBook or razor blade metal tank kind of experience. 

 

That the biggest improvement is the underside of the laptop which feels sturdier and looks well ventilated but I'll talk about that when I get to the performance part later on. 

 

Connections, Charger, Type-C 

 

Now in terms of connections, it is pretty much the same story as it was before you get to five gigabit USB ports on the left, as well as a headphone jack.

 

There is nothing on the right side which is great in my opinion because it won't interfere with your mouse. 

 

And on the back, there is the power connection, a gigabit Ethernet HDMI USB 3.2 Gen two type C port, and another five gigabit USB type port, which seems like a good amount. 

 

Overall, what I find interesting is that ACS is focusing on the power delivery as well this time, the new 241 breaks are smaller than before. 

 

And I would say even smaller than I've seen on most competing laptops. You also have the option to charge it via a D-type C port with up to 100 watts. 

 

Now 100 watts is worthy enough to game on the go, but it will be plenty for like office use or your school use. 

 

And as you will see later in this review this laptop has a very good battery life, but you know if you do need to be super mobile and you do need a bit more power, you can just use any compact type C charger to top it off, and that's it. 

 

Keyboard, Touchpad

 

Now on the inside, it's pretty much the same as the last generation laptop so which is completely fine. There isn't too much flex into the chassis. 

 

The keyboard is pretty good and very easy to get used to. And I do appreciate the extra keys at the top for volume or opening the software to quickly change some settings. 

 

Now keyboard can make or break a lot of experience in my opinion and I do think that this one just works well for both gaming, and work, and the touchpad is.

I mean, okay, I guess it's a touchpad After all, it is fine for a gaming laptop and it won't cause any trouble when you do use it every once in never because you know I cannot do anything without a mouse but if you need to use it is going to be fine. 

 

Now one thing that's still missing from the inside is the webcam which I don't get. I know this is a gaming laptop and many gamers won't really care, but it is also the year 2021, where many of us need to work from home or study from home. 

 

I mean even my seven-year-old needs a webcam to use teams for his Elementary School. 

 

Now last year I did give them a pass because no one could have seen all of this coming. 

 

But this year they had plenty of time for this lineup so I know that some of you don't like webcams for privacy reasons, but I do think that this is a clear downside. 

 

1440p 165Hz IPS Display Performance

 

But let's get to the good stuff right now and that is the panel of this thing. And this 1440 165 hertz battle makes the biggest difference in using this laptop as a daily driver compared to the gaming laptops with fast 10 ATP screens. 

 

Now just having that higher resolution means the screen is visibly sharper than the previous fast gaming panels. And more importantly, you gain a significant amount of workspace, as well. 

 

Now I do know there were gaming laptops with high-resolution screens before this one. 

 

But those always run at 60 hertz while this one has a refresh rate of 165 hertz so you don't need to choose anymore between speed, or space, you just get both, it also feels like a fast screen when you're gaming.

 

It's maybe not at the same level as a proper desktop 4040 p gaming monitor, but motion clarity is similar to gaming panels from the last generation that was rated at three milliseconds. 

 

So I would say is just a good experience overall. For the benchmark results aren't that bad either. The color gamut especially is excellent with a full sRGB coverage and 94% DCI p3 coverage. 

 

The factory calibration does oversaturate reds and greens are tiny bits that make the colors powerful and look nice while in gaming, but you should tweak those if you are serious about the photo or video editing. 

 

Now the contrast isn't amazing but it is fine. And the same goes for the white point and the gamma curve. The maximum brightness seems pretty average at just under 300 nits. 

 

So I would say it is going to be fine for anything indoors but not great for gaming outside in the sunlight, which you shouldn't do anyway. 

 

AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU Performance 

 

Another really strong point and this laptop is, of course, the news and three CPU so this model comes with an eight-core ryzen 9 5900 HX. 

 

It runs at around 35 watts typically but it can be pushed up to 80 watts, in some scenarios. 

 

Depending on your profile settings. And even if you leave it in the default performance mode which does put it at around 35 watts. 

 

The performance is really impressive. In cinebench 15 and 20, it easily beats Intel's ultimate I 910 and nine at HK which uses a lot more power. 

 

And it even pulls ahead of the desktop Core i9 9900 k from the MSI GT 76 Titan, and in a single-core test, it just, you know, humiliates both. 

 

Now all the raw power doesn't always translate to performance in every test because if we look at blender, for example, it only does a little bit better than last-gen AMD CPUs and Intel's eight cores are still very competitive as well. 

 

But at the end of the day, most of those differences don't matter that much. Anyway, and what you should take away from all this is that this G 15 has plenty of horsepower for pretty much any task, but if you already have a recent eight-core CPU, you don't instantly need to you know throw it out of the window and buy this one.

 

1080p Gaming Performance

 

But let's talk about gaming for a second here because this is where things get a little bit complicated. Now when looking at laptops, the first three games I always test are always the same. 

 

Division 2 ,Far Cry 5 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and with a brand new high-end CPU and Nvudia's latest RTX 3070. 

 

I expected this laptop to pull ahead of the pack by a lot, but it didn't in Division 2 it did end up near the top only behind high power RTX 2080 max B units, which is fair, but some RTX  2080 max Q and RTX  2070 max your laptops for only a few frames behind in Far Cry five it ended up behind some of the RTX  when you 70s, which kind of seemed a bit odd, and in Assassin's Creed Odyssey it did perform near the top.

 

But again, some 2017 laptops scored pretty similarly here as well. 

 

Now I mean these numbers are all fine on their own, but it did feel a bit disappointing. 

 

Gaming Performance ( ASUS ROG Laptop)

 

After seeing how big of a jump desktop RT x cards made, but laptops are a bit more difficult to compare than desktop GPUs as well because there are a lot of different parts here that are playing a certain role right and it can sometimes be difficult to see where the bottleneck. 

 

So I wanted to test a few more games with a different approach this time around, comparing how they perform on this 2021 G13 against my Strix scar from two years ago which actually had to save 2000 euro price, and also has a 151 GPU, but a 27, of course. 

 

So what did two years of CPU and GPU development give us in terms of game performance? 

 

Well, not much to be honest. There are improvements across the board, but it depends on which game you're looking at. 

 

So some games show really big improvements like division to Doom Metro Exodus and Borderlands three other games like Shadow the Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed Valhalla show a reasonable improvement. 

 

But some games barely run faster at all, and some older games like Far Cry five, but also more recent games like watchdogs Legion, for example, I can't see why but it just looks like that this Arctic's 3070, isn't that much faster than its predecessor at NADP, and some games even seem to struggle to benefit from this faster, AMD CPU over an older ninth Gen Intel with fewer cores. 

 

1440p Gaming Performance

 

Now since this is the first proper gaming laptop with a 1440 p screen. I also wanted to see the game performance here because that's kind of the point of this laptop right. 

 

I don't have data to compare it to. But on its own, I would say it looks pretty good. In most heavy triple-A titles, you can expect smooth frame rates at high, or even ultra settings and games that support in video class.

 

Especially do really well now seeing that this laptop didn't seem that much faster than the previous laptops at 10 ATP, and then most of these 1440 p frame rates aren't that much lower from the tenant if your results. 

 

It just seems like we're reaching that same point, as we have with desktop PCs, where newer and more powerful GPUs mostly make sense if you're also going up in resolution. 

 

But the important thing here is the bottom line and that is that you can have a good quality gaming experience with this laptop.

 

Thermal Performance

 

It goes to thermal performance so I think aces made very good progress this time around. They told me they would add extra heat pipes to most new models and that seems to have paid off. 

 

Most gaming laptops in the past hit around 90 degrees or more. 

 

And here in the default performance mode, both CPU and GPU sit much closer to 80 degrees Celsius, which I think is a pretty comfortable temperature, and it's not extremely loud for the laptop, either standing at 4070 decibels. 

 

In turbo mode, it does get a bit louder but it still holds up well, stressing both the CPU and the GPU at the same time, and the CPU starts to pull around 53 watts, instead of 35, but for CPU and GPU stress test 89 degrees and 83 degrees, respectively, are not bad results at all. 

 

He says does include a quiet mode as well which does keep the system a lot quieter by limiting the CPU and the GPU power draw a lot. 

 

It stays cool but it does hurt your GPU clock so don't expect to play serious games in this silent mode, it is mostly meant for you to know work and school uses the reason it performs so well we can also see on the inside of the laptop. 

 

Internals, Maintenance,Upgrades

 

There are plenty of heat pipes and both fans have plenty of exhaust space, and the bottom cover has plenty of ventilation. 

 

They also added some small paths to kind of guide the internal airflow and they're now using liquid metal instead of traditional paste so it does look like they take last year's review or feedback to heart and made some changes. 

 

They also get full points for maintenance and upgradeability, because you can easily clean two fans, you can easily replace the battery, you can add a second SSD. Replace the Wi-Fi chip that is under the first SSD, and both RAM slots are upgradeable as well.

 

Battery Life

Now another positive thing about the G 15 is its battery life, it showed an okay result in the PCMark test, which by default does enable the Nvidia GPU something that you also can turn off in the software if you like. 

 

However, the Netflix test where it relies entirely on the IGPU. It manages to last, almost 10 hours which is a phenomenal result for a gaming laptop, it means that you can literally work on it all day without worrying, and then come home, plug it in and play. 

 

 SSD, Speakers

 

They also put a pretty fast SSD aside, or at least this one terabyte model performs well, and the speakers are good as well I mean, they're still laptop speakers so don't get too excited, but they do not cringe like some others, and they offer plenty of volume and nice sound quality overall for both music, and some videos. 

 

Conclusion

 

And that's pretty much it for today, as I said at the start I think there are so many things to be excited about when it comes to this laptop. 

 

The new CPUs are great and capable of doing anything you can do on a good desktop PC. 

 

The fact that you can now get fast quality HD screens is awesome, especially if you'd like to gain and work on your laptop and the new G15 is just a nicer machine for everyday use than the previous versions. Thanks to the much better battery life.

Next to full upgradability, and those little improvements like the type C charging option. 

 

Now, these things are probably not enough to make you regret buying a laptop last year. 

 

But if you're coming from a laptop that is three or four years old things have changed a lot. Now I did expect to see a bigger difference in games though. 

 

But since these just launched and we only had them for a few days. It's going to take a few more laptops and some more testing to figure out if we can squeeze a bit more gaming performance out of this GPU. 

 

For now, though this is it and this is what you're getting. I hope you enjoyed this review.