Asus ROG Strix GL502 Gaming Laptop Review

Today we’re reviewing the Asus ROG Strix GL502 gaming laptop. This laptop is aimed towards gamers who are looking for something with a dedicated graphics card in a compact design. It’s the perfect laptop for anyone who’s “on the go”, who wants something portable that they can just slip it into their backpack.

This small laptop does pack a punch, don’t let its size fool you. It is capable of running most games comfortably at 1080p. Here’s our review.

The Asus ROG Strix continues the trend of getting its inspiration from a stealth fighter jet, it looks very similar to its bigger brother the G752. It has a brushed metal lid with angled lines but instead of being in copper this time they’re in neon orange. The one thing we did notice, when we opened up that lid, is how easily it collects fingerprints.

The rest of the laptop is made out of plastic and that includes the brush deck, that looks like metal. Plastic is a better option for most larger laptops as it does help keep the weight down. The Strix only weighs 4.8 pounds which is a little bit heavier than the razor blade but more than half the weight of the 17” ROG G7 52.

Asus ROG Strix GL502 Cool Design

In terms of ports, on the left it comes with a USB type-c port,USB 3.0 port, HDMI, mini display port, Ethernet jack and a power connector. On the right there’s an audio jack, two more USB 3.0 ports and one full-size SD card slot.

The Strix comes in two models and in different configurations, but the main difference is that the GL502 VT which is the laptop we’re reviewing uses a GTX970M graphics card while the GL502 VY uses a 980M. Our review unit also comes packed with an Intel quad-core i7 6700 HQ processor, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, a 15.6” 1920 x 1080 Full HD display and a one terabyte hard drive.

This is the entry level model and retails for about $1400.

Getting inside the GL502 is fairly easy. All you have to do is unscrew the screws on the bottom and you’re in. The first thing you’re going to notice is the two fans and bunch of heat pipes running back and forth. The fans are spray painted neon orange in order to keep up with the theme.

On the top right you have your hard drive which can be easily swapped out with an SSD drive if you want quicker speeds. On top of that you have your 8GB DIMM right in the middle which is swappable and the other 8GB DIMM is somewhere else on the motherboard that requires a little bit more work in order to get to. The good thing is there is a PCI NVME SSD storage space in case you want additional storage or if you want the fastest storage possible.

The display on this laptop is really good. It’s full HD with a resolution of 1920 x 1080, it’s an IPS panel and has very good viewing angles. In fact it has a 178 degree field of view so if you have a buddy over, he’s going to be able to see everything on your screen. It has a matte finish so you’re not going to get any reflections. The cool thing I did notice about this display is that it gets very, very bright and we only had to keep it to about 60% in order to get a good user experience.

One of the best screens on the market.

When we were playing CS:GO we noticed how good and accurate the colors were. We can see all the intricate details of what’s on the screen especially in a dark environment.

Above that display is a 1.2 MP front facing camera. The camera is not that great at all, in fact it’s very noisy but if you need to make the odd video conferencing call it should do the job fine. This is a gaming laptop after all.

For audio it’s using ICEpower speakers which is a subsidiary of bang & olufsen, a very reputable audio company. They’re placed on the deck which means they’re forward-facing which is always a good thing on our book. We did find the highs to get nice and loud but the mediums felt washed out and the bass is just non-existent but it kind of makes sense taking into consideration that most hardcore gamers are going to want to use a good pair of headphones.

Above the speaker’s lies a full-size chiclet keyboard with a numeric keypad. The WASD keys are in neon orange to remind gamers where to place their fingers.

The typing experience is good but not great but the gaming experience on the keyboard itself is actually really good. The keys have a 1.6 mm travel distance so they’re quite tactile and there’s three levels of red backlighting. The only issue I have with this keyboard is that the placement of the arrow keys is right beside the shift key and that causes the arrow key to sometimes get in the way.

Neon orange WASD keys.

The touchpad has a good size, we always had enough room to move our fingers around – pinch-to-zoom, scrolling – it all works great and it also has palm detection when you’re using a third-party mouse, so if your palm is resting on it it doesn’t click or get in the way when you’re playing a game.

It’s not the greatest touchpad, we did find the accuracy to be a little off but we honestly think most people who buy this laptop for gaming will want to use their own third-party mouse.

This is a gaming laptops and it does come with its own dedicated graphics card which means it’s going to handle “every day” productivity tasks with ease. We had no problems with working with different apps including editing a heavy 4K video.

The only thing I suggest is using a separate scratch disk so it’ll run a lot smoother. On top of that we had no problems having more than 16 chrome tabs open while watching more than one full HD video and the laptop handle it like a champ.

The first game we ran was OverWatch, it’s a brand new game by Blizzard. It’s a first person shooter and it’s very addictive – be warned. The thing about OverWatch is they cap the frames per second so if you’re using a monitor with a 60Hz refresh rate, the most FPS you can get will be 10 above that which is 70, so we were getting 70 frames per second at 1080p Ultra, the whole time without dropping whatsoever.

Also we just want to mention to a lot of gamers out there who have an Asus ROG, if you have the Asus GameFirst software installed on your laptop and you’re having issues with OverWatch, I suggest removing it completely. I found that my latency actually dropped from 300 to 400 down to about 50 ms. Actually we dig around for more info on this issue and it seems to be a common issue.

The next game we tried was Doom at 1080p on high settings and had no issues running between 40 and 50 FPS and the last game we tried out was “Heroes of the Storm” where we were getting about 70 FPS when there was no intense fighting going on. The frame rate would drop to about 40 to 50 FPS when the battle started getting very intense and we were running it at 1080p Extreme mode.

I’m sure if we reduced it to “high mode” you can get around 60 frames per second. One thing we noticed is that the top of the deck was getting really really hot so we did a heat test and it was averaging temperatures of 128° F” which is really high. We usually like the heat to be below a 110 or even below 100. On the back it was averaging about a 120 which is lower but overall it’s a major concern for long-term use.

And finally, the battery life. I was really shocked at how good the battery life was for a gaming laptop. I was getting over five hours of battery life before needing a full charge and our activity consisted of things like browsing the web, watching movies and doing general productivity tasks.