Amazon.com: Customer reviews: ROG Zephyrus M Thin and Portable Gaming Laptop, 15.6” 240Hz FHD IPS, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070, Intel Core i7-9750H, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB PCIe SSD, Per-key RGB, Windows 10 Home, GU502GW-AH76

The best and most economical gaming laptop.

Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2020

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Writing this review after using this extensively for 60 days. The most magnetic feature of this device is the looks. It has the potential to turn heads anywhere and everywhere. The brushed aluminum back panel with the red-lit ROG logo is very classy and subtle. Although this surface is prone to fingerprints and needs to be wiped often.

Chassis, trackpad, and Keyboard:

Once opened, the chassis is made out of magnesium and the lower panel is made of plastic. The chassis is very sturdy since it's made out of an internal honeycomb design. The build quality is excellent and gives out a premium look. The rubbery magnesium top surface is soft and comfortable as a palm rest and this surface does not attract fingerprints. The keyboard is excellent with decent key travel for gaming and typing for long hours. The per-key RGB lighting is brilliant and the brightness of the keyboard backlight can be adjusted. Although, the porous material near the power key and volume keys becomes a host to dust particles and is very hard to clean. The touchpad is not that great with a mediocre size and a plastic surface. It would be nice to have a glass touchpad.

Display:

The 240 Hz Pantone validated IPS display is very smooth and color accurate. The blacks are deep and backlight bleed is almost non-existent. It offers a great gaming experience and it is also suitable for content creation. The only drawback with the screen is the brightness. If you are using the device in bright daylight, the screen has to be set to maximum brightness and it is still a little hard to see. If the device is being used indoors, the brightness is sufficient.

Performance:

This is where the laptop knocks the competition out of the water. This was a major concern for me before buying this laptop. But I was not disappointed. 9th gen i7 processor, stock 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 2070 Max Q graphics and 1TB SSD is the sweet spot for portable gaming. The 16 GB RAM which comes with the laptop is single-channel RAM. Meaning, there is another empty slot for RAM expansion up to 32GB. Once, I installed an additional 16 gigs of RAM, the performance increased drastically. Note: RTX laptops perform optimally with dual-channel RAM. With the upgraded RAM, I could see increased frame rates instantly. CS GO gives an average frame rate of 250 fps at the highest settings. Apex legends gives an average frame rate of 200 fps at the highest settings. Many other graphic intensive games give about 150 - 200 fps on an average. Apart from gaming, I also use this laptop for Adobe Premiere Pro, ANSYS Fluent, etc. and the performance is mind-blowing. I would recommend upgrading this device to 32 GB RAM to witness the wrath of this laptop.

Thermals:

Thermals should be of least concern as this is equipped with two high-speed fans for the CPU and GPU. When the fans are set to Turbo mode, any task/ game can be run without worrying about thermal throttling. The fans run very loud at Turbo mode which can be a little embarrassing in office spaces. It would be advisable to place a small item under the screen hinges. This allows the fans to suck more volume of air which provides better cooling. I use two erasers.

ASUS Software:

ASUS uses Armoury Crate which acts like the ROG control panel. This software allows numerous customizations and is very clean to look at. To use the per-key RGB keyboard function, an additional app called AURA Creator has to be downloaded. Sadly, Windows does not recognize AURA Creator as a default app. Meaning, the keyboard lighting reverts to the default Rainbow colors every time you restart. ASUS also allows you to restrict charging to 60% or 80%. This is very helpful when you keep the laptop plugged in all day. This feature prolongs battery life. I hope ASUS integrates AURA Creator into the Armoury Crate.

CONS:

- The biggest CON of this device is the downward-firing speakers. Even though the speaker's quality is good, because of its downward orientation, you hear a muffled sound which is very irritating.
- Missing Thunderbolt 3. Most laptops in 2019 were Thunderbolt 3 compatible. Somehow, ASUS skipped it, making this device a little less future proof.
- The trackpad could be improved. It is not a bad trackpad, but would be better with a glass surface.
- The power brick is big and heavy. Though this laptop is thin and very light, the power brick is literally a brick!

Overall, considering the pros and cons, I would say this is an amazing device. I feel this is a better option when compared with its counterparts from Razer, MSI, Alienware, Dell.

11 people found this helpful

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phung

What a powerful little monster!

Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2020

Verified Purchase

**1-year Review**
So, I've been owning this laptop for almost a year now and my impression has not changed. Solid laptop for work, gaming, and coding. The touchpad has a few glitches here and there with the zoom-in gesture but that doesn't bother me most of the time. Since the purchase, I've upgraded the storage to 2 GBs and RAM to 32 GBs (which is solely for the purpose I use the laptop for). If you just want to use this laptop to play games and do school work (or pretty much 95% of the jobs out there), the stock performance is more than enough.

Overall, I still recommend 10/10. If the laptop gets hot and the fans bother you then I'd recommend you get the KLIM laptop cooler (costs about $30). All problems solved.

I've had this laptop for 4 months now and I gotta say I am very impressed. Yes, fans are loud but this is a thin and light laptop so it doesn't have room to put in additional heat sinks like a thicker, regular laptop. At the end of the day, you can only fight physics so much.

The performance is excellent. I hook this up to a 43'' super-ultrawide monitor for work (and occasionally gaming) and this little laptop handles with no problem. I can play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare at max settings on the 43'' inch monitor and get 70+ FPS most of the time. I think if you use this laptop for gaming, 16 gb of ram should be plenty. For me personally, I use it mostly for work and always run multiple sheets of excels + a heavy financial software, and I had to upgrade to 32 gb ram.

The keyboard can be customized to per-key RGB and you'll have to download software from Asus for it. I personally didn't care much, so no complaint there.

Battery-life: I work on the plane with the laptop all the time and the battery usually lasts about 5 hours. With that said, I don't spend a lot of time watching Youtube or gaming on battery, so I don't know how long the battery would last under those applications.

Would recommend buy 10/10. Only complaint is that Asus should get rid of the "Republic of Gamers" logo and the sound (which you can turn off) when booting up. Some people, like me, need a decently powerful laptop for work so gaming laptops are the way to go, but I don't need to have that logo showing up when I start my computer in front of other professionals.....

6 people found this helpful

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Adel Mohammed

Runs warm but read on

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2020

Verified Purchase

This is probably the last laptop I will buy, but not because of this particular laptop. Mostly because the direction manufacturers are heading. Over all this is great laptop, after you spend some more $$$$$ though. The thermals on this thing are horrible, and the Intel 660p needs something.

PROS +
+ has a great screen
+ the 2070 max-Q is a decent all around powerhouse
plays most games on high or ultra without going over 60c @ 60fps+
runs any autodesk software with ease (add extra ram if you are wanting it for this purpose)
+ minimal bloat ware
+ armory crate software is nice but needs others to get full tuning exp
+ For a laptop keyboard this one has a great keyboard, good clicky feel and decent throw

NEUTRAL =
= on board ram latency is meh ( do not buy high end ram*)
if you want extra buy only a 16GB module and Samsung also*
= touch pad could use improvement overall nice but touchy
= USB/ports layout (why in the middle?)
= ASUS customer service isn't horrible, you just have to be really direct and blunt with them
if you have driver issues do not buy their flash drive they offer, all of their drivers are available on their site

CONS -
- SSD isnt that great (unless you add a second in RAID0)
- Runs really warm ( 80c CPU and 75c GPU)
mine needed new thermal paste as what came in it was already dried out
- keyboard does get warm during and heavy task or gaming
even with new paste and cooler it still is warm but not hot like before

Over all this is a great laptop after you spend an additional 300-400 extra. Also if you have thermal issues send it back. Reason being is that when you remove the heat spreader off of the motherboard to re apply Thermal paste it voids the warranty. After correcting the thermal paste issue my temps went from 80c CPU to 60c CPU, the GPU went from 75c to 55c.

The Intel SSD is okay however v. spending an additional 400+ on new SSD for this laptop. I would purchase an additional Intel 660p and configure it in RAID0. Do this right out of the box and it is done through the BIOS not windows. I would recommend doing this if you plan on doing and kind of CAD/CAM/rendering. SIDE NOTE, when and if you do purchase an additional SSD, make sure to get a heat spreader for the SSD, they are cheap.

*If you do plan on using this rig for any kind of editing, obviously I would purchase additional RAM. The motherboard only allows 32GB total, and only has one slot. 16GB is already on board and is Samsung dies, at a CL of 19 and runs at 2666MHz. With that being said I would personally v. spending extra on high end, is to purchase an additional Samsung module. An additional Samsung module @ 16GB should only be an extra 75 bucks here on amazon.

In general I am very happy with this purchase. However thin and light does not equal a cool running machine. Also do not take your laptop apart unless you know what you are doing. This was not meant to be a guide of any sort. Just my personal experience and my opinions on this specific GU502GW.

12 people found this helpful

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Tmac Boi

Worth the money, performs very well

Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2020

Verified Purchase

Definitely met my expectations. It handles games very well on maxed out settings. So far so good. It does not like multiple heavy processing while downloading and setting up everything. That's not a deal breaker for me though. I like that it automatically adjust fan speed, cpu frequency and gpu frequency based on what I am doing. It knows if your not pushing it hard to lower settings to increase battery life. That is useful since this is a work computer and after hours gaming for me. Battery life on the site claims 8 hours. I have noticed an average of 3 hours and it may vary depending on how you set your performance / power saving settings. I was hesitant based on the price tag but it delivers and I have no complaints.

One person found this helpful

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dan h

The product quality is kind of bad.

Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2020

Verified Purchase

I'm currently writing as the left cooling fan continues to sputter and die, the temperature from the computer has left scars, and if I adjust the way I sit the AC cords stop charging the freaking things.
Pro's
-You can play games at some of the highest graphics settings (Until five minutes later when it thermal throttles you)
-It is very light
Con's
-I don't think they put cooling paste on the CPU, of course this is my first gaming laptop so what do I know
-Will heat up really quick. I had to go and buy an external fan just this thing wouldn't have internals averaging out at 90c and even then it only brought it down just enough so I don't get throttled.
-The product's durability sucks. One fan is barely managing to scrape by and the Ac cord is so thin I'm amazed it even lasted as long as it did; which by the way, I haven't even had the laptop for an entire year yet.
-Fans will reach up to speeds of 8000rpm (which is nice) but will then immediately spin down to 6000rpm which is the main reason that I have found for the Laptop's throttling.

Overall this product was nice for the first two months, but it has slowly deteriorated over time. For a product that cost me 2,000 out of my pocket, you'd expect it to last at least a year. If you are thinking about this getting this product you might as well wait and see if they produce a newer model that has the 3070, hopefully then you'll get your monies worth.

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Customer

(Almost) Perfect Portable Gaming machine

Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2020

Verified Purchase

Asus has made improvements with every iteration of the Zephyrus, their thin and light gaming laptop. This late 2019 version comes with 16gb Ram, a 15.6" 240hz monitor (1920 x 1080), 1 TB SSD, and the Nvidia RTX 2070 max Q video card.
There is software which switches between the 2070 video card and the onboard Intel graphics card depending if it is needed (you can adjust this with the nvidia controller). You can control the fan speed, lights on the keyboard, etc. with the included software.
You have the option to easily add another 16 mb Ram (32 mb, dual channel) and another ssd card.
Performance is excellent for gaming and you should be able to easily play most games at high refresh rates. However, maximum performance can only be attained by using the ac power adapter and maximizing the cooling of the laptop (fan noise will be high). Due to the very slim and portable design, cooling and fan noise seems to be the most problematic issue with this laptop. There are 3 fan settings, quiet, performance, and turbo. You won't hear much noise at quiet and performance but turbo is definitely noticeable. The fans are quiet at turbo and will automatically go into turbo mode when gaming. If Asus can improve the fan noise and heating issues, this would be the perfect gaming laptop for most people.
Pros:
Portability, light weight, excellent screen (very bright, clear), Very fast performance for games, good portable desktop replacement
Cons:
Fan noise when gaming, heat
Updated my review to 5 Stars! Highly recommended!

One person found this helpful

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Michellechang44

Powerful, portable, light weight

Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2020

Verified Purchase

So I have been wanting a new laptop for awhile now, finally got around to looking for one. I had a Alienware 17R2 from 2010, so this is a huge difference for me and a major upgrade. The difference in graphics is night and day. When I play my regular games I notice the fans are on full speed, but that doesn't bother me. My wife and daughter says it sounds like someone left the water running, but informed them its just the fans on the laptop. The laptop does get pretty warm, so I would recommend a cooling pad, I just ordered one. Making sure the pad blows air up, and location of fans are near the top row as that's where the laptop vents are sucking in air. The laptop is light weight and very portable.

I do worry about the screen/lid though, it seems very thin and could be damaged when thrown into your backpack/laptop case without keeping in mind what else you throw in with it. Like the power supply, that thing is a brick, so I make sure to put it in another compartment, don't want it pushing down on the laptop during travel. Price wise, me personally its worth it for the power and size. I plan to add more storage and maybe upgrade the RAM, not a need just a want. Only had it for a week, so if anything changes, I will update.

One person found this helpful

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Jason

Fan failing after only a couple months

Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2020

Verified Purchase

TL;DR
Bad: Fan failing, LED problems, clicking sounds. Good: Speed, Graphics Quality, Boot time.

This is a sharp looking notebook and has pretty solid performance overall. The issue is that there is a single fan, on the left side (when the notebook is flipped over) that revs up and sounds like it is almost grinding on something. Most times this goes away after about 30 seconds and then runs fine for a few hours but sometimes even the slightest tap on the touchpad or movement of the laptop sets it off again.

I've taken the back cover off and made sure that there are no loose connections and that the wires aren't draped accross the fan blades (that is what it really sounds like), but they weren't. I know I need to just send it in and I am going to but it is so dissapointing how soon this failed. Yes, it is a mechanical device and yes they do fail but this is a premium laptop and I would hope for a better experience than this. This is the second Asus laptop I've bought in 4 months, the other being a Zenbook for my daughter in college. The keyboard on it stopped working after about 2 weeks of use. No spills, no dings, just stopped working. She had to send it in for replacement. I do hope that ASUS reads these reviews and looks into these issues. They may have an incredibly low fail rate in the manufacturing plant but so far I'm at a 100% failure rate here at home and that is very dissapointing.

Now, on to the good:
Light
Great video card
Fast m2. drive
Extremely fast boot time

The bad:
Fan failure in less than 2 months of ownership.
LED lights on keyboard just flash red for extended periods of time unless I restart the machine. Once restarted they almost always start working properly again.
Occasionally, usually 2-3 times a day the computer makes a clicking sound that sounds like a hard-drive failing. Since everything in there is solid state, I know that isn't the issue. I heard that the sound is coming from a audio driver issue but this has been updated with no change whatsoever.

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Todd Pettit

High quality gaming laptop with a couple of quirks

Reviewed in the United States on December 23, 2019

Verified Purchase

The ROG Zephyrus M is packed full of great features like the BEAUTIFUL IPS display with 240hz refresh rate and response time of 3ms, a 1TB SSD, a 9th generation i7 with 6 physical cores and 12 threads, 16 GB of RAM, a thunderbolt 3 port, a nice RGB keyboard, and some nice ASUS software.

The software allows you to change the settings on your RGB keyboard and make some performance tweaks so that you can control exactly how your laptop runs. This is a nice feature because on max settings the laptops battery life is short and the fan is pretty loud. Like... really loud. This isn't a huge problem for me because I always game with headphones, but if you're somewhere that requires something a little more discreet you can use the ASUS software to set the laptop in "silent mode" and while it's not completely silent while gaming it does drastically reduce the fan speed.

The IPS display is BEAUTIFUL. Note that the display is only 1080p, but for the size of the display I think that's perfectly sufficient. If you must have 4k you can always attach an external display via the built in HDMI port. For a screen this size I doubt 4k would be noticeably better, but if you must have it you'll have to look elsewhere.

The 1TB SSD, 16GB of RAM, and 9th generation i7 all provide a snappy and fast OS experience and is great for virtualization if you do any of that sort of stuff. I'm an IT guy so it's nice to be able to spin up some VMs on my laptop without being too concerned about resources or storage space.

The RTX 2070 Max Q doesn't disappoint. I've been able to max out all the games I play with it just fine. A lot of the games I play are a little dated so I haven't REALLY tested it's limits yet, but for 1080p gaming I doubt there are many games that would push beyond it's limits. If you're looking for 4k gaming you might struggle a little bit, but this is not a priority for me. I recommend you look at benchmarks for the RTX 2070 Max Q because it does have a significantly weaker performance than it's desktop counterpart. For a mobile gpu, though, it does a great job.

My only real complaint with the laptop is the layout of the ports. The Thunderbolt port is located halfway down the right side of the laptop, and the charger port is halfway down on the left side of the laptop. This makes using a docking station kind of awkward because have to run cables to both sides of the laptop, and the thunderbolt cable will actually cross two USB ports on the right side. Ideally the Thunderbolt port and the power port are both located on the same side and are near the back of the laptop. I don't have a super fancy docking station so I cannot provide power to the laptop through that port, but that may be possible I'm not sure.

10 people found this helpful

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szecstom

IMPORTANT DESIGN Quirks (READ Before Purchase!)

Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2020

Verified Purchase

Not mad, just weirded out. This machine runs like dream and the screen is fantastic. (240 Hz)
However, it's full of designs decision that are just baffling to me.

Firstly, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, there is only ONE single DDR slot. Meaning you can't upgrade the RAM by adding another stick, you need to replace it. This discovery was unfortunate, because I ordered another 16 GB Samsung DDR that I can't do anything with now.

Secondly, if you order the 240 Hz screen, the backplate will look different than on the pictures. I think there are programmable pixels on it but I haven't looked into it properly.

Thirdly, the CPU and GPU are very close together, I know that this, much like the the single RAM slot, is trade off for portability, but they are basically heating each other. Most of the heat actually comes from the CPU so unervolting it is a good idea. Anyway when the CPU heats up, which is almost immediate, it pushes the fans to extreme rpms and they sound like turbofan engines. I am honestly not sure how the magnesium alloy housing affects the heating problem, I know it's for durability but it seems like an overkill to me. Also the bottomplate is still plastic.

Finally, the touchpad sensitivity, both for moving the cursor and clicking, is just simply disappointing. It's entirely usable, but it can't even hold a candle to my 4 year old Lenovo's touchpad which I had abused to death and it still works brilliantly.

I wish this machine was more cleverly designed, but I can't be mad at it because of the friendly price. It runs games very well on med-high settings for a laptop of its size, and it seems to be perfect for people like me, who only play games very casually and do not expect extreme performance and fidelity. I mainly bought it for CFD and FEA scientific simulations, I'll see how it handles them tomorrow, but I guess that's not really a factor for most people. I might need to replace the RAM after all. Let's hope the sounds won't bother my colleagues too much.

One person found this helpful

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ROG Zephyrus M Thin and Portable Gaming Laptop, 15.6” 240Hz FHD IPS, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070, Intel Core i7-9750H, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB PCIe SSD, Per-key RGB, Windows 10 Home, GU502GW-AH76

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