Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2021
First off, for the most part, I love this laptop. It's borderline an ultrabook, it has a wonderful GPU, the CPU is respectable (for a laptop AMD CPU), the keyboard is gorgeous, the addition of a dedicated button to bring up the Armoury Crate overclocking and power mode options is great, it has USB-C charging (if you have a >60w GaN charger), and the available ports are sufficient.
However, unless you plug it in, there's no chance of any gaming at all, a severely diminished refresh rate, an awful response rate, and more.
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PROS:
- Thin, ultrabook-thin
- Excellent RGB keyboard
- Dedicated key for Asus overclocking and extra power options
- 16 thread, responsive CPU
- Reasonbly powerful GPU for a laptop
- Expandable RAM (up to 40GB including the soldered on 8GB)
- light, considering the hardware and necessary cooling
- reasonably cool, but only in Silent/battery saver
- high-refresh rate screen
- low response rate screen, but with OEM power BRICK (keywords: OEM Brick)
- Respectable overclocking options (in-OS, NOT in BIOS)
- You can completely disable to dedicated GPU by enabling "iGPU Mode" in the Asus Armoury Crate. This saves a few hours of battery
-The keyboard's backlight also lights up the secondary function of each key unlike some laptops that'll only light up the "F1" or the "!" instead of both "F1" and "!", and things like that
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CONS (double spaced so I have room to explain, sorry):
- can't figure out how to get into the BIOS even via their own instructions (and I'm a computer engineer, 40-50C in silent)
-Runs INSANELY HOT in any mode other than silent/battery saver (80-85C without any overclocks)
-Overclocking will quickly result in thermal throttling. Get a strong cooling fan pad and keep at least an inch of space under the laptop/cooler. The cooling is severely insufficient, which, to be fair, makes sense for an ultrabook
- You can only use the performance modes when the OEM BRICK is plugged in. while you can charge with a 60 watt usb-c brick or stronger, it will not allow you to enable any of the asus performance modes. You cannot override this. This includes the recently released, official USB-C brick from ASUS
- Ugly built-in screen. It's washed out and there's no way to set a colour profile. You can't fix it no matter how you try)
- Stupid resolution for such a powerful laptop. It's QHD (1440p). This GPU is totally wasted on such a low resolution, even with the high refresh rate. The lack of 2160p gaming laptops is disappointing
- When you can actually enable it, the 165hz refresh cannot be hit in most games by this 3070. The laptop would be better off as a 75-120hz 4k screen. The architecture of ampere video cards, like this one, favours resolution and tensor calculation (ray tracing and DLSS) over total output. It loses efficiency. It's just a poor choice of screen for this GPU.
- Unless the OEM power BRICK is plugged in, you cannot enable the low-response rate for the monitor
- Unless the OEM power BRICK is plugged in, you are limited to a 30hz refresh rate, which is completely unacceptable and is half of even the most basic, cheapest, entry-level monitor from 2010
-It has 1 slot for extra RAM, but 8GB of RAM is soldered on, limiting you to 3200mhz, C22 RAM. Anything with higher clock speeds, or with faster timings, is going to be wasted as it cannot exceed the speed or timings of the soldered-on RAM. Note that you only have 1 expansion slot available. It will alter the soldered-on RAM to match the RAM stick you buy if it is slower, but not if it's faster. The max RAM the laptop can take is 40GB (8GB + 32GB)
-audio is poorly balanced. I think it's because it's trying to emulate surround sound, but the channels are very poorly balanced and no volume level is ever entirely comfortable.
- I dislike the way the F-keys and their underlying functions work. The FN button should be a toggle and enabling the FN button should execute the F-buttons (Aka, Function buttons), not the other way around like this is
- I dislike that it doesn't have primary home and end buttons only oddly placed, secondary ones. As a developer, I use the very, very often. Having to hit an extra, awkward keystroke to do that is annoying.
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MAJOR WORDS OF WARNING:
Be warned that IT WILL BURN YOU IMMEDIATELY ON CONTACT in any mode other than silent/battery saver (maybe touchable in the basic performance mode IF you're lucky but not in any of the real performance modes)!!! I cannot stress this enough. You WILL get burned.
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CONCLUSION:
For all my complaints, let me be clear. This is a nice laptop. However, it has many, many drawbacks and multiple design points I consider total dealbreakers, like limiting refresh rate to 30hz/30fps unless the OEM power brick is plugged in is. The heat levels are also completely unacceptable. I got this for work, not for gaming, but even in the basic performance mode, it made me have to insulate and pad it just to run my software/data engineering programs. Utterly ridiculous.
No laptop, gaming or otherwise, should have to be plugged in 24/7 to work. No laptop should have to be plugged in to get more than more than 15% of its advertised refresh rate and/or response rate. This is brazen, but legally defensible, false advertisement. I'm not amused. I don't approve of such shady, gray area tactics. They can get away with it because fanbois are dangerously toxic. They should be held accountable to their actions.
If these things aren't deal breakers to you, buy the laptop. Definitely. For me, however, I can't accept something that limits itself to 10% of its capability if it's not plugged into the short power cables that make up the OEM brick. Power bricks are ancient, inefficient, hot, and antiquated.
I'm returning it tomorrow.
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NOTES:
1. The battery life on this laptop is listed at 7 hours. With the dedicated GPU completely and totally disabled, with the power mode set to battery saver, the backlighting on the keyboard off, the wifi disabled, AND the screen set to the lowest brightness, while doing nothing other than running a basic text editor (Visual Studio Code, which is about as demanding to run as Microsoft Notepad) I got, on average, 3 hours of battery. This is not enough for a work day. The reason I'm making this note because the laptop I bought prior to this had the Ryzen 4980U CPU, which has the exact same integrated GPU as this laptop's Ryzen 5900HS (technically an iGPU, not an APU if you're curious). That laptop had a gorgeous LED, ~4k (slightly less resolution than 4k). It had much, much faster RAM, an instant-on function, and better speakers. That SoC (system-on-a-chip) draws the exact same amount of power, if not a little more, than the SoC, but this SoC only lasts 3 hours while the other one I have lasts 20 hours. The other laptop I have also has a smaller battery. Why it has such a disparity, I cannot answer, but it's bad. If I had to guess it's all due to poor firmware. The CPU in this laptop wastes a lot of time on kernel level operations, which is a giant red flag for poorly written drivers/firmware.
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P.S. I apologise for the use of caps, but I only used the for acronyms and for things that were VERY important, and needed to be stressed. People overusing caps annoys me too
