ASUS ZEPHYRUS GA 502 with AMD Ryzen CPU

More info

https://www.asus.com/us/Laptops/ROG-Zephyrus-G-GA502/


I’m excited for this laptop because of the AMD and Nvidia combo, at 35W the 3750H should run cool and the GTX 1660Ti should pretty much handle most games at high settings at 1080P for a very good gaming experience , best part is it’s fairly cheap but still very powerful.
The hardware should be a great match for each other not the most powerful but still great for gaming.

 

Me too!

Here is a comparison between my Razer Blade Base 1060 MaxQ and this GA502 GTX1660TI MaxQ (60W):

https://www.3dmark.com/compare/spy/7111916/spy/6932283#

Since it's only quad core and i5 level the CPU bench takes a hit but I'd happily trade that for less noise heat and longer battery life (assuming the idle power draw on the 3750H isn't too steep, it should be good). Thin and light 180W power brick is great. Plus is has usb c charging/power draw for idle/off charging on the go.

There are videos of unboxing, but nothing more. NewEgg sold out but Best Buy USA still has stock at $1199 USD.

I'd really like to know how loud it gets and temps under load, level of performance on battery and quality of construction.

Too bad the base of the laptop is plastic but the price is great and if it's solid, I'm planning to return my Blade Base and get it for a 25-35% GPU boost, bigger SSD, battery and faster refresh screen for $50 less than I paid for the Blade .

Videos:




Peter

 

One good thing about a plastic build is it doesn’t retain heat like a metal build but as long as it’s solid that’s fine.

 

I picked one of these up at Best Buy and I am quiet surprised at how well it performs in real world gaming.
I played Destiny 2 on high settings for 90 minutes and the temps never went over 75 degrees on both the CPU and GPU. Fans were a little quieter than my Razer Blade and other Zephyrus (GX701).
Build quality is decent and screen has very little backlight bleed - overall am quite impressed with the build, performance etc for the price.
I opened up the chassis and added an additional NVME drive for storage - easy to access and took about 10 minutes.

 

Any chance you can do a DB test when gaming? Was it on Auto fan or Max fan profile?

 

Thanks that's great to hear it's quieter and solid. My old Gigabyte P34G just sort of fell apart on the plastic side.

Any chance you can do a TimeSpy test with between 20 and 50% battery? Some systems really throttle when running anything intense on battery while others give consistent results (75-95% of plugged in performance) until they hit battery saving mode. It'd be great know if this can handle it since the 35W CPU and 60W GPU should let it do great.

Would appreciate it so much, I'm in Canada or I'd run out to Best Buy and buy it right now and try it.

Thanks,
Peter

 

Sounds like a good buy!
Anyone had a chance to test battery life yet? I know it might be short when gaming but what about non gaming?
Thanks in advance

 

Does usb type c pd charging work? The kitguru video mentions at 9 min. On reddit someone said that it doesn’t work, looking for confirmation here. Also if anyone who does have it, are you able to set the 1660ti as the physx processor in nvidia settings so the hdmi port works out of the dGPU and not the iGPU?

 

72Whr battery with a ryzen 4 core... Should be getting 7 hours if I had to guess. Set screen to 60 Hz and a power profile change should do wonders. Can you run freesync on an external display through iGPU?

Anybody open it up yet? Can somebody post a pic of the internals?

 

I'm in Canada where the GA502 hasn't been released yet. If it had been, I'd buy it today and run the tests myself, but we have to dog sit until the end of the month so I can't take a day to drive across the border to buy one at BestBuy.

If someone would be willing to run a couple of quick tests (3DMark11 or TimeSpy) on high performance/full brightness while at around 50% battery and record the scores and the wattage data through HWInfo64 I'd know if this thing power throttles or not when on low battery under gaming loads. That way I can stop second guessing myself and decide to keep my Razer Blade Base (which doesn't throttle) or buy this.

I only have a few days left to decide before I lose the ability to return the Blade, so I'd really appreciate it and from the money I'd save travelling to get it, I would pay you something through PayPal for your time.

It should only take a few minutes to run the tests and I'd share the data and analysis with everyone (I've already collected data points from the Blade Base GTX1060 maxQ and Y740 RTX2060/2070 models for comparison).

If anyone with a GA502 is willing to help me out, please let me know through here or by direct message. I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks a lot,
Peter

P.S. For those interested in GTX1660Ti in other systems such as paired with a i7-9750 see this review: https://www.pcmag.com/review/368126/msi-gs65-stealth-2019

 

Hello fellow Canadian. On amazon it ships 22nd, so we are gonna miss out on some of the fun

 

Yep - unfortunately. Though Cookiedemkp was kind enough to run the tests I requested (really grateful to him for doing so), I think unless I can figure some way to bypass the power throttling on battery, I'm going to have to give the GA502 a pass unfortunately :/

It does show that the GA502 is giving much lower performance on battery than I had hoped. I don't know if there is some other setting to prevent it, but as it is I'm guessing it's stuttering a great deal because of lack of power.

I also tested a Razer Blade RTX2070 in person at the MS Store and I found it was able to consistently give 56-60% of plugged in performance (without stuttering) even down to 14% battery while in 3DMark11 which was 60fps locked on battery (and therefore gave lower results).

My Lenovo Y740 tests though showed massive stuttering and as the battery drained the performance would get significantly worse as the available battery voltage dropped (it only has a 11.52V 3 cell battery as opposed to the 15.4V 4 cell in the Razers and I assume in the GA502). So I'm wondering if there's something different that Razer is doing to allow consistent high performance on battery since I know too that with other laptops I've owned battery gaming is like watching a slideshow because of poor power management.

I didn't include Turbo runs in my analysis of either system - just the normal plugged in results. And I didn't enable throttle stop/undervolt on the Blade Base since he didn't do any such tweaking on your GA502.

Analysis of Performance/Power Results Comparing Plugged In/Battery from TimeSpy Runs:

Razer Blade Base 2018:
Max GPU Power Plugged In: 73W
Max CPU Power Plugged In: 43W
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/7157396
SCORE
3 717 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q(1x) and Intel Core i7-8750H Processor
Graphics Score 3 550
CPU Score 5 080

Max GPU Power on Battery (17%): 55.7W
Max CPU Power on Battery (14.8%): 41.1W
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/7156524
SCORE
3 306 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q(1x) and Intel Core i7-8750H Processor
Graphics Score 3 110
CPU Score 5 143

89% of Plugged in Score while using up to ~83% of max power (Slight Power Throttling)

ASUS Zephyrus GA502 (2019):
Max GPU Power Plugged In: 61.7W
Max CPU Power Plugged In: 10.8W
SCORE
4 552 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti(1x) and AMD Ryzen 7 3750H with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx
Graphics Score 4 932
CPU Score 3 170

Max GPU Power on Battery (27.6%): 31.9W
Max CPU Power on Battery (26%): 10.6W
SCORE
1 785 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti(1x) and AMD Ryzen 7 3750H with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx
Graphics Score 1 657
CPU Score 3 179

39% of Plugged in Score while using up to ~59% of max power (High Power Throttling)

You can see from the results that CPU is not throttled on the GA502 - it always uses about the same amount low amount of power for the same score on battery or not. The GPU though is heavily throttled.

The result is very unfortunate to me since I had such high hopes for this low power CPU and high performance GPU combination, but I'm very glad I found this out before driving all the way across the border to buy one...


Peter

 

Why is this a bad thing? I don’t know why you would want full performance on battery since you will absolutely murder battery life. The throttling is good because you get a longer runtime for when you might need the power. Or even better, you stick to iGPU to get a good boost to GPU power vs intel CPUs while conserving even more battery life

 

It’s not a bad thing just bad for him and how he wants to use it.

 

Thanks for the tests.
Sorry for the basic questions - regarding the 10.8W CPU power, is someone able to please explain? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I thought that ryzen CPU could go to 35W, or am I missing something here?

 

Most of the time I set the computer to "Battery Battery" w/100% brightness - like right now. I worked on the train for about 30 minutes and I've been on my Razer Blade Base now for 10 since I got home and it shows 5 hours 48 minutes (86% remaining).

So I'm really happy with the battery life while working on this mode - but sometimes I get to play a game like Civ 6 or Mass Effect Andromeda on the train and I really appreciate having 90% of my plugged in performance while doing so. I did a calculation this morning and it gives me 70 minutes runtime - which is more than the Y740 gave, while giving 2x the performance consistently from 100% battery down to 5%.

I really appreciate having the option to game on battery - not being restricted to lower performance at all times.

I had noticed with the Y740 (both RTX2060 and RTX2070 versions) that it worked great plugged in, and on battery it was fine exploring. But when I played the game on battery and got into a fire fight - it was unplayable. It stuttered so badly I had to give up. Thats why I'm so happy to have found the Blade.

Yes the Ryzen CPU is supposed to go up to 35W - I didn't run a CPU Benchmark other than the one built into 3DMark. It only using that much power is great actually. It gives i5 level performance which is good, but it's a lot less than the performance of the i7 8750H in the Blade or the i7 9750H in other new laptops so it's a bit of a loss to me.

You can try yourself if you get a GA502 - just install HWINFO64 and run a muticore benchmark and see.