Asus ROG G501 announcement

I agree with ChrisAtsin, It's not that bad IMHO, is a good looking and powerfull machine, maybe is not the best-power-gamer-laptop out there but definitely has great potential, "except" for the 960.
Asus thought (maybe) it was better a laptop with power but without you burn your hands every time you use it.

....more gaming power at the expense of higher temps and fan noise, or midrange game with better temps, and don't forget is a i7 16gb UHD and one SSD PCIe x4

I was hoping at least 965

 

.....but it has TB for egpu

personally dont like asus.. was thinking about zenbook ux 303 until read some rewievs and touch it by myself... specs are good but on paper...

 

That exactly. I mean for the gaming series - for the even bigger G551JW they could have done that. At least a 965m GTX. Now they'll even release the Flatbook UX501 and the N551JW, both with the 960m. But hey... only the G551JW or G501 is a "Gaming" series... because of what exactly? The color???... Retardedness²³

 

Asus's 15.6" ROG laptops (from the G53JW onwards) have been a complete joke over the last few years... Asus can engineer really well but they just don't spec their laptops up properly.. On the other hand, the 17.3" ones are very well engineered and have great specs (although I'm no fan of BGA CPU+GPU)..

 

I think this laptop looks really interesting. It looks insanely slim similar to the rMBP and Razer Blade 14. And at 2 kg.


The big ones here;

- 96 Watt battery. Could 5-6 hours be realistic? The CPU is still 47 Watt so I have my doubts, but that is a punshy battery.



I am not going to comment on the merits of 960 being to little before I see the temps. I am more about conservative temps than sitting 90 degrees after a bit of gaming. That is just silly. If they can keep temps, noise and maintain a battery life that will assist in its slim profile, then this one might actually be possible to carry around on a day to day basis. I am looking forward to the reviews on this one.
Razer Blade 14 has shown itself to be too much of a dealbreaker IMO!

 

I agree

 

The CPU may be 47W at full load but just doing basic activities it wont use anywhere near that.

 

honestly.. i would expect more, considering the QHD+ Razer Blade can reach 5hrs already, and my FHD Blade can reach 6hrs. it'll be disappointing if the G501 can't even reach that with a weaker GPU and bigger battery.

 

Saw an article that said the UX501 was 6+ and has the same battery and specs as the G501

 

want to put the trigger on this laptop. Any review yet ?
I'm not sure what to do. It's between G501 and Blade FHD. Too bad Asus only provides the stupid 4k version for now. A FHD one will surely handle office work for 7~8 hours and will avoid the scaling issue. but they are lot to like on this baby: big battery, PCI SSD, 16GB and lightweight. Decisions, decisions...

 

The Asus will be a nice unit. I wonder if they will embrace the dock idea as a way to add performance to their thinner machines.

 

Does anyone know how optimus manages with a discreet gpu and an egpu? Apparently the G501 has a thunderbolt port, which has always worked well on my rMBP13 with a thunderbolt eGPU ... is there any reason to think the G501 would make this process a pain in the butt?

I feel the 960m will be able to manage a good number of games, but for those it can't, I'd like options.

 

You might need to disable the internal gpu to prevent confusion but it's a good question.

 

By the time this make it to market, it will be an old outdated 4th gen quad core, old chipset, with DDR3 tech which will be then be superseded by 6th gen quad core with DDR4 tech, in a matter of months. Not to mention that will be shipped with Windows 10 rather than 8.1 in which people will drop like a stone. This same platform with new gen and new OS in the coming months will be ideal

 

Asus always screw up their releases of the 15.6" ROG laptops since G53 times... They've released them months behind schedule and they are completely neutred... Not worth even having a look at..

 

Is there any substantial improvements in the Broadwell Quad-Core chipset? I assumed it was marginal since nobody is really talking about any benefits other than 2-5%

As for DDR4, it has been around the corners for years. Do you really think it is coming within a few months? And as far as Win10, it's a free upgrade for all win 8 users, so does that matter so much?


With that being said, I have never owned an Asus laptop, so I have no idea. I always heard good things, quality wise about Asus notebooks!

 

Broadwell, if any of these manufacture do unlikely release it, providing Intel allows this to happen. Then yes, take the 5%, but mostly the increases iGPU performance and power savings with the node shrink that is most important for mobile devices. Not to much of a big deal, as is still based on the Haswell tech and chipset, would be a incremental upgrade.

DDR4 is already here, no longer around the corner. Since last year, I am running DDR4 in my X99 desktop, not really that new anymore considering over half a year has gone. DDR4 in mobile (which will just use the same IC as desktop) will come with its own power saving ideal for mobile platforms, plus added bandwidth for iGPU performance.

Reason why preferably you want Windows 10 per-installed over a Windows 8.1 upgrade, is that you will get full Windows 10 driver support for the device you have purchased. If you have a notebook with Windows 8.1, then you can only hope the vendor provides a Windows 10 driver set.

It is Q2 of 2015 now, with Windows 10 coming in Q3, almost is right here. If you look at when Intel are releasing Skylake expectantly then is right in line with Windows 10. Now that is going to be a huge upgrade worth holding out a couple of months for, in this notebook or similar will be freaking awesome. Drop to much money now and you will end up regretting it.

 

Every single CPU chipset since I have been part of this board has been delayed. I wonder if Skylake won't be also be affected by all the delays just like Sandy, Ivy, Hashwell and now Broadwell also has.

The next tech is always around the corner. The only people who lose are usually those who get caught in a trap-and-mouse-scenario of trying to get the latest thing.


I couldn't find anything regarding battery life improvements on the Broadwell Quadcores. Do you know if there will be anything substantial? The battery life gains are significant on M processors (obviously) and 15Watt, but nothing on broad well. Due to designf of this machine that would obviously be a factor. Particularly when it looks like some models will ship with 56 watt battery contra the 96 Watt.

 

96Wh battery is massive, pair that up with a efficient processor and prepare for some serious battery life. Most of the power gains come for near idle power states and light loading with modern processors, if you are heavy loading X processor with X amount of TDP continuously then the battery will drain regardless.

Just need to look various Broadwell processor based which are U based series. These have much better battery life when doing light tasks.
Make no mistake a 96Wh battery pair with Haswell quad will last a long time in any-case, so no worries there.

Although to play it safe and you don't need anything right this moment or next couple of months, just wait a few months longer. Likely this will not be getting Broadwell quad, the qauds appear to discontinued from being released at the stage for any notebooks. With that in mind, seems only logical that Broadwell quad is skipped and moving right on to Skylake quads for these higher end models, such as this.

Rumor has it that Skylake may release with similar performance or not much greater than Haswell. The most interesting part of rumors is that the instruction per cycle maybe higher than Haswell, with lower clock speed than Haswell, therefore for similar performance. And if this results in a lower TDP due to architectural changes, then battery life is going to be very long under normal situations, and even so under load.

In any case the Asus is looking very nice, seem to me a little late with an older engine under the hood. Will be great with a later model engine under the hood in the next few months.

 

I'm probably going to wait for Skylake. I don't need to replace my P34G, but the build quality is lacking and causing some issues. Hopefully it holds out until then. This laptop sounds great for me as a need something that is light to work on, but also can do some gaming.

Hopefully they get it out in August.

 

It would indeed be terrific if the improvements where so substantial when it came to battery life!

 

I got to see some of the new asus 15" chassis and they do seem pretty solid IMO.

 

This is looking like a flex ridden piece of crap. I am not impressed by it anymore. If it is over priced then I will not even consider it.

 

I don't recommend constantly beating any machine Normal typing should never damage that kind of case and the cooling is solid.

 

Keyboard area shouldn't flex that much, especially the area on the chassis near the back edge of the keys. Not like the guy in the video is beating it either.

 

Flex on keyboard are dealbreakers for me. I use the keyboard a lot, and I type really fast and somewhat hard. I agree that, that amount of flex is disturbing.

 

In the teardown vid we can see it has a 60WHr battery, not very impressive for its price tag.

 

There are a few laptops on the market where you get two battery options, one with a 2.5" drive and a smaller battery, one with only a mSATA or M.2 drive but a bigger battery. In the video (0:42) you'll see that the 2.5" drive is right next to the battery. On the other models I've seen the optional bigger battery takes up the space where the 2.5" drive would sit.

I'm guessing this is how the bigger battery version for the Asus is also configured.

 

i thought these were made of sturdy aluminum? looks like plastic to me.

 

Yep on the UX501 tear down that was online but got removed, there was an optional battery that could be removed for the 2.5

It sure looks like they went cheap or for weight reasons.

 

The two 551 models we have are quite different internally with different ports and part placements.

 

Posted in the old GX500 thread. I'm in Singapore on a business trip and went to the famous funan digital mall (only electronics). Every store from Alienware to MSI to ASUS had some cool material. Came across the ROG G501-JW. It is amazing looking to hold and feel, they have it displayed against the G551 for comparison in all stores. Did a firestrike extreme test on it, it did get quite hot on the top right corner but you could still touch it. I have my own reservations about how prolonged use may destroy the insides of this ultrabook. The vents are at the back underneath where the screen folds. The guy in the ASUS store told me that when he opened it up he could only see PCI x2, and said maybe the other 2 were located under the keyboard. It's retailing for 2698 SGD not including GST (VAT) over here. It also came with only 500 GB SSD. All store reps agreed it was cool, but not worth the price and most thought an MSI with the 970m was better. Just thought I'd let you know it was released exactly one week ago in Asia.

 

I saw a couple of videos, and keyboard have to much flex, it is freaking disappointing all this

 

It's going to depend on what exactly you want it to do.

 

G501 on newegg:

ASUS ROG G501JW-DS71 Gaming Laptop Intel Core i7 4720HQ (2.60GHz) 16GB Memory 512GB SSD NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 15.6" 4K Windows 8.1 64-Bit

http://m.newegg.com/Product?itemNumber=N82E16834232427&Keyword=asus g501

 

G501 tested by notebookcheck: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-G501JW-Notebook-Review.141745.0.html

Basically the CPU temp is limited to 85C by Asus, causing CPU throttling under cinebench and similar heavy load, and GPU will also throttle during heavy use to below stock speed. Very disappointing, asus should stick to intel specs and allow the CPU to run up to 100C, this would most likely prevent the CPU throttling.

And battery running time is not very impressive with the 96WHr battery, with 4 hr 45min of surfing over wifi. For example the asus G551 with 56WHr battery managed 5 hr 17 minutes in the wifi surfing test. I know the 4k display is power hungry, but still, I had expected a lot more.
Black levels and contrast for the 4k display is only average as well.

For the price tag I had expected better results. At least the noise levels seems acceptable.

 

the more i read about the 501, the more i'm disappointed with it. looks like Asus compromised a lot to keep this thing fairly cool. considering the razer blade gets about 6hrs of battery, doesn't throttle, and the heat is not too bad.. i would've expected at least better battery and no throttling from the 501

 

I'm with you on that one. I really wanted to like this thing, especially since I have the UX51VZ. I don't know what Asus expected, with an underpowered GPU that throttles every chance it gets. It's dressed, marketed, and priced as a hardcore gaming computer yet functions like your average multimedia notebook, and every single review out there is pointing that out.

 

Actually it's 3 609 points (a typo in the notebookcheckreview). Which is exactly 860m GTX level. Disappointing, even if it's "only" 10% difference. They could have put in a 860m right away. Wouldn't sound good enough for premium prices though. It's not the first time ASUS did this... they always seem to gimp their internals. In favor of fan noise probably. The noise results from NBR seem to be great though. Probably the most silent gaming laptop in fact.

Regarding battery life... I guess the exaggered 4K is the reason for it. Double amount of pixels. I mean, who in the right mind comes to the idea using a 4K panel on a laptop with 860m only? It's the same on the UX501. The GPU is too weak for it. Every computer amateur can tell that, and yet they keep on throwing laptops together in unreasonable ways.

 

Actually 4k is quadruple the number of pixels.

 

G501 comes with the FHD panel version so it costs lower price and should have had better battery life, is it still worthy as a medium gaming-everyday laptop?

 

No not with the throttling nonsence Asus have pulled with this!

 

Guys,

Just a quick heads-up: only the French stores seem to have the G501JW with FHD IPS matte screen (PLS from Samsung, similar to the MSI GS60 screen) and 96Wh battery in stock.
Got myself 2, if someone is interested, let me know!
Battery life so far seems to be around 5,5 hours, with mainly multimedia tasks (browsing, watching youtube videos) and balance battery profile.

 

I'd expect a phase in of 5th generation CPUs at some point to help availability.

 

Would it be worth buying the 4k version for the battery & RAM increase and then ordering the FHD screen direct from ASUS and just find a vendor that will replace it? Is it even possible and worth it in the long run?

 

The two will use different connectors so it wont be a straight swap.

 

Can you go into the technical details of how difficult it would be to swap the ports etc. I assume the wires connecting to the motherboard would have to be changed and they are soldered on?! I'm not sure, I just want to know if it is worth it as some of the stores in Singapore are selling the G501 at a competitive rate. Overtime, I could easily buy an FHD and change it. Ultimately I want to know if it is worth it as I would also expand the SSD.

 

Asus are using different motherboards between the different models so it may not even be possible at the moment. I have not investigated the connectors themselves.

 

I second this, both the CPU and the GPU throttle hard when playing a game. GTA V was slow and choppy, the CPU speed and the GPU speed was jumping up and down all over the place. There is no stability in the clocks, and throttling occurs very quickly. I even went as far to reduce clocks on both the processor and also the GPU, but all continued to throttle. Great machine for multimedia and portability, but rubbish at gaming, shouldn't have ROG label on it if it cannot game to the fullest.