GL502 kaby lake finally does away with the nasty orange keys.

damn, the plastic bits look like painted plastic. That sucks the palm rest isn't metal
As i suspected based on the internal photo, it's black plastic, painted silver.

painted plastic is really not durable. the paint, that is.

 

Weird that they address the power supply issue but not the overheating :/ I wonder if the 553 and 753 have issues as well with CPU overheating or the vm 1060 version for that matter

 

60C is a little higher that what I'm used to seeing laptop i7s idle (generally around 50C), but that may just be the way the laptop is designed (in exchange for lower fan noise). It shouldn't have any negative effect on your system stability or longevity.

CPU hitting 98C under load is ok for short duration. If you were running like that for hours straight it may be of concern. More importantly than the just temp is whether or not you're throttling. If you're throttling and still hitting 98C, then yes, that's poor thermal design and may pose a long-term problem. However, if you're not throttling and 98C is where you top out at I wouldn't be too concerned. Repasting may help, as would complaining to ASUS to have them release a BIOS update to increase the fan speed.

My current laptop (4720HQ) will hover at around 97C with 100% on all 8 cores when compiling code for periods of up to 20min at a time. I've been doing this for about 2 years now and it hasn't caused any issues. I've also occasionally run stress tests/benchmarks that will keep it up there for up to 2 hours at a time (but not often). Though it shouldn't hit that high with just normal gaming, as with an i7 CPU games should generally be GPU limited, not CPU.

 

looks like i'll be getting my kaby 502vm early. Will arrive tomorrow, or wednesday at the latest.
shipped out 15 miles from my home

 

Nice! Though I'm not optimistic about the cooling situation tbh after the YouTube video and the other poster in this thread who hit 98c while just gaming. Hope you get a good one! But as you said I imagine they just recycled everything :/

 

I wonder if it's because the CPU/GPU share one heatsink? The Clevo I have now has seperate CPU/GPU heatsinks, and I've never hit CPU temps that high while gaming (benchmarking/stress testing is a different story though, see above).

 

Dunno but they do have a ton of threads about overheating at the official rog forums

 

Yeah I actually ended up hitting 99C CPU in other games that support 120Hz, where max details would get me 100-ish FPS so you understand the use case. Regularly living at 97C CPU, 85C GPU. I used Intel's XTU to see what I could do. Undervolting anything more than -0.1V was causing various crashes in game or BSOD for me, but I did get temps down for 120Hz to 90C, which I would consider my absolute top end, but OK.

Remember, in a game that you force to 60Hz, (or like in Fallout4 where you introduce weird bugs if you uncap frame rate beyond 60) I saw great temps. 80C CPU, 70C GPU. So if you're OK with 60Hz on demanding titles, undervolting, or running it hot I think there should be a good machine in here if you like its style/price/etc. I generally favor a little more heat in exchange for less noise. I cannot stress here enough how pleased I was with the sounds these fans made. I know my temps got too high, but the fans are well made and had no odd whining or high-pitched sounds.

I agree with @seeker_moc, I've wondered if the pipes being so few and tied together is what's influencing temperatures like this. Look at how much higher the GPU gets dragged up in my two results for 120 vs 60.

In the end, given a few other minor picks with the machine I ultimately decided to return it -- perhaps for the new 8157 Sager, or the upcoming Aorus X5 v7. Both you can now put in a 120Hz panel. Sager is about same price if similarly configured to the Asus -- a little more you can do the i7700HK. I like that it has separated cooling areas given the problems I've faced here and it has a more professional look to it. Aorus comes stock with the HK, is lighter weight, has more battery (90WH vs. 60WH on Asus/Sager) and a Thunderbolt 3 port for future eGPU use, which is cool -- though asking price should be at least $2400 when announced. Not cheap!

 

Yeah, that 120hz 1080p screen is a killer to feed, and any laptop that can do it successfully is going to need awesome cooling, a large body and mass to sustain long usage at full load on the GPU and CPU, and nice quiet and efficient fans to draw out the heat.

I wouldn't run it with anything less than a full body 17.3" laptop, a 1070 - 1080 preferred, and even then it's gonna be loud.

I can't imagine what kinda hardware is going to be required to feed a 4k 120hz / 120 fps panel

 

Arghh...... so because it was sent UPS Ground, it got caught up in the snow in Oregon. Delayed due to weather, delivery unknown.... I'm about to just buy another and hope they'll deliver it correctly this time...

 

1080p @ 60Hz is plenty for me on a laptop. It's just my opinion, but a 15.6" 1080p @60Hz is the best comprise for performance/quality of graphics vs size/heat/battery life of the laptop. Going forward, I'd prefer improvements in power consumption than performance (assuming performance at least keeps up with new games).

If I wanted something large/powerful enough to do 4k @ 120Hz I'd build a new desktop with a 27" monitor. I can see the value of higher resolution on a laptop for still image purposes like photo editing, but I doubt anyone can seriously tell the difference on a 15.6" screen while playing a game or watching a video with fast moving graphics on the screen. Assuming 20/20 vision, you have to be within 2ft of a 15.6" screen to fully resolve 1080p, and you have to be less than a foot away to fully resolve 4k (<13" on a 17.3" screen, not a significant difference).

I can also see the benefit of 120FPS for things like lag/latency, but again, no human can actually see more than 60 FPS.

 

It isn't just the 120hz screen cause the vm model with 1060 and 60hz screen has overheating as well. There is a huge thread on it over at official rog forums

 

@seeker_moc : Agree & agree mostly. I am currently spoiled by a desktop setup like that and well, with GSync, 144Hz display .... you can feel something more than at 60. It's not much, maybe we are talking about "butter" vs. "BUTTER". You also have more headroom with faster displays to target frame rates that are always going to keep GSync on, which is what you want if you have it. Since your card (like a 1070) can clearly push out 60+FPS... if you had a 60Hz display... well then it's back to the old V-Sync / Fast-Sync / Frame Limiting type questions.

This guy does some great videos to discuss input lag of the three things I mentioned. Long video, but if I remember the take-aways correctly, using NVidia Inspector to frame limit, or V-Sync all introduce input lag to the largest degree. Fast-Sync is very close, but G-Sync is best:


That all said...You're still right. It's a laptop. And also, I'm not a competitive gamer. More of a tech enthusiast who knows too much for his own good. I like the idea of a 120Hz panel since I'm spoiled and know I'll appreciate it, but if the next machine I try overheats like this one ... I'm going to take a 60Hz panel, at which point a GTX 1060 will probably be just fine since 60FPS would become the new ceiling for me.

You might even take G-Sync off the must-haves at that point, and pick up one that's optimus based for exceptional battery life since a 1060 can hit 60FPS on most AAA titles right now. No future proofing though. You'd have to always keep details low enough to exceed 60FPS and engage Fast-Sync in that type of scenario.

Pros & Cons... Pros & Cons.

@fluffydelusions : TY I'll go have a look right now for that. Interesting.

 

I'm the same way, more an enthusiast that a pure gamer. I was kinda concerned at first about not having Optimus, but after looking at the skylake model review at notebookcheck.net, you definitely lose some battery life, but not nearly as much as I would have thought (16W (optimus) vs 19W (g-sync) at average idle, and LESS power consumption at a gaming load). That, and I'm primarily a Linux user, and Optimus is something of a pain to get working. Even when working, the graphics architecture between Linux and Windows are completely different, so there's some fundamental issues you have to workaround that haven't been resolved yet (bad tearing, manual switching between the iGPU and dGPU). I'm glad that with g-sync I won't have to worry about this anymore.

 

Whew. Just got back from ROG. Lots of threads across all the models (including 6th gen 502) pertaining to things I saw. Fan speed concerns, the total shutdown I experienced, and a couple people posting the high 90s temps. Someone even under volted and got the same drop I did, though he was able to take his farther before BSODs. Machine should be OK like this. I think it's going to be a must-do for owners. No response on forums though from ASUS yet-- I still haven't officially heard back from support about my temperatures last thursday. Wonder if they're overwhelmed or just don't know what to say yet?

Never knew, or thought about it but yep-- would of guessed. Makes total sense there. It's such a great technology on many aspects.

 

it's here...

 

The heat issue and power supply issue (1070 model) has been a thing since the 10xx models came out last year and Asus have never said anything. But they are obviously aware as the kaby lake model has a 230w power supply now compared to the 180w that caused battery drain. That's why I'm amazed they haven't addressed the heat issue. Maybe the average consumer doesn't monitor temps and complain? I dunno

 

Nice..pics!

 

@link626 : Enjoy and just undervolt. I think you'll be happy! I also saw someone say in another thread that there's some way in the advanced windows power management to get the processor to not change frequencies as much which supposedly will reduce coil whine if you experience it when you're sitting idle in Windows.

 

Picked mine up today. I'll post some temps later today. I'm doing a clean windows install right now and I'll get some games after that.

 

Overwatch on epic should be good

 

gl502vm-ds74.
As mentioned before, only the lid is metal. The top edge of lid is still painted plastic, as is the rest of the laptop.
The goddamn red letters are hard to see in dim light unless the backlight is on. I prefer white lettered keys.
Definitely an IPS panel. made by LG LP156WF6-SPB6.
mechanical hard drive made by toshiba mq01abd100.
HDMI port is only a crappy 1.4 version. Not 2.0.
There is a thunderbolt 3 port, which acts as a second displayport in addition to the mini displayport.

With everything unplugged, the laptop alone weighs 5.5 lbs, measured on a kitchen scale.
Battery life during idle, with screen always on at dimmest setting, wifi on, is ~6 hours 15 minutes for the 64whr battery. During light load, I would guess you might get 3-4 hours if you cap the cpu and gpu speed.

The center logo has a silver mirror finish when turned off, but lights up orange when turned on. looks neat.



Graphical bios.
SSD is a Sandisk SD8SNAT128G1002
Bios reads cpu fan speed, so hopefully someone can hack it so it can be controlled by software.




Thunderbolt 3



and the thunderbolt controller JHL6240, along with the Texas Instruments usb-c controller nearby. The thunderbolt controller is the crappy half speed version, 20gbps. 2 lanes PCIE.


and this is why the cooling sucks.
The vents are pretty much blocked... There's a small gap where heat must escape...





mind the gap....













el cheapo black painted plastic


They call this the triple copper cooling system.
But the 3rd straight piece of copper stuck on top is very thin.





Baseline temps and stuff, at 70*F room temperature, fan running around 1800rpm.....



With the laptop raised 1" off the table, Fans ramp up to 4500rpm during 2 runs of cinebench, with cpu temp ranging from 81-86C......



with Prime95, Turboboost quickly heats up to 93C, then backs off the cpu clock to just slightly above default clock and temp stabilizes around 86C.
Fan noise is tolerable even at 4500rpm.
This is 100% cpu load test. You'll rarely ever have 100% cpu + 100% gpu load in the real world.



with the lid 90% closed, exhaust unblocked, cpu temps are able to touch down to upper 70C.
The stupid lid design definitely gives a 8*C penalty, at least. Let's just estimate it's a 6*C penalty to be nice.
Core 1 fluctuated 10C lower with the exhaust vents unblocked.......


Running prime95 and furmark together, cpu stays in the 90's and throttles 100-200mhz.
GPU appears to be ok at stock clocks.
This is about as bad as it gets. Laptop should not shutdown. It should keep throttling.
Asus lets the cpu run in the 90s continually. Palmrest remains cool.



I would say overall it does a good job with cooling. GPU is able to keep the minimum stock clock, cpu throttles slightly. But overall you still get a lot of performance.
and you're never going to have 100% cpu+gpu load in the real world anyway.

Now I just need to test a 4k monitor to see if the hdmi port is 1.4 or 2.0.

 

Nice pics. Can't wait for impressions. Also I don't think it is necessarily the back that causes the heat issue cause the 702 is more open in back and still has the issue

 

Any word on the panel? HWinfo should give you the actual model number, instead of the generic manufacturer code you find in Device Manager.

Edit: Also, I plan to repaste. Can you see if there are thermal pads in addition to the paste? If so, can you guess the thickness (.5, 1, or 1.5mm)? Thanks.

 

I'm going to test temps with lid open and closed to see how big of an impact that lid blockage causes.

Imagine if you had a desktop computer with a beefy graphics card, then put a panel in front of the exhaust, a few mm away. That baby's gonna get hot

I'm not going to remove the heatsink.
But if it's anything like my old G501vw, I bet Asus is using paste instead of pad.

 

Aren't there vents on top? I heard a bunch of people say it overheats and shuts off with the lid closed and hooked to an external monitor

 

Ok, no worries. I've only ever seen paste for CPU/GPU, but sometimes they also try to cover the GDDR5 and/or chipset with pads and place them under the same heatsink assembly.

Still no update on when mine's due to arrive.....

Edit: Finally, and update. It took UPS 4.5 days just to make the 1,000 mile trip from Ontario, CA to Portland, OR. Hopefully it'll get to me in WA tomorrow, but they still haven't updated my delivery time.

 

ram on the gl502 is pasted. I can see the whitish blue paste oozing out a little.

 

I'm over here in Olympia also with a delayed package though still says I'm getting it today...not the gl502 though lol

 

@link626
Do you have a laptop cooling pad to try if it helps with temps ?

 

I'm not going to use a cooling pad. My tests will be strictly the laptop itself.

I will only raise the laptop on 1-inch foam blocks to create more clearance for airflow.

Actually I will compare temps for flat on table, raised 1", and lid 90% closed.

 

yeah asus never learn from mistake, that vent air must be not block, they should learn from MSi or DELL to make cooling system lol, the GL502VS was very good product price to performance. but they ruin it just because of that back panel design...

 

So, some initial impressions (note I got the VS). Build quality is solid. It's plastic everywhere besides the back of the lid so don't expect anything jaw dropping, but it's nice. The ram on mine wasn't pasted or soldered, and I went ahead and upgraded it to 32gb with the hyper x I had ordered. Idle temps aren't bad, I'll post some more temps of during gameplay in a bit. I also plan on running firestrike to make sure everything is up to par since the razer blade I had bought left a bad taste in my mouth. I'll post the results of that as well. I also plan on buying a 1 tb pcie ssd and changing out the m.2 that's in there as well as removing the secondary hdd as well.

 

OK !
I can understand why you don't use one when testing , just wanted to see if one actually helped with temps.

 

Small amendment to my last post. I wasn't paying attention, but those temps were from while I was downloading 3 different programs at once. When I'm just web browsing, it's high 40's low 50's

 

Thanks so much for the work you put into this. I was kinda hoping I'd be able to contribute, but UPS still hasn't rescheduled my delivery, and my laptop is still in Portland.... It's not too far away, if only I could just drive down there myself and pick it up. Anyway,

The LG panel is the same 60Hz, IPS, 72%NTSC (~100% sRGB) monitor that most 15.6 gaming laptops use, which is great. Good gamut, fast response times for a laptop IPS, and ~900:1 contrast. That was my biggest worry, as I do a lot of photo editing in addition to gaming.

70C is a little higher than I'm used to for idle, but it's still a perfectly acceptable temp, especially as it's likely intentional to keep fan noise down.

It's also good to see that the CPU's TDP is unlocked, and seems to properly respond to high loads/temps by reducing boost. That's much more appropriate than TDP throttling or dropping below base clocks. GPU steady at 80C under full load without throttling is also great.

It's too bad that the lid gets in the way and costs a few extra degrees, but even so with these load temps and cool palmrests it shouldn't pose any problems.

 

Yeah my USPS package from yesterday got delayed as well to today. Amazon said a lot of people were affected yesterday but mine is coming via Kent so not sure

 

That's more like what I'm used to seeing for idle. You do have the 1070 though, so yours is slightly thicker and may result in better temps for CPU-only tasks. The extra thickness of the VS is also the reason you have 2 actual RAM slots, instead of the 1 with another soldered to the board that the VM has.

I've used active fan cooling pads before in the past, and have found they don't lower load temps any, as in a properly designed systems the laptop fans themselves will speed up under load as long as the vents aren't blocked. They lower idle temps slightly (as the laptop internal fans aren't spinning at idle), but that doesn't really matter. The only scenario I've found them helpful in is if your laptop throttles due to heat, the extra cooling from an external fan may provide just enough support to keep it from throttling. Maybe.

That said, I do always use a lap desk when I'm using it as a literal "laptop". It's more comfortable, and prevents your legs from blocking the air vents, which will cook a gaming laptop quickly. There's no fan, just a flat stable surface to keep the laptop vents from being blocked. It's doesn't make it cooler, but keeps it from getting hotter. It gives you 80% of the benefit of an active cooling pad with lower weight, no extra noise, no extra cables, and more comfort.

 

First time in a while I'm skipping Asus...Bought an MSI ge62vr with 1060. Played overwatch on the ge62 on ultra. Temps are good. GPU max was like 71c though avg was like low 60s and CPU max high 60's though it was mostly high 50s/low 60s. That was just with fans set to auto btw no cool booster enabled. This laptop is also very thin. Asus really needs to fix there cooling.

 

Actually, idle is in the low 40's.

The laptop gets in the 90's under full load, but is able to hold performance at those temps, for the most part.

 

You going to undervolt or leave everything as is?

 

I see now, I mistook your 70F room temperature measurement for 70C... spending too much time at work staring at computer screens is killing my eyes (and my mind). Mine has updated to delivery tomorrow, only 6 days late, but who's counting...

 

Alright here are my results from playing overwatch. Couple of things. Core 3 by itself shot up to the low 90's for a couple of seconds but would usually go back down pretty quickly. Also weird, at epic settings and render scale set to 100%, I'm only getting around 116ish fps. Looking at other laptops that were tested, I should be getting a pretty decent amount higher. Last note, firestrike was 13260

 

Looks like everything from temps to clocks to performance is great. Notebookcheck.net is showing average firestrike score as 11552 based on 20 samples and average Overwatch @ Epic/1080p/16xAF as 105fps based on 6 samples, so your 116fps is above average, not below. Are you perhaps comparing yourself to the desktop 1060 benchmarks? I know they're the same chip, but the laptop version is clocked slightly lower, and should be a few percent slower.

 

I have the Gl502VS, which is with the 1070 chip. I'm fine with the temps and firestrike score, because those are actually just fine. But if you look on notebookcheck for the 1070, the average fps for overwatch is around 156. I'm just trying to figure out exactly what's causing the difference so that I can have full performance on the laptop. And I'm guessing that 10 degree difference during load on core 3 isn't that big of a deal then?

 

I played watchdogs 2 for an hour, and was able to make the 502vm overheat and thermal throttle a little.

Both cpu and gpu were hitting near max temps, 98 and 83C respectively.
This is with the laptop 1" off the table

i wonder what the max rpm of the fan is. It doesn't spin faster than 4700rpm.
I know other laptop brands can make their fans howl at 6000rpm, so there's probably more headroom

I will test later with turboboost disabled. I think there's a trade-off with this laptop.... you can't have both chips at max performance.

 

You're right, I knew that... I tend to forget details. That is a bit low for a 1070. Are you on the newest Nvidia drivers? Have you tried disabling unnecessary programs running in the background?

Anyway, a transient 10 degree difference on one core is normal. The game probably doesn't use all 8 cores, and whatever thread it put on core #3 was probably using 100% load for a bit while processing something, then dropped back down once complete.

 

confirmed the gl502vm-ds74 only has hdmi 1.4 port.
tried 4k monitor with hdmi 2.0 and fancy hdmi cable. Can only push 4k@30hz.

so this is a recycled mobo from the skylake, and you'll need a usb-c hdmi 2.0 adapter to use a 4k TV as a monitor @60hz

 

well that sucks

 

however, the 502VM beats the GL502VS because the VM technically has 2 displayports along with the hdmi port.

Nvidia control panel shows a 2nd displayport, which is included in the thunderbolt 3 port.

So the VM can let you run quad display natively.
Or in the future, if you need a 5K monitor that requires 2 displayports, the 502VM has the necessary hardware

The 502VS has hdmi 2.0 and displayport, but that's it.

Anyone with the new GL502VS check the bios to see if it now has thunderbolt 3 ?

In terms of ports , the GL702VM is still the best. It has hdmi 2.0 and 2 displayports (1 via thunderbolt 3)