Asus ROG GL502VM

Design

Asus has slowly been edging its way away from the done-to-death black and red color scheme found on most gaming laptops. Instead of crimson highlights, the GL502 has orange trim accenting its black paint job. It’s not a grand departure like the titanium and copper design found on the Asus ROG GX700and ROG G752, but it’s a start.

Though, we almost wish Asus would have stuck to the purely black and red motif, as the keyboard backlighting is still red. Aside from the new paintjob, Asus has seriously upped the profile of this machine with a new look that’s in line with the rest of its ROG series. Whereas the Asus ROG G501 closely copied the MacBook Pro look, the GL502 stands on its own with an attractive and aggressive design.

Display

The GL502VM has a matte FHD IPS screen and it seems to be the same one which its sister model, the GL502VS uses. This is a bright display with good contrast and stable viewing angles. It supports Nvidia G-Sync. The values of the screens are slightly different, which is to be expected, as two screens of the same build never produce the exact same numbers (brightness, contrast, etc.).

According to the Asus website, the GL502VM is available with a 4K display. However, at the time of testing, we were not able to locate such a model.

Performance

The Asus ROG Strix GL502 is a rock star when it comes to Full HD gaming, For the last few weeks, we’ve been using the 15-inch notebook as our primary Hitman playing system, and it’s been an absolute joy with the settings turned all the way up for a near constant 60 frames per second (fps) frame rate.

With Doom, a much more intense first-person shooter game, I was able to kick the graphical settings up to Ultra and see a steady 60 fps runtime as well. Deus Ex Mankind Divided was the only title that protested against me pushing the Strix to its limits, however, this issue likely stemmed from the buggy PC port rather than Asus’ hardware. Nvidia’s next generation Pascal graphics offer a considerable jump up in power and the results are startling in our benchmarks results.

Backing up the claims we just made, our benchmarks show the Nvidia GTX 1070 virtually doubles the gaming potential of the GL502. The Division and GTA V play at much faster and smoother frame rates, thanks to the Pascal bump. Of course this shouldn’t be too surprising when the Nvidia GTX 1070 comes from a newer architecture, features 2GB more video RAM and is meant to replace the Nvidia GTX 980M.

Battery

A full battery will last 3:40 hours in our practical WLAN test. For this test, we check the battery life while running a script which loads different websites. The “Balanced” profile is active and power saver options turned off. The brightness is regulated to around 150 cd/m². The laptop lasts a little longer in our video test, but the device is still depleted at 3:55 hours. We ran the short movie, Big Buck Bunny (H.264 coding, 1920×1080 pixels) in a loop. Wireless modules were turned off and the brightness was set to 150 cd/m².