Asus ROG Strix GL502VY-DS71 Notebook Review

Maintenance

Serviceability is easy on the GL502 series and CUKUSA even offers a detailed disassembly guide for all users. As expected, the cooling system on the GL502VY is largely identical to the GL502VT. The heat pipes here do appears slightly thicker, however, and the heat sinks are designed a bit differently as well. Users will also notice that the GL502VY includes 2x SODIMM slots and no soldered RAM unlike on the GL502VT.

Warranty

The standard one-year manufacturer warranty applies with a 30-day protection against any number of stuck pixels. CUKUSA also offers three-year warranty as standard for any aftermarket or modified hardware installed by the reseller. This can include the HDD, SSD, WLAN, and RAM modules depending on the configuration.

The keyboard should feel instantly familiar to anyone who has used an Asus G752, UX501, or GL552 as the manufacturer employs a similar Chiclet layout across most of its gaming notebooks. The touchpad here is slightly different, however, as it is not as recessed as on the UX501 or GL552 and is thus easier to press. Precision will always be a step below systems with dedicated mouse keys like the G752.

Auxiliary keys and/or dedicated Macro keys would have made the system more attractive to core gamers.

Color coverage is approximately 55 percent and 84 percent of AdobeRGB and sRGB, respectively. In comparison, the Samsung panel in our GL502VT covers nearly 100 percent of sRGB and 63 percent of AdobeRGB. Even so, the GL502VY offers deeper colors than a handful of other 15-inch gaming notebooks including the Alienware 15 R2. Wider color spaces and more accurate colors are generally unimportant for gaming purposes compared to aspects like contrast ratio and ghosting.

Further analyses with an X-Rite spectrophotometer reveal colors that are about as accurate as the GL502VT out-of-the-box. However, since the gamut on the GL502VY display is slightly narrower, the system benefits less from calibration. Our measurements after a quick calibration prove this to be true as colors are still slightly inferior to the GL502VT. For example, color accuracy improves across all tested saturation levels, but they still become less accurate the deeper the saturation due to the panel's smaller sRGB coverage.

Outdoor visibility is above average under shade due to the bright backlight and matte panel to reduce glare and reflections. Direct sunlight still proves to be too much for the display, so colors and texts will become washed out and uncomfortable to read for long periods. Viewing angles are otherwise excellent as expected from an IPS panel. Colors and contrast do not degrade unless if viewing from abnormally obtuse angles.

The Core i7-6700HQ is probably the most common Skylake CPU option for gaming notebooks. Thus, its performance has been well documented in our database. Raw processor performance is not a huge upgrade over the previous generation Broadwell i7-5700HQ or even the Haswell i7-4700HQ while the desktop-class i7-6700K is roughly 15 percent and 30 percent faster in single-threaded and multi-threaded applications, respectively. No throttling occurred during our CineBench tests.

See our dedicated CPU page on the Core i7-6700HQ for more technical information and benchmark comparisons.

PCMark 8 ranks our system in the same ballpark as many of its competitors and sometimes even higher depending on the individual test. We experienced no software or hardware issues specific to our test unit during our review.

3DMark benchmarks show the GTX 980M in the Asus to be just as fast as the GTX 980M in the much larger and pricier DogHouse Systems Mobius SS. Thus, performance and clock rates aren't artificially throttled in any way. Moving from the GTX 970M to the GTX 980M will lead to a raw performance boost of about 30 percent while moving from the GTX 980M to the GTX 980 Notebook will lead to yet another 30 percent gain according to Fire Strike benchmarks.

We stress the notebook with synthetic benchmarks to identify for any throttling or stability issues. Core temperatures are not wildly different than the GL502VT despite our previous SKU running a GTX 970M. GPU temperature is just a few degrees warmer under Unigine Heaven stress while the CPU is slightly cooler in the low 70 C range. Otherwise, users will be glad to know that no throttling should occur when gaming as the GPU will run at a constant 1114 MHz clock rate. The CPU in particular is very good at maintaining its Turbo Boost speeds even when under extreme stress.

Running on battery power will throttle GPU performance while the CPU remains unaffected. A 3DMark 11 run on batteries returned Physics and Graphics scores of 8683 points and 4882 points, respectively, compared to 8650 points and 12472 points when on mains.

Surface temperatures are not wildly different from the GL502VT. The louder fans may have a hand here in keeping temperatures cooler especially on the underside of the unit. The Asus system also does a better job than both the Aorus X5S and Alienware 15 R2 at keeping heat as close to the back of the unit as possible. Note that the WASD keys in particular are much cooler than the surrounding keys when under heavy processing loads for more comfortable gaming.

Runtimes are significantly reduced when compared to the GL502VT. Instead of a near 10-hour battery life when idling on desktop and on the most conservative settings, our GL502VY SKU clocked in just 4.5 hours under the same settings. Lkewise, WLAN runtimes are almost halved from about 6 hours on the GL502VT to just over 3 hours. Runtimes are short even when compared to other gaming notebooks of this size class including the Alienware 15 and Aorus X5S v5.