Asus ROG Strix GL553VD-DS71
Specifications
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Average of 2 scores (from 1 reviews)
Reviews for the Asus ROG Strix GL553VD-DS71
Pricey budget gamer. Budget gaming notebooks are becoming increasingly popular thanks to GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050, and Asus has decided to throw their hat into the budget ring with the GL553VD. The notebook packs modest hardware into a well-built chassis with some nice extras, but are these factors worth the additional cost?
Source: Computer Shopper Archive.org version
The Asus RoG Strix GL553VD is a competent 15.6-inch gaming platform. It has just enough power to play the latest games at 1080p, all the while running quietly and looking good in the process. It has other notable upsides as well, such as decent speakers and respectable battery life for a gaming notebook.
Single Review, online available, Very Long, Date: 03/09/2017
Rating: Total score: 60%
Comment
Model: Mid-range gaming laptops, which are affordable, reliable, yet still powerful, meet the essential requirements of users like gamers. Actually, the manufacturer Asus did very well with the combination of an Nvidia Pascal graphics and a 7th generation Intel Kaby Lake processor in the 15.6 inch ROG Strix GL553VD. As a result, the Asus ROG Strix GL553VD could appeal to most users at first glance with not only excellent performance but also great design. Its price can still be considered pretty low in view of its features. “In other words, the Strix seems like it should be a killer deal” (quoted from page DigitalTrends).
Design
The Asus ROG Strix GL553VD laptop comes with a 15.6-inch Full HD screen which 178 degree viewing angles and matte finish. GadgetShow comments that this enables users to share the screen with fellows without ambient light distraction. “When you first behold the Strix, named after a genus of predatory owls, you’ll notice that it’s a little less flashy than its predecessor”, said DigitalTrends. Regarding page LaptopMag, between its black-plastic chassis and bright-orange accents, Asus’ laptop looks like it’s ready for Halloween. The lid features two traffic-cone-orange stripes flanking the ROG logo, which is a bit extreme for that reviewer’s taste. The page PCVerge also showed a viewpoint that the Asus ROG Strix GL553VD is - at least by gaming standards - not large and bulky like predecessors. Particularly, at 0.8 x 15.1 x 10 inch (HWD) (2.03 x 38.35 x 25.4 cm) and 5.5 pounds (2.49 kg), it won’t take the least of desk space and is somewhat travel friendly as it can slide into a 18.4” laptop backpack though it is not as heavy as we might expect. The page Geeks3D gave their opinion about the ROG Strix GL553VD’s design: “If you need a 15-inch gaming notebook with a reasonable price and a nice design (black brushed aluminum case), the ROG Strix GL553 is a good choice”.
Display
The 15.6-inch, 1080p screen of the Strix is sharp and colorful. The reviewer of page LaptopMag said when he watched a Full-HD trailer for Spiderman, “Homecoming, the red in Spidey’s suit was the perfect shade of crimson and the blue was nice and deep, while the fur in the villainous Vulture’s collar was nice and sharp”. TechForPennies says, “The 15.6” matte display on Asus ROG Strix GL553VD has neat features. It of course supports 1080p resolution and using that with the GTX card won’t be a problem at all. Its technique is similar to IPS, with 180 degree viewing angles at all”. The colors are rich and vibrant, darks are deep and inky. As remarked positively from the DigitalTrends, running through some high-resolution black-and-white photos, the Strix’s display rendered them perfectly, with an appreciate contrast between the brightest whites and the darkest darks. According to PCVerge, the panel is very bright up to 349 nits in the center, and the average luminance of the Asus GL753 is not much lower at 337 nits and Nvidias’s G-Sync Technology isn’t supported here. According to LaptopMag, the colors are vibrant, but they aren’t necessarily accurate: “The Strix has a Delta-E color accuracy score of 1.6 (0 is best)”.
Keyboard and touchpad
The keyboard of the Strix is extremely comfortable. “Thanks to its deep 2 millimeters of travel and 62 grams required force to depress the key, I never found myself bottoming out on the keyboard deck” (LaptopMag reviewed). PCVerge also reviewed that users had a chiclet style keyboard with a numeric keypad, which offers some decent key travel, at least for gaming standards. Evaluated from page DigitalTrends, “The Strix benefits from the trend that the manufacturers have been putting a little extra effort into the keyboards, providing a keyboard with excellent key travel, and a surprisingly high-quality feel”. It has little give, as most laptop keyboards do, but the keys themselves are responsive, clicky and satisfying the touch. The reviewer of page TechForPennies wrote that this notebook came with a backlit keyboard and you could change its color.
The overly fussy touchpad in 4.1 x 2 inch (0.41 x 5.08 cm) might make us want to use a gaming mouse when browsing the web. According to LaptopMag, it’s fine for navigating and performing Window 10 gestures, but it only let the reviewer right click in the very-bottom-right corner of the touchpad, while it usually would let him left click just about everywhere. However, the GadgetShow gave a perspective that though the trackpad is large, it is slightly erratic to work with: “Users get all the usual function keys (doubling up as themultimedia keys) with a dedicated ROG app and power buttons as part of the keyboard. This was accidently pressed since usually the delete key is placed at that position on most keyboards”. Followed a comment of DigitalTrends, the Strix GL553VD’s trackpad feels great: “It’s slick, with a matte texture that is pleasant to the touch. It’s surprisingly accurate, sharp enough to use in games like Civilization VI, or other turn-based games that don’t require the precision and speed an external mouse provides”. On the contrary, page Geeks3D complained: “The touchpad is not good especially the left click. I don’t know if this is only on my sample but I don’t like this touchpad”.
Audio
For audio issues, regarding LaptopMag, the speakers in the Strix are serviceable, but the sound quality isn’t up to par. “When I listened to Blink-182’s “Wishing Well”, the sound filled our lab, but the only parts I could make out clearly were the vocals and guitars”, said LaptopMag’s reviewer. Notwithstanding, “Moving on, the Strix is outfitted with a set of speakers that can produce rich, deep sounds a step above what you might be used to on a gaming laptop. The Strix, by comparison, reproduces rich and lifelike sound without any noticeable clipping” (DigitalTrends).
Graphics and performance
rmed with a 2.8 GHz 7th generation Intel Core i7-7700HQ CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB 7200 rpm HDD, the Asus ROG Strix GL553VD is a fine multitasking machine. The reviewer of page LaptopMag stated that he had 28 tabs opened in Google Chrome, two of which were streaming games from Twitch at high resolution, and he saw only the faintest hint of lag when switching among websites. DigitalTrends says that when it comes to processor speed, the Strix manages to keep up with the competition, but never quite pushes past similarly outfitted competitors. According to TechForPennies, “The Intel Core i7-7700HQ runs on nothing less than four cores, and the clock speed is 2.8GHz. The speed will even increase higher thanks to the 3.8GHz turbo boost feature, so that there are no software I can think of that wouldn’t run on this rig”. Specifically, LaptopMag also left a comment: “You are not going to play games at their highest settings on the Strix, but it’s the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 GPU with 4GB of VRAM will handle most titles on normal or medium settings”. Despite belonging to the new GTX 1000 Series, the GeForce GTX 1050 (4 GB GDDR5) is still a budget graphics card. From the TechForPennies’ point of view, it is going to run any game there currently are, yet we might not be able to use all-ultra-settings on each game. For example, on high presets and 1080p, we can expect The Witcher 3 have 50 fps, GTA5 70 fps and Battlefield 4 100 fps. As a small verdict for its performance, DigitalTrends concluded: “GL553VD is still a budget gaming notebook, but with those specs it should be able to hold its own against competitor and offer decent frame rates at high settings. The GTX 1050 is a card that will likely start to show its age very quickly. It already has trouble running recent games at high and ultra-high setting in 1080p”.
Heat and battery life
The Asus Strix GL553VD, as evaluated from LaptopMag, stayed cool under pressure: “After we streamed HD video from YouTube for 15 minutes, the bottom of the laptop reached 93 degrees Fahrenheit (33,89 °C), and both the center of the keyboard and the touchpad reached 88 degrees (31.11 °C), all of which are below our 95 degree (35 °C) comfort threshold. However, after I played Grant Theft Auto V, the system got a tad hotter. Keyboard and touchpad reached 93 degrees (31.11 °C) degrees and the bottom of the notebook hit a toasty 109 degrees”. And for page DigitalTrends, while performing their gaming benchmarks, they noticed another peculiar issue. The Strix has a bad habit of accumulating an enormous amount of heat.
LaptopMag advised us to bring a power adapter with us in case we want to take the Strix anywhere: The Strix GL553VD lasted only 3 hours and 41 minutes on the LaptopMag Battery Test, which consists of continuous web browsing over Wi-Fi. This battery life is notably lacking due to the undersized 48 Wh battery it’s equipped with. In the tests of DigitalTrends about battery, the Strix’s battery barely broke two hours of battery life on a full charge.
Verdict
In general, “The Asus ROG Strix GL553 is the most affordable gaming laptop that the company currently sells, and it comes with a comfortable keyboard, a vivid display and an NVIDIA GTX 1050 GPU. But the laptop’s subpar speakers and finicky touchpad are serious trade-offs” (LaptopMag). Beside some advantages like the vivid display, the slimmer design than other competitors, the RGB-backlit keyboard and a powerful CPU, this notebook still has several defects that could make user feel underwhelmed, for instance, the extremely poor battery life, the fussy touchpad, or even the adequate graphics card. Yet, in case you need an affordable gaming laptop that can play recent games at medium settings, I think the Asus Strix GL553VD could be the best choice. Regardless of some flaws mentioned above, the PCVerge still said that the Asus ROG Strix GL553VD is a very attractive proposition for a very reasonable price given the latest Kaby Lake processor and the GTX 1050. Overall, “There is no reason to skip GL553VD if you don’t have all the money in the world to spend, but still want to have decent gaming experience on a laptop”, concluded TechForPennies.
Press Review by Capuchino Saber
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile: Mainstream graphics card based on Nvidia's Pascal architecture and successor to the GeForce GTX 960M. Is manufactured in a 14nm process at Samsung and the technical specifications are very similar to the desktop version.
Modern games should be playable with these graphics cards at low settings and resolutions. Casual gamers may be happy with these cards.
» Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Graphics Cards and the corresponding Benchmark List.
i7-7700HQ: Quad-core notebook processor based on the Kaby Lake architecture. Besides four CPU cores (including Hyper Threading), the chips also integrates the HD Graphics 630 GPU and is manufactured in an improved 14 nm process.» Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Processsors.
15.60":
15-inch display variants are the standard and are used for more than half of all laptops.
The reason for the popularity of mid-sized displays is that this size is reasonably easy on the eyes, often allows high resolutions and thus offers rich details on the screen, yet does not consume too much power and the devices can still be reasonably compact - simply the standard compromise.
» To find out how fine a display is, see our DPI List.Asus: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. is a major Taiwanese computer hardware manufacturer based in Taipei, founded in 1989. Under the Asus brand name, the company manufactures a wide range of products, including laptops, desktops, motherboards, graphics cards, monitors, smartphones and networking equipment, complete systems and PC components for end users.
Under the ROG (Republic of Gamers) brand name, ASUS manufactures gaming laptops known by gamers for their powerful specifications, dedicated graphics cards, high refresh rate displays and advanced cooling systems.
Beyond gaming, a wide range of notebooks are offered for different needs and budgets, from ultra-slim and lightweight ultrabooks to versatile 2-in-1 convertibles and budget-friendly options. In 2023, Asus had a 7% global market share of the PC market.
Customer satisfaction with ASUS notebooks concerns performance, the features, and the good price-performance ratio of ASUS notebooks. However, as with any brand, there are occasional reports of problems such as overheating, driver compatibility, or build quality issues.
70.15%: This rating is poor. More than three quarters of the models are rated better. That is rather not a purchase recommendation. Even if verbal ratings in this area do not sound that bad ("sufficient" or "satisfactory"), they are usually euphemisms that disguise a classification as a below-average laptop.
» Further information can be found in our Notebook Purchase Guide.