ASUS ROG Zephyrus M GM501GS Gaming Laptop Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The ASUS ROG GM501GS retails for a price in the region of £2000. For a laptop that is clearly quite a significant outlay of money. Given the excellent processor, graphics card and the clearly fantastic hard drive options available, this is, however, a laptop that should provide you with some excellent value for money. Even in terms of the aesthetics, for the price, this is one of the best looking laptops around.

Overview

The ASUS ROG GM501GS is, without doubt, one of the best laptops we have seen in overall terms levels. Not only does it look good, but it is proven to be a consistently strong performer in all the tests we conducted. Aside from the questionable cooling and specifically noise levels, there is very little to fault.

Performance

As can be seen in all of our tests, the GM501GS was a top performer. While it did better at gaming than it did for more practical applications, it was never found to be wanting in any particular area. True, there were some results that were a little lower than expected, but even those still remained enough within the remit to be acceptable.

In terms of the battery, this does appear to be a bit of a double-edged sword for the ASUS ROG GM501GS. While it charges exceptionally quickly, it also seems to run out of power fairly quickly too. When fully charges, we generally tended to find that the battery would only last 3 hours in operation. Given the slim design, the reason is likely that the battery fitted isn’t very big, 3 hours isn’t very long without needing a charge.

The laptop does have its own performance based slider which can affect the overall battery lifespan, but ultimately, when gaming, you shouldn’t expect this to last more than 2 hours. This is a lot lower than the figures represented by ASUS who suggests that 5.5 hours could be expected. I honestly could only see that achieved if you left it idle, with screen brightness on minimum and all connections turned off.

Design

I absolutely love the design of this laptop. It is without a doubt one of the best in terms of both the aesthetics and the actual physical design itself. The mechanism to raise the base of the laptop to allow for more ‘breathing room’ is truly fantastic. In addition, even the parts of a laptop that can look traditionally a bit bland or ugly don’t.

The rear is excellently presented and the underside is very smooth. Albeit, with the latter potentially at the expense of noise and temperature performance.

Should I Buy One?

So £2000 is clearly quite a lot of money to spend on a laptop. Consider, however, what you are getting with the GM501GS. Not only are you getting Intel’s latest 8th-generation processor, but you’re also provided with a Nvidia 1070 graphics card. On top of all that as well you’re getting a fantastic hard drive system and what is perhaps the best-looking laptop currently available on the market. I really can’t stress enough just how fantastic this laptop is on every level. It’s just a slight disappointment that when unplugged, it does seem to gobble up the battery life really rapidly.

Pros

• Fantastic design and presentation.
• Nice tactile keyboard and mouse pad.
• Excellent gaming and processor performance.
• Everything oozes quality!

Cons

• Short battery lifespan at heavy use. Two hours at best should be expected from gaming use.

Neutral

• The keyboard lighting effects could have been a little bolder.