Asus has mounted itself as an esteemed participant within the international of gaming laptops. The ROG collection has given us game enthusiasts some of the maximum effective laptops money should buy, and some of them even include thoughts-boggling RGB LED lighting and eye-popping designs. Every year Asus updates its line-up with the latest hardware inside the marketplace, and for 2019, it has done the identical. With the modern-day Intel Core processors and Nvidia’s RTX collection pictures playing cards inside it, the Strix Scar 2 GL504 is one of the new laptops from the agency. And boy, can it play!
A few weeks ago, I was given my arms at the GX701 Zephyrus Sand became enormously impressed with what the huge 17-inch laptop may want to do. However, it fell quick on practicality — It’s too huge. And very pricey. The GL504 Scar 2 looks like an extra realistic alternative for maximum gamers. Priced at Rs 1, sixty-four,990, it’s miles the maximum less costly version in the Asus line-up with the Nvidia RTX pictures cards. With this context, I picked the GL504 Scar 2 for this overview. So is it certainly the most practical of the Asus gaming laptops this year? Read on.
Asus GL504: The Good Bits
Design:
Whether it is a sub-Rs 30,000 pocketbook or a mighty gaming pc, Asus kind of looks after the layout. The GL504 isn’t an exception. At first look, the laptop sports an eye-catching layout, especially with the lid that sports a twin-gradient brushed aluminum finish. As ordinary, there is a ROG logo that glows in RGB colors.
Open the lid, and you’ll be hit within the face with one of the maximum aggressive designs you will ever see on a gaming pc. There’s an extensive keyboard with a committed Numpad and mainly placed arrow keys. The keyboard is RGB backlit. The trackpad is huge enough for everyday use and has a smooth attain. A fake carbon fiber finish with camouflage snapshots and angular warmness vents makes the deck distinguishable from different gaming laptops. Some may additionally like this layout, while others might not. The display has skinny bezels on three facets, with the backside protecting a chunky bezel that also houses a webcam.
There’s an RGB LED strip that runs almost the complete length of the front — this makes for some quite cool lighting effects in the darker atmosphere.
Connectivity:
The GL504 doesn’t compromise on the subject of connectivity alternatives. It gives:
1 x USB three.1 Gen2 (Type-C)
2 x USB three.1 Gen1
1 x USB three.1 Gen2
1 x mDP 1.2
1 x HDMI 2.0
1 x RJ-forty five Jack
1 x 2-in-1 card reader
1 x three.5mm headphone and microphone blend jack
1 x Kensington lock
Display:
The GL504 sports a fifteen.6-inch IPS LCD that may render at the most resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The display supports fairly properly dynamic variety with decent contrasts — now not the nice shades you would see but desirable enough for maximum gamers. The viewing angles are extensive, and an anti-glare coating makes sure you see more of the content material in place of your mirrored image. The 144Hz refresh charge with a response time of 3ms makes for smoother movie or gaming studies.
Performance:
At the start of this evaluation, the GL504 is a part of the brand new fortified ROG series of laptops with updated internals from 2019. Inside there is an eighth Gen Intel Core i7 8750H CPU clocked at 2.20GHz — that is the simplest processor the 2019 ROG laptops come with. I became trying out the version that had the NVIDIA Geforce RTX 2060 GPU with 6GB of GDDR6 reminiscence. There is 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a storage combination of 256GB NVMe SSD and a 1TB HDD.
The GL504 had no problem with all of the video games I tried on it. I attempted some contemporary titles from Steam and F1 2018, Watch Dogs 2, Cause four, and PUBG. For this kind of game, I selected to stick to the very best viable settings. The RTX 2060 isn’t the maximum capable GPU, but it can supply first-rate frame quotes of near 60 fps with maxed-out settings. Dial down the settings, and the fps count number goes up. For example, in F1 2018, I noticed the RTX 2080 Max-Q render the smog and dust debris at the racetracks pretty realistically — the stuff that the RTX 2060 wasn’t superb at. While the GPU’s birthday celebration piece is ray tracing, I didn’t have any games to test ray tracing performance. That said, the RTX 2060 does a better job than the GTX 1060 in rendering put up-processing consequences in video games.
The GL504 additionally has extraordinary thermal overall performance. With the dual-fan cooling machine, the large vents, and the plastic chassis, the computer in no way heated up uncomfortably. I became able to play video games for close to an hour without the keyboard emitting heat.
Practicality: Gaming laptops aren’t the most practical computers to live with on an everyday basis. However, the GL504 is as smooth to stay with as conventional laptops from some years in the past. It is heavy at 2.4Kgs but remembers that this is much less than a load of what 15-inch laptops used to weigh around multiple years in the past. Also, the weight distribution on this computer is even, making it clean to hold round. The keyboard, though, isn’t the maximum best device to write — the chiclet keys are very relaxed, but the jazzy photos and the glittering RGB lights are rather distracting. The trackpad is satisfyingly responsive.
