Hey guys, Jarrod here and today we're going to take a look at the ASUS ROG Strix GL553VE
laptop and find out what it's got to offer and how well it performs in games.
Inside the box we've got the laptop itself, manual and warranty information, ROG sica
gaming mouse, power cable and power brick.
Let's start with the specs of the laptop, in my configuration here there's an Intel
7700HQ quad core Kabylake CPU, which runs at 2.8GHz and can turbo up to 3.8GHz.
There's 16gb of DDR4 memory running at 2,400MHz with the option of 32GB available.
For storage there's a 256GB SATA3 M.2 SSD and 1TB 7,200 RPM hard drive, however different
sizes are available.
There's an Nvidia 1050Ti for the graphics, which powers the 15.6 inch 60Hz 1080p IPS
panel.
For network connectivity there's a built in gigabit ethernet port and Intel Dual Band
7265 WiFi which supports 802.11AC, as well as Bluetooth 4.0.
The laptop has a brushed black metallic look to it with some tasteful orange coloured accents
around it, and overall I think it both looks and feels nice.
The physical dimensions of the laptop are 38.3cm in width, 25.5cm in depth, and 3cm
in height which makes it a little thicker than laptops I’ve recently reviewed, but
it’s still a decent size, not too thick.
The total weight of the laptop with battery is advertised at 2.5kg, and I found my particular
model to weigh just under 2.6kg, and when adding the power brick and cable for charging
the total weight increases to 3.1kg, so it's still fairly portable.
As mentioned the screen is a 1080p panel, which I personally prefer at the 15 inch size.
It's a 60Hz display which is fine considering the Nvidia 1050ti inside, as we'll see in
the benchmarks it doesn't often go too far above 60 frames per second in many games anyway.
I’ve performed my usual backlight bleed test on the display, which involves having
the laptop show a completely black screen in a dark room to help emphasize any bleeding
around the edges.
I then take a long exposure photo with my camera to help display any bleed, so basically
this is a worst case scenario test.
We can see there's a fair amount of bleed, mainly from the top but also most corners,
and I did notice this while using the laptop in a normally lit room during darker game
scenes.
This sort of thing can differ from laptop to laptop, I was curious and looked at some
other reviews of this model and didn’t see any others that were as bad, so it seems like
your mileage may vary.
The brightness of the screen can be adjusted quite a bit, and I've found the viewing angles
to be quite good, I can see the image and colours clearly on any angle thanks to the
IPS display.
The screen also has a matte finish to it, which I personally prefer as you can more
easily see what you’re doing despite your lighting situation, as reflections are harder
to see.
While moving the display I only found a little bit of flex, nothing serious, overall it feels
pretty sturdy and the lid can be opened easily with one finger.
Above the display is a HD camera, so it’s only capable of 720p video, it looks ok but
not great.
The built in microphone doesn’t sound that great either, but I’ll let you be the judge.
The keyboard has been pretty nice to type with, it's definitely one of the better laptop
keyboards that I've used.
It's a full sized chiclet keyboard with numpad, and all of the keys are RGB backlit over 4
different zones, allowing you to customize the look with the included ROG Aura Core software.
The effects available are lacking a little, hopefully that can be updated in a future
update.
There’s just a little keyboard flex, but it’s only noticeable if you push down quite
hard, it wasn’t a problem while typing normally.
The ROG button launches the ASUS gaming app which lets you view system information and
change the fan speed.
I also liked the touchpad, it felt nice and smooth to the touch and the left and right
buttons are built in towards the bottom.
In addition to this, you can left click anywhere on the touchpad with one finger press, or
right click with two fingers.
Additionally I’ve found the touchpad to work very well, with the tracking working
all the way right to the end of all edges.
The front facing speakers actually sound pretty decent, at least for a laptop.
They sound a little muffled and aren’t as clear at louder volumes, but there is some
bass.
Now onto the available I/O.
On the left there's the power input, air exhaust, rj45 ethernet port, HDMI port, 2 usb 3.0 type-a
ports, a usb 3.1 gen 1 type-c port, and 3.5mm headphone and mic jack.
Over on the right there's a usb 2.0 type-a port, a dvd drive which I was a little surprised
to see, and kensington lock.
As the USB port is close to the front I found that I had to plug the included sica mouse
in on the left, otherwise it got in the way while using the mouse.
The front features some basic status LEDs, full size SD card reader and the speakers
are behind the orange mesh.
There's nothing at all on the back except some subtle republic of gamers branding.
Up on top there's some more ROG branding which is LED backlit when the laptop is on.
The aluminium lid was quite the fingerprint magnet, but nothing a quick wipe with a microfiber
cloth couldn’t fix.
Underneath there’s some air intakes to keep everything cool, as well as some orange rubber
feet which both stop the laptop from moving around on flat surfaces when in use, and also
rise it up slightly to help let cool air in.
There's a 48 Watt hour 4 cell battery, and with a full charge and doing basic tasks such
as browsing the Internet and watching YouTube with the screen on around half brightness,
keyboard lighting off and background apps disabled, I was able to use it for 4 hours
and 24 minutes.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings the battery lasted just 38 minutes.
It would have been nice to have a bigger battery, personally I’d have been cool if they removed
the DVD drive and used that for battery space instead.
Based on the the specs and size I thought the laptop would have adequate cooling space,
during normal use with an ambient room temperature of 18 degrees celsius, both the CPU and GPU
idled at 40 degrees celsius.
While benchmarking for an hour with the same room temperature, the CPU reached a maximum
of 87 degrees celsius, while the GPU peaked at 75, which was a little warmer than I expected
but not too serious.
The laptop was warm underneath, but fine on top so no issues using it on a table.
I also found the laptop fairly quiet, at idle it sat around the 30-32 decibel mark and I
could barely hear it.
With the fans maxed out it went up to 53 decibels.
I also didn’t notice any coil whine while playing games.
Finally let’s take a look at some benchmarks, we’ll first cover some real world gaming
benchmarks followed by tests with various benchmarking tools.
All tests were run at the 1080p resolution with all Windows and Nvidia updates to date
installed.
I’ve been playing a lot of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds lately, so let’s start there.
Even playing at high settings we’re sitting around the 60 frames per second sweet spot,
though of course this can quickly dip depending on what’s happening in the game and how
many people are in the area.
In battlefield 1 we’re getting decent frame rates, even with ultra settings we’re still
close to 60 FPS.
The Witcher 3 is a bit different, even at the lowest settings we’re only start getting
close to 60 FPS, however it was still very playable up to high.
Watchdogs 2 is another game that likes more resources, again we’re almost at 60 FPS
on the lowest settings, however I had no issues playing at high to very high and everything
still looked great and played well enough.
Ashes of the singularity seems to be quite CPU intensive, and again to get a decent frame
rate we have to play with low to high settings.
Shadow of Mordor on the other hand worked well even at ultra settings, but I needed
to swap to very high to sit around the 60 FPS mark.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon was another that only reached 60 FPS at low settings, you could
play on medium or high alright but it wasn’t a pleasant experience going up any higher.
With DOOM I was easily able to average above 60 FPS even at ultra settings, no real need
to play any lower.
We’ve seen that some of the games tested play at 60 FPS even with maximum settings,
while others only barely reach this target at minimum settings, so it really depends
what games you’ll be playing on the laptop.
If you’re curious just look up benchmarks of your favourite game with the 1050ti and
7700HQ CPU and you should expect similar results with this laptop.
Now onto the benchmarking tools, while a useful indicator note that these results are less
practical compared to the real world gaming results previously shown.
This is how the laptop performed in Heaven benchmark with the tessellation set to extreme,
and anti-aliasing set to x8, and this is how Valley benchmark performed with anti-aliasing
on x8 at various graphics settings.
I ran both the Fire Strike and Time Spy benchmarks from 3DMark and got scores of 6,317 and 2,406
respectively.
In Crystal Disk Mark the 256gb Hynix SSD performed around 560 MB/s in sequential reads and 255
MB/s in sequential writes, which is about what you'd expect from a SATA3 based SSD for
the read speed but the write speed seems quite a bit lower.
After looking at the details for the particular model installed it is performing exactly as
advertised, so worth noting if writes are important to you.
The 1TB 7,200 RPM hard drive gets around 146 MB/s in sequential reads and 139 MB/s in sequential
writes which is about all you’re going to get from a mechanical disk.
Overall I think we’ve got a pretty good laptop here.
The build quality is nice and it feels quite sturdy, and the orange accented colouring
is fairly subtle compared to other gaming laptops I’ve seen.
The IPS screen looks great apart from the noticeable backlight bleed that was present
in my model, and the battery is large enough for you to get a fair bit of work done away
from power, but not too much gaming.
If you’re going to be doing a lot of gaming depending on your games you might want to
look at a higher model with a 1060 instead of a 1050ti, as I’ve found that to provide
a better all round 60 FPS gaming experience at 1080p, but of course that will cost more.
With these exact specs I’ve seen the laptop for sale in Australia for anywhere between
$1900 to $2100 AUD, which at the time of recording translates to roughly $1520 to $1680 USD for
my international viewers.
As mentioned you can get different disk and memory sizes, so the pricing can still vary
a bit.
So what did you guys think of the ASUS ROG Strix GL553VE gaming laptop?
I've found it to work pretty well, it offers a decent gaming experience with fairly good
battery life for the size and specs.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments, or simply leave a like or dislike
on the video to let me know what you thought.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this
one.