I can see the product development meeting now
No one's buying AMD laptops because they're slow...
But everyone likes AMD Ryzen desktops with lots of processing cores...
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[Intro]
With its black back panel and red accent lighting, the Asus GL702ZC looks mean
But not in an, over-the-top gamer-ey way
And opening it up, immediately reveals the stars of the show
A Ryzen 7 CPU and Radeon Graphics processor
that make this, the first all AMD gaming notebook that we've seen in...
Many years, or...
Now that I think of it, ever?
And it's no slouch!
The Ryzen 7 1700 8-core 16 thread processor boosts up to 3.7Ghz,
The RX 580 is a very competent GPU for 1080p gaming,
The 16 gigs of RAM out of the box,
And, the ample I/O that comes with the territory of a large and in charge
17-inch machine like this one, make the GL702ZC, on paper,
One of the most compelling, gaming/workstation PC's that we've ever seen
But I'm sure what everyone is wondering right now, is...
Can they keep all of that cool? And the answer is...
Hell yeah!
For a while..
At 3.2Ghz under synthetic load
The temps, well...
*BAD PUN ALERT*
They just kept on Ryzen
At 5 minutes, we hit 80 degrees Celsius
After 10 we were above 90C, and then after 20 minutes, it seemed to leveled off
But at 95 degrees
And, while still remaining super quiet for some reason
maybe ASUS needs to do some fan curve tuning here
Once my CPU is over 90 degrees, I don't care if it sounds like a typhoon,
It needs some TLC
Tender Loving Cooling
And remember our testing was done in a climate-controlled room
All of that being said, we were impressed to see any laptop maintain 3.2Ghz on eight cores
So, to find out how this kind of grunt compares to a more traditional Intel 4 core laptop
We put it up against the ASUS G503VM. A similarly priced 15-incher,
That packs an Intel Core i7-7700HQ, and an Nvidia GTX 1060
Firing up Cinebench we... Wow. Oh wow
Wow!
Oh wow, just...
Wow, that's some savage destruction of...
I mean, not just our comparison laptop...
All laptops!
By a lot!
Even beasts like ASUS $6,000 water-cooled GX800,
And the Acer Predator 21X are no match!
For the multi-threaded prowess of the GL702ZC
And the theme continues in other CPU focused tests like 7-Zip and Blender
It's not all amazing though
In rendering tasks that can take advantage of the GPU
The gap narrows somewhat with the GL702ZC still taking a convincing lead though
And then, when we move from compute, to graphics
The RX 580 just can't quite keep up with the GTX 1060
No matter how hard it tries
*loud fan noise*
Which, judging by the sound of the fans while gaming...
Was pretty hard
In 3D Mark it loses out by a bit to the 1060,
And then in actual games the GL702ZC consistently loses, although not by much
To it's smaller, Green and Blue brother
Not that those couple of frames will probably be noticeable in actual gameplay
But there's more to life than FPS anyway. If you run out and buy a GL702ZC today
That's our AMD version here, It's both heavier and thicker than the Intel Nvidia version
And honestly, the 702 didn't light any exciting fires for us at this price in general
The keyboard is not amazing, it does have a numpad if you're into that and after typing for a bit
Getting up to speed accurately won't be a big challenge, but it's a bit mushy feeling
And pretty much the same can be said for the trackpad
It's serviceable, but un-interesting
And the same goes for the screen. It is IPS, so viewing angles, brightness, and colors were all suitably adequate
And FreeSync is a boon for improved gaming smoothness at low frame rates
But 60Hz screens are better suited for laptops that don't have to go up against 120Hz models, at a similar price
In eSports titles, this amounts to a big difference in the gaming experience
Moving on to the webcam. It's not bad by laptop standards, but it's..
Unexceptional. Especially in low light
And, you might want the light low since you'll be doing everything you can, to conserve the battery
Like...
There's bad, and then there's...
One hour and 22 minutes until all the electrons have escaped... bad
To be clear, the performance while it's doing it is good
But this still puts the 702ZC on the, worst battery life
We've ever seen in PC Mark's test podium
Okay, so that last bit was a bit of a downer
There's more good stuff though, Opening up the GL702ZC you are greeted with surprising upgradability
There's an empty RAM slot,
Non soldered solid state storage, and a 2.5 inch bay
And, AND!
A mother-freaking full sized, desktop AM4 socket!
Now, we can't guarantee that ASUS will provide BIOS updates, but AMD has confirmed AM4 support
Until 2020! So it's possible
Pretty unlikely, but possible
That you could have top-tier AMD CPU performance for years to come
with all that being said
We're not that into buying this thing as a gaming laptop. It's competent at gaming
But if that's what you plan on doing, there are better options right now
With that said, we see the GL702ZC with its unprecedented multi-threaded performance as more of a,
Powerhouse on a budget mobile workstation
That can also game on the side.
And in time, we're really excited to see what other Ryzen 7 designs, make their way to the market.
I mean, maybe with a more powerful NVIDIA GPU, or mobile Vega.. Next note, AMD
We could see the ultimate streaming laptop
Only time will tell
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