Hey, how's it going Dave 2d here?
so this is a laptop with Nvidia's new Max-Q design specifically the Asus GX501 and
well here's thing for years ever since like gaming laptops existed people have been trying to find that perfect balance between
power and portability and honestly
It doesn't really exist because when you have a gaming laptop it's usually thick or
Loud or thick and loud until now Nvidia's Max-Q approach is an approach to building a laptop
That's thin and quiet and powerful
Basically they're building the perfect laptop so everything from the GPU to the drivers to the thermal components the electrical components
Everything is geared towards this Max-Q approach
And it's essentially all about efficiency
So first let's talk about the GPU it's a GTX 1080 chip it has all the cuda Cores all the memory
But it's clocked slower
They've reduced the clock speed a bit before this Max-Q approach
But the trade-off is a very nice reduction in power consumption so in terms of total wattage a regular GTX 1080 laptop will pull
maybe 250
260 Watts under full load this laptop pulls
171 Watts Under Full Load
And that's like a 90 watt difference which means smaller AC adapters for portability and less heat output
and when you have less heat to deal with you can make your laptops thinner your fans don't need to work as hard and on the
Asus Zephyrus the bottom actually opens up when you lift the screen which allows for better air flow
Now this machine is running some very early drivers
But I'm just curious to see how we do for benchmarks the Max-Q design Zephyrus is about
13 to 15 percent slower than a regular laptop GTX 1080 which is around what I expected and it's about 10
Maybe 12 percent faster than a GTX 1070 laptop
So it kind of sits between the two in terms of just broad performance
But the thing is the fans on this laptop are super quiet in comparison to anything else on this chart
It's so weird to see this kind of performance in something this quiet
Now I wanted to focus on Nvidia's Max-Q design for this video
But because I've been using this for a while I thought I'd give it kind of like a mini review
The build quality is really good. It's a premium asus device
I think it's the best-looking laptop that asus has ever made there's lots of brushed aluminum
Great materials with just a hint of gamer DNA. It doesn't have any like red racing striped and stuff.
It has a solid port selection for a 15-inch laptop, but there's no SD slot if you're looking for one.
The nvme drive inside is really fast its upgradable
But it's not easy to open it up. The thermals are comfortable when playing games
But Max-Q does limit the thermal output automatically. The configuration of the top deck here is obviously a little bit different
They've shifted the keyboard down for better component, airflow. It has customizable backlighting and the keys have pretty short travel
It's very chickity
I am comfortable gaming on it
But I don't think it's ideal for typing a ton of stuff. Now because it's positioned so close to the bottom of the keyboard asus
Includes a wrist rest. I didn't find it useful
I mean, I found it comfortable enough to use without but everyone's Gonna be a little bit different the trackpad/keypad
I find it super cool switches between the two it uses windows precision drivers with good tracking and when it's a number-Pad mode it's
Very accurate it's obviously positioned a little weird being on the side, but I got used to it quickly
I am right-handed though. The speakers are pretty nice and because of how quiet the system is even under load you can totally rely on them
for games. It houses a 50 watt hour battery underneath the keyboard and battery life is short
I'm getting three hours of battery life with my regular test, but that's just the nature of a thin and light high performance laptop
There's no more room in there for a bigger battery
So I played a lot of games on the Zephyrus and it just crushes them at 1080p
With the G-Sync panel games look super smooth at 120 Hertz.
It's just a very enjoyable gaming experience almost every single First-person shooter is going to play really well in this system
Open-World games tend to be a bit more demanding, but even those play pretty well
You won't be able to hit 120 frames per second on every Open-World game at Max graphics
But if you reduce it to high the screen can show off that sweet refresh rate again.
Video editing is also awesome on this laptop. A lot of laptops with high-end CPUs and high-end GPUs can be loud in premiere because that's
just the way video editing is it's CPU intensive its GPU intensive, but with a Max- Q laptop
It's quiet
But you still get kick-ass performance. The other thing is that the zephyrs is low-key enough to use in a library or a coffee shop
If you want to go out there
and you want to play some games no one would bat an eye these laptops are so quiet and unassuming
The Max-Q approach to laptop design obviously isn't for everyone
Some people don't care about how thin their laptops are. Some people don't care about how loud the fans are. They just want pure performance
and for those people the full fat GTX 1080 laptops a little bit thick but those will deliver great performance better performance than this
But if you're looking for thin and light and powerful and quiet
Nvidia Max Q delivers. This thing is seriously laptop dream material.