The Asus ROG Strix GL703V is a great laptop for 1080p gaming. It’s not cheap, but is a good choice if, like us, the thought of spending £3000/$3000/AU$4000 on a rig makes you want a week long meditation retreat just to get over the stress of it all.
Let’s get the bad part out of the way quick, though. The Asus ROG Strix GL703V’s battery life is bad. It will barely last a train trip from London to Paris, let alone a long haul flight.
But who’s taking a 17-inch laptop on a plane anyway? This is a gaming laptop for the home, even if it is substantially thinner and somewhat lighter than some of Asus’s models designed to house top-end GeForce graphics cards.
Price and availability
The Asus ROG Strix GL703V costs $1499/£1499 in the spec reviewed. This is the GL703VM.
It has a GeForce GTX 1060, one of the best options for 1080p resolution gaming, 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. There’s a 1TB hard drive too for all your media files, miscellaneous junk and less performance-critical games.
There’s also a GL703VD model. This starts at $1099 but has a GTX 1050 graphics card, which will leave you juggling settings more than the spec reviewed. The base model also snips out the SSD. And if you’re spending this sort of money on a laptop we always advise getting one with an SSD.
While frame rates in games can still seem fine with a hard drive, load speeds will be much slower and Windows 10 just doesn’t run that well off slow storage.
Obvious rivals at the price include the MSI GE73VR 7RE and HP Omen 17.
Design
The Asus ROG Strix GL703V’s design is typical of a mid-range, unashamed gaming laptop. Its lid is brushed aluminium but the rest of the shell is plastic.
However, there’s a soft-touch carbon fibre effect finish on the keyboard surround. This helps mitigate the possibility of the GL703 being seen only as a budget-conscious laptop.
Like other ROG models, you do need to be willing to go “all-in” on the gamer look, though. The keyboard font and big, brash logo on the lid mean this isn’t a design for those quietly ashamed that they like to unwind with a game or two.
The stiffness of the shell’s panels aren’t quite up to those of an Alienware 17, though. Push down on the area below the keyboard and you can get it flex a couple of millimetres, but during general use we’re largely happy with how it feels.
This is a home-bound laptop, however, as the 17.3-inch screen gives it a large footprint. And while significantly thinner than some, this isn’t part of the new breed of gaming laptop that secretly dreams of being the sort of ultra-slim computer a start-up’s marketing director might buy.
It’s 24mm thick and weighs just under 3kg. Carrying it between rooms is no major chore, but we’ll stick with a MacBook Pro for working in coffee shops, thanks.
The Asus ROG Strix GL703V has no optical drive, but does have a solid array of connectors. About its sides are four USB 3.0 ports and one USB-C. The USB-C is not a Thunderbolt 3.0 connector, just the slower USB 3.1 Gen 1 kind.
For video there’s a full-size HDMI and a mini Display Port. An RJ45 Ethernet port that lets you plug into your router to avoid any potential Wi-Fi issues.
Half-hidden on the Asus ROG Strix GL703V’s right edge there’s also an SD slot, now routinely left out of most expensive non-gaming laptops.
Screen and speakers
Ours has the 120Hz display, letting you use V-sync at frame rates higher than 60fps
The Asus ROG Strix GL703V’s screen is one of its strongest parts. It’s a 17.3-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS LCD with a matt finish. At this size you can quite easily notice pixellation in Windows 10’s icons, but this is above all else a laptop made for 1080p gaming.
Color saturation is excellent. It completely covers the sRGB standard, and even exceeds it, and there’s even 92.8 per cent coverage of the DCI P3 used by the film industry.
Games and movies look rich and bold. Contrast has a hand in this too. At 1238:1 the Asus ROG Strix GL703V has better contrast than most IPS LCD laptops.
Top brightness of 262cd/m isn’t going to make the screen look so good if you take the laptop out to the beach. But it’s just another reminder the GL703V is really a homebody.
Not every spec of this laptop may have quite the same performance, though. There are variants of the Asus ROG Strix GL703V with a 120Hz panel, and those with a 60Hz one.
Keyboard and trackpad
As you can tell from a quick glance, the buttons are built into the pad rather than sitting below, unlike a top-end model such as the Alienware 17. If we were to sit down for a proper gaming session, we’d use a laptop. But for general laptop duties, the trackpad is fine
Other than its GeForce graphics card, the Asus ROG Strix GL703V’s keyboard is the element that screams “gamer” the loudest. It has a highly customizable rainbow backlight, and the WSAD keys have translucent sides, letting the light outline them more clearly than the others.
There are four LED zones, so you choose any breed of rainbow effect you like. 'Breath' and 'color cycle' modes effectively animate the backlight too (it’s a little distracting) and the 'all keyboard' mode just lets you pick a single color for the entire backlight. Some colors look a little off, and white looks blue, but plain red, green or blue tones look spot-on.
The keys have 1.8mm of travel but feel mostly like those of a standard laptop. They have some resistance, but it’s light and deliberately soft. These keys are comfortable and relatively quiet, but nothing too special.
The trackpad is of the same grade. As the keyboard has a NUM pad it’s shifted to the left of the Asus ROG Strix GL703V, and its surface is plastic, rather than textured glass.
The Asus ROG Strix GL703V has a 7th generation Intel CPU rather than an 8th gen one. However, this is largely because at the laptop’s release 8th generation laptop CPUs are all 'U' series ones designed for slim and light laptops. And the Core i7-7700HQ here still, for the most part, outperforms a Core i7-8550U.
It’s a quad-core processor with four cores, eight threads, a clock speed of 2.8GHz and a 3.8GHz Turbo.
New G-series 8th gen CPUs are heading our way, but at the time of review at least, the Core i7-7700HQ isn’t heading to the graveyard just yet.
General performance in Windows 10 is great thanks to the 256GB SSD, which you’ll also want to use for your favorite games. It’s not a lightning-fast SSD with read speeds of 562MB/s and writes of 264MB/s, but provides the crucial performance boost over a hard drive.
It’s the graphics card that matters most, of course. The Asus ROG Strix GL703V’s 6GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GPU doesn’t quite match the performance of desktop GTX 1060, but is still great for 1080p gaming. Middle Earth: Shadow of War runs at an average 52fps at Ultra settings, rising to 104fps at Low settings.
Creative Assembly’s demanding Total War: Warhammer 2 runs at 34.9fps at Ultra, 76.1fps average at Low settings.
If you can’t stand dips below 60fps, you’ll have to lower graphical effects in some games. However, the sad truth is GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 laptops are prohibitively expensive for many, and probably most, gamers.
The Asus ROG Strix GL703V offers a good balance between cost and performance. Our review spec it also has 16GB DDR4 2800MHz RAM, letting you be careless about how many tabs and apps you have open when not gaming.
When you’re simply writing documents or browsing websites the Asus ROG Strix GL703V is near-silent apart from some light coil whine, although the fan does seem to fire up every now and then to flush out some excess heat. Under pressure the fan is louder than those of some of the thicker gaming laptops, although as it has quite a low-pitch tone we don’t find it particularly obtrusive or annoying.
After longer stints of gaming, some of the heat from the GPU and CPU does bleed into the keyboard, though, the upper keys starting to feel warm to the touch. If you tend to play for hours (and hours) at a time, you might want to consider a thicker laptop with a more substantial heat dispersal system. Those great big vents on the HP Omen 17 and Alienware 17 aren’t just there for the looks.
As with any gaming laptop, you’ll likely want to use headphones or speakers while playing, although the Asus ROG Strix GL703V’s stereo speakers are reasonable. There’s at least a hint of bass and passable clarity, although higher frequencies sound soft.
An app called Sonic Studio also lets you alter the sound profile too. However, trying to bring out more treble clarity tends to make the speakers harsh.
Battery Life
Last year we reviewed a lower-power laptop in the Asus ROG GL703 family and found its battery life to be remarkably good. But in this higher-performance, 120Hz-screen notebook, that has flipped.
Despite having a solid 64Wh cell, the Asus ROG Strix GL703V only lasts 2 hours when running PC Mark 8’s mixed use battery test.
Playing a 1080p movie on loop at 50% brightness sees its stamina increase to 2 hours 20 minutes. However, it’s clearly pretty useless away from its charger. Is the 120Hz screen really that much of a power drain?
Of course, this isn’t quite the killer issue it would be in a laptop otherwise well-suited to use outside the home.
We liked
The Asus ROG Strix GL703V is a good laptop for 1080p gaming. A GTX 1060 GPU and Core i7 HQ processor remains a great combo for the job.
Its screen is the biggest draw, though. Great color saturation and contrast makes games look stunning on the large 17.3-inch screen. Its 120Hz refresh rate would be more useful with a GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 GPU, but you’d have to pay a lot more for that spec.
We disliked
Battery life of just 2.5 hours makes the Asus ROG Strix GL703V useless as laptop to use on-the-go. You probably wouldn’t buy a 17-inch gaming laptop for the purpose, of course, but bear this in mind.
There’s also a cost to the laptop’s relatively slender 24mm thickness, as after a while some heat starts to bleed through to the keyboard when playing games.
Final verdict
The Asus ROG Strix GL703V is a solid choice for 1080p gaming if you don’t plan to use it away from its power adapter.
A rich, deep-looking screen makes moves and games alike look great. However, you do have to put up with some keyboard warmth under strain, which may be off-putting for the hardcore crowd.
from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/2F9jf3g
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