ASUS Zephyrus M Review – Slim Yet Smooth Gaming

Zephyrus, the greek god of the west wind, is a really cool name and it fits for ASUS’s Zephyrus M which was revealed along with the rest of ASUS’s ROG line-ups. With the special body that was crafted by the ASUS engineers, they have built the world’s slimmest gaming laptop that runs on a very powerful processor of Intel’s latest 8th Gen processor and Nvidia’s graphics for your gaming needs. All that heat from the high specs needed to be vented out and ASUS gave the new Zephyrus a smart air-vent popped up at the back of the laptop as you flip it up.

*Photos taken with Sony α6300

Heat has always been an issue as we game on our laptops and in some cases, the heat can burn or destroy your PC if not taken care of. The smart air-vent design that lifts up at the back is great to help with the ventilation of your laptop when gaming. What we have here is the ROG Zephyrus M GM501GM model thanks to ASUS.

Check out our unboxing video below:

Design

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus M is designed to be a portable and powerful gaming laptop. So if you’re going to bring it around, it should have a stylish look of a laptop. And the Zephyrus M was able to pull it off in style. With a Black Titanium brushed aluminum as its chassis and a chrome ROG emblem that glows in red, it’d catch anyone’s attention.

As you flip the lid up, the back of the keyboard will be lifted up slightly to reveal the hidden vent at the bottom for ventilation and at the same time provides a comfort-angle for your keyboard usage. The bottom vent known as the Active Aerodynamic System (AAS) revealed after the lid was lifted up is a creative design which allows for ventilation to deal with the heat when gaming. As it is equipped with the 8th Gen Intel Core i7-8750H and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, when gaming, you’ll need all that heat to go somewhere to maintain its performance right?

If you ever need USB ports, the Zephyrus M has 4 installed with 3 on the left and 1 on the right. All the USB ports are USB 3.1 supported and it also comes with a Thunderbolt 3 port along the right side as well. Though the Zephyrus M is at an astonishing 19.9mm thick only and only weights 2.45KG, it is still able to fit those ports in.

Display

With the norm of gaming laptops at 15 inches, the Zephyrus M at 15.6″ can put up a display of 1920 x 1080 resolution. The matte screen is great when using outdoors without the glare and it has a refresh rate of 144Hz. Equipped also with the Nvidia G-Sync technology, your games will hardly encounter any screen tearing or latency which can disrupt your gaming experience. With the lid able to tilt up to 178-degree, you will be able to position it at an angle that you are comfortable with.

Performance

It’s 2018 and the Zephyrus M runs on one of Intel’s latest 8th Gen processors, the Intel Core i7-8750H, which runs on 6 cores, at 3.9 GHz and at 4.1 GHz if overclocked. It also comes with 16GB of RAM as well which supports your laptop’s reading speeds and overall performance. This also allows for the number of tasks that you can do while you’re multitasking like, the number of tabs on your browser or windows that are opened and running at the same time. If you’re a multitasker on the PC, you can also hook up a monitor with a HDMI for a split-screen view.

Equipped with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5 VRAM, it enables you to play the latest games on your laptop just about anywhere! Games that we’ve tried it on are Overwatch, Far Cry 5 and PUBG on the highest settings which ran smoothly with no heat issues while playing them. With a battery of 180W, it can last 5.5 hours while it’s on idle but of about 2 hours and 30 minutes if you are using it pretty heavily.

Overall

Compared to its predecessors, the ASUS ROG Zephyrus M GM501GM is a great replacement as it is cheaper at RM 7,999 and equipped with a much more powerful Intel Core i7-8750H processor. With a creative design that allows them to fit the GTX 1060 and provide ventilation for it, the rig is a great replacement if you like an aluminum companion to bring outdoors. Though the battery does not last too long and the fan could be too noisy when under heavy usage, it can be bothersome for some. However that can be overlooked if you are wearing your headphones most of the time and a power outlet isn’t an issue. So if you’re looking for a replacement, the ASUS ROG Zephyrus M is a good choice for your gaming needs.

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