ASUS GL502VS Review: An Adequate Gaming Laptop

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By Ikechukwu Ugwuanyi

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My take on ASUS GL502VS

Summary

The ASUS GL502VS is an amazing gaming laptop that features an attractive design. Moreover, its powerful CPU and adequate GPU make it fit for playing most modern games. However, the battery life of the laptop is somewhat average.

 
Overall
4.2

Pros

  • Attractive design
  • Good number of ports
  • Excellent GPU performance

Cons

  • Not-so-good battery life
 

Looking for a portable gaming laptop? If so, this ASUS GL502VS review should serve as a guide to what you have been looking for.

ASUS GL502VS: At First Glance

A gaming laptop is not difficult to identify; accordingly, it was no work for me to identify the ASUS GL502VS as a gaming laptop. You need to see the air vents, the aggressive red lights, and the luminous ROG logo on its back.

“Well, whatever it has, I have seen that before, “you may say, but wait until we get to the performance aspects of the laptop. ASUS will really blow your mind with this gaming laptop.

Besides, I think this is another gaming laptop that one can use for other tasks aside from gaming. However, before we conclude like that, let us get to know this laptop extensively in the subsequent sections below.

So, kindly read on.

ASUS GL502VS: Design, Display, Ports, and Connectivity

From all points of view, the ASUS GL502VS looks somewhat attractive. Although it may not be the sleekest laptop ever, it is far from being unattractive.

To achieve such a look, ASUS gave this laptop an aluminum body with a brushed metal finish. Certainly, an aluminum body is more durable and better than a plastic body.

However, if you handle this laptop with dirty hands, its aluminum brushed finish body tends to accumulate fingerprints easily. Sadly, these fingerprints don’t wear off easily, even when cleaned multiple times.

Therefore, you may want to purchase the black color variant of the laptop so the fingerprints or smudges shouldn’t be too obvious. Notwithstanding, the silver color variant can be your choice if you’re sure to handle it with clean hands.

That aside, the laptop’s lid looks thin and fragile, but to give it enough strength, ASUS shaped it like a car bonnet. So, pressing it with some pressure does not really affect it.

As usual, ASUS did not leave the laptop’s lid blank. Otherwise, the game-centric impression won’t be there.

To this end, there are two vertical non-parallel strips on the lid that glow in orange color. Also, in between these strips lies the ROG (Republic of Gamers) logo.

Funny enough, this ROG logo usually reminds me of certain artistic eyewear worn at cultural carnivals. Maybe, this one is worn at gaming carnivals.

Well, with the logo’s orange highlight, you can readily sense the impact of the laptop’s gaming power.

Moving on, the ASUS GL502VS’ lid is held in place by two small hinges that are almost at the left and right edges. Due to the fact that these hinges aren’t too tight, you can easily open the lid with one hand.

Now, when you lift the lid up, you’ll see the laptop’s 15.6-inch FHD (1920 x 1080) resolution display. This display uses an LCD screen with IPS (In-plane Switching) technology.

What’s the impact of this IPS technology on your gaming experience?

Simply put, the IPS technology makes a display offer wide viewing angles. Therefore, when you play games with two or more friends sitting at acute angles to the laptop, the content on the display shouldn’t lose quality or accuracy.

Besides the IPS technology, this laptop’s display features a 16:9 aspect ratio. This aspect ratio is preferable to 4:3 because it allows you to view every aspect of the content on the display with no portion cropped off.

Aside from that, the ASUS GL502VS’ display has a matte surface that reduces reflection and sun glares when used outdoors. Also, the display covers up to 83% of the sRGB color gamut, which means that it should be able to produce a wide range of colors accurately.

One more thing – the laptop’s display is non-touchscreen, and I guess that shouldn’t be a problem. After all, you are not buying the laptop to play android games.

That said, unlike the metal body of the laptop, the bezels surrounding the display are matte-black plastic. You’ll see an HD webcam at the center of the top bezel and an “ASUS” logo at the center of the bottom bezel.

Regarding the webcam, HD webcams can be good for video calls but may not do well in taking pictures. Nevertheless, this laptop’s webcam might be able to capture fairly decent pictures as long as there’s sufficient light.

Similar to the bezels, the deck of the ASUS GL502VS is also made of plastic but with a brushed finish. Moreover, on the laptop’s deck, there is a standard keyboard with a dedicated number pad.

All the keys on this keyboard, except the Z, Q, S, and D keys, are black in color with orange lettering on top. Meanwhile, the Z, Q, S, and D keys look opposite – they feature orange color with black lettering on top.

This distinct look is to always remind you that these keys are particularly for navigation when gaming. Besides, the keyboard’s keys are well-spaced, responsive, and have a key travel of 1.5 mm.

Hence, the keyboard offers a comfortable typing and gaming experience. By the way, key travel can be defined as the distance between the resting point of a key to when it fully hits bottom.

Moreover, the keyboard has a red backlight feature with three levels of brightness. While this is a good feature for gaming at night, it poorly contrasts with the keyboard’s orange keys.

Having said all that about the keyboard, let us check out the touchpad of the ASUS GL502VS. Underneath the keyboard, this laptop features a wide touchpad with integrated click buttons.

This touchpad is surrounded by an orange line which makes it look really appealing. Appreciably, the touchpad responds to touches swiftly and supports multi-touch gestures such as pinch-to-zoom.

Moving on to the ports, the ASUS GL502VS features a good number of ports. Starting with the left side of the laptop, you will find a charging port, an Ethernet port, one DisplayPort, and an HDMI 2.0 port.

That’s not all; the left side of the laptop also features a USB 3.0 port and one USB 3.1 Type-C port. Turning to the right side, you’ll see a headset/microphone jack, two USB 3.0 ports, one SD card reader, and a Kensington slot.

Moving on, the left and right edges of the ASUS GL502VS’ bottom have openings for two down-firing stereo speakers. These speakers can produce rich and balanced sound quality and do not distort even at a high volume level.

Nevertheless, you should get a better sound quality when you plug in a headset.

As most of us know, a cooling fan is an important factor when it comes to gaming laptops. Concerning that, the ASUS GL502VS features two cooling fans with some air vents on its bottom.

These cooling fans and air vents do a decent job of keeping the laptop cool most time. However, the ASUS GL502VS gets a bit too hot when running some intensive high-end games.

Thus, in such cases, the cooling fans will start to blow at their top speed which eventually results in some audible noise. Sometimes, you may think the fans making noise is a symptom of them malfunctioning.

Well, that’s not the case. Instead, it’s part of the cooling fans’ effort to prevent the laptop from reaching a damaging temperature level.

Finally, in this section, let us look into the ASUS GL502VS’ dimensions and weight. This gaming laptop measures 390 x 266 x 30.1 mm (W x D x H) and weighs 2340 g.

In comparison, the MSI GT62VR 7RE Dominator Pro measures 390 x 266 x 40 mm and weighs 2921.14 g. Also, the Acer Predator 15 G9-593 measures 391 x 300 x 39 mm and weighs a hefty 3520 g.

Thus, these laptops are much heavier than the ASUS GL502VS.

All things considered, I will rate the ASUS GL502VS a nine out of ten in this design review section.

ASUS GL502VS: Processor (CPU) Performance

The ASUS GL502VS has a quad-core (four cores) Intel Core i7-6700HQ CPU with 6 MB of cache memory. This 6th generation CPU comes from Intel’s Skylake microarchitecture, which featured a lot of improvements over the Broadwell architecture.

Some of the improvements on this CPU architecture include support for waking the laptop using voice and biometric login. However, these features can be enjoyed only when the laptop uses Windows 10.

That aside, the ASUS GL502VS’ processor supports hyperthreading. For better understanding, hyperthreading is the ability of each CPU core to run multiple tasks concurrently.

Hence, the processor should be able to process various information and tasks in less time. Also, the processor will be able to run more background apps and tasks without slowing down.

Moving on, this CPU runs at a base frequency of 2.60 GHz and a boost frequency of 3.50 GHz. With this processor speed, the ASUS GL502VS should be able to handle most high-end games at a satisfactory speed.

Also, the laptop should be able to handle intensive multitasking with ease. Not just that, it should also be able to smoothly run resource-demanding applications like Adobe Photoshop and handle any productivity task you throw at it.

For a better analysis concerning the laptop’s processor power, let us take a look at its Cinebench R15 test result. In brief, Cinebench R15 is a test that measures a CPU’s ability by putting its cores through some series of workloads.

Hence, this test assigns two results which are the single-core score and the multi-core score. For your information, the single-core score is obtained when only one of the processor’s cores is put through a series of workloads.

Meanwhile, the multi-core score is obtained when all of the processor’s score is put through a series of workloads. Moreover, a high single-core and multi-core score on the Cinebench R15 test means a good processor performance.

Hence, based on the test result, the ASUS GL502VS delivered a 147 points single-core score and 676 points multi-core score. This laptop’s scores are almost on par with the scores gotten by the MSI GT62VR 7RE Dominator Pro, which uses the same processor.

Specifically, the MSI GT62VR 7RE Dominator Pro recorded a 143 points single-core score and 673 points multi-core score. Interestingly, compared with the Acer Predator 15 G9-593, which also uses the same processor, the ASUS GL502VS’ scores are once again almost on par.

Precisely, the Acer Predator 15 G9-593 achieved a 142 points single-core score and 676 points multi-core score. All in all, I will rate the ASUS GL502VS an eight out of ten in this processor review section.

ASUS GL502VS: Memory (RAM) Performance

The ASUS GL502VS comes with a DDR4 SDRAM 2133 MHz memory type. Furthermore, this laptop has two memory slots and features a standard memory of 8 GB in one slot.

However, the laptop supports a maximum memory of 32 GB. Therefore, you can upgrade the laptop’s memory up to 32 GB RAM to make it perform faster and more effectively.

That said, it is worth mentioning that this review is based on the ASUS GL502VS with 32 GB DDR4 SDRAM 2133 MHz RAM. With this amount of memory, this laptop should meet any game’s memory requirement.

Regarding multitasking, the laptop should be capable of running up to 50 Chrome tabs simultaneously without lagging. While these tabs are running, the ASUS GL502VS can still stream an HD video on YouTube and still not slow down.

To further prove the laptop’s performance with 32 GB RAM, let us discuss its results in a PCMark 8 benchmark test. Briefly, PCMark 8 evaluates the overall ability of a computer to handle everyday productivity tasks like web browsing and word processing.

As expected, a high score on this test indicates good performance. So, at the end of the test, the ASUS GL502VS scored 5011 points.

Comparatively, this laptop performed better than one of its major rivals, the MSI GT62VR 7RE Dominator Pro. Specifically, this MSI gaming laptop delivered a score of 4924 points on the PCMark 8 test.

Finally, to end this memory review section, I will rate the ASUS GL502VS a nine out of ten. This rating is due to the laptop’s RAM capacity, upgradability, and test score.

ASUS GL502VS: Storage Options and Performance

The ASUS GL502VS is sold with either an HDD (Hard Disk Drive) or SSD (Solid State Drive). In the context of gaming, your choice of storage type affects the performance of your computer while gaming.

For example, because SSDs are typically fast, games should load faster when using the ASUS GL502VS with SSD. HDDs, on the other hand, are typically slow.

Hence, with HDD, games might load a bit slower on the laptop. However, HDDs offer larger storage space, while SSDs offer limited storage space.

Speaking of storage space, the ASUS GL502VS’ HDD supports a maximum storage capacity of 1 TB. The SSD, however, supports a maximum storage capacity of just 256 GB.

Hence, if you prefer speed and faster load time over storage space, it is best you purchase the ASUS GL502VS with SSD. However, if it is the other way around, then I suggest you purchase the laptop with HDD.

Impressively, for storage expansion, the ASUS GL502VS comes with an SD card reader. Having said that, it is important to state that this review focuses on the ASUS GL502VS with SSD.

Hence, to see how well or how fast the laptop can perform with its SSD, I’ll highlight its result on a CrystalDiskMark test. In case you don’t know, this test is a benchmark test that measures the read and write speed of a computer’s storage drive.

For your information, the read speed and write speed are how fast a storage drive can open and save files, respectively. Hence, the higher the “MB/s” value on the CrystlDiskMark test, the faster the read and write speed of the computer’s storage drive.

So, according to the test result, the ASUS GL502VS delivered a sequential read speed of 485.4 MB/s and a sequential write speed of 312.4 MB/s. In comparison, the MSI GT62VR 7RE Dominator Pro, which also uses SSD, delivered a read speed of 502 MB/s and a write speed of 455.5 MB/s.

Also, the Acer Predator 15 G9-593, which also uses SSD, offered a read speed of 502 MB/s and a write speed of 447.3 MB/s. Hence, both these comparison laptops will open and save files faster than the ASUS GL502VS.

In conclusion, the ASUS GL502VS offers two storage options as well as an SD card reader. However, this laptop was outperformed by some of its competitors on a storage benchmark test.

Therefore, I will rate the ASUS GL502VS an eight out of ten in this storage review section.

ASUS GL502VS: Graphics Card Performance

As expected from a gaming laptop, the ASUS GL502VS comes with a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 GPU. This graphics card offers a base frequency of 1506 MHz and a boost frequency of 1683 MHz.

Also, as a dedicated graphics card, this laptop’s GPU features a dedicated VRAM – it has a dedicated VRAM of 8 GB GDDR5. Due to its massive amount of dedicated VRAM, this GPU should be able to handle any graphics tasks that come its way.

Hence, with this graphics card, the ASUS GL502VS will be able to play title AAA games at a high frame rate. For example, the laptop delivered an impressive frame rate of 192.2 fps while playing Battlefield 4 in high graphics settings.

For more insight into the graphics performance of this laptop, let us consider its result in a 3DMark 11 test. Simply put, the 3DMark 11 test measures how vividly a GPU can draw and fill the shape of 3D objects in 3D games.

It also checks whether the movement of 3D objects is smooth or freezing. Moreover, just like other tests discussed in this review, achieving a high score in the 3DMark 11 test indicates a good graphics performance.

Hence, in the test, the ASUS GL502VS scored a massive 15822 points. Comparatively, the MSI GT62VR 7RE Dominator Pro scored 15492 points, and the Acer Predator 15 G9-593 recorded 9543 points on the same test.

Hence, the ASUS GL502VS has a better graphics performance than these laptops. By the way, the MSI GT62VR 7RE Dominator Pro uses an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 GPU, while the Acer Predator 15 G9-593 features an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 GPU.

To put this graphics card review section to a close, I will rate the ASUS GL502VS a nine out of ten.

ASUS GL502VS: Battery Life and Performance

The ASUS GL502VS features a 4-cell 62 Whr Li-Ion battery. However, there is no information from ASUS concerning how long this battery can last.

Hence, in order to find out, I will consider the battery rundown test result of the laptop. In case you’re curious, this test involves continuously surfing the web via a Wi-Fi network until the laptop dies.

Thus, at the end of the test, the ASUS GL502VS delivered a battery life of 3 hours and 16 minutes. In comparison, the MSI GT62VR 7RE Dominator Pro with a 75.24 Whr battery delivered a battery life of 4 hours and 6 minutes on the same test.

Also, the Acer Predator 17 G9-793 with an 8-cell Lithium-Ion 6000 mAh battery delivered a battery life of 7 hours and 56 minutes. Clearly, these laptops have longer battery life than the ASUS GL502VS.

Due to this, I will rate the ASUS GL502VS a seven out of ten in this battery review section.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Is the ASUS ROG GL502VS-FY057T good for gaming?

Apparently, as a gaming laptop, the ASUS GL502VS is good for gaming. Moreover, due to its powerful graphics card and specs, this laptop is able to play title AAA games with ease.

For example, while playing Battlefield 4 in high graphics settings, the laptop delivered an outstanding frame rate of 192.2 fps.

2. What does ROG mean?

ROG is a lineup of gaming laptops manufactured by ASUS. Also, it is an acronym for Republic Of Gamers.

3. Does the ASUS GL502VS feature an HDMI port?

Yes, the ASUS GL502VS comes with an HDMI port.

4. What processor does the ASUS GL502VS use?

The ASUS GL502VS features a 6th generation Intel Core i7-6700HQ CPU. This CPU supports hyperthreading and has 4 cores with a cache memory of 6 MB.

5. Does the ASUS GL502VS have a camera?

Yes, at the top of the ASUS GL502VS’ display bezel, you will find an HD webcam for video calls and taking selfies.

Conclusion

It is quite clear that ASUS manufactured the ASUS GL502VS to deliver nothing short of excellent performance. From its powerful 6th generation Intel Core i7 processor to its dedicated GPU with 8 GB VRAM, this laptop has enough power to offer awesome gaming performance.

Besides, the laptop offers two storage options as well as an SD card reader for storage expansion. The only major problem that this laptop has is its poor battery life.

Apart from that, there is nothing serious to dislike about the laptop. Hence, if you can cope with this flaw, the ASUS GL502VS is totally worth it.

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About the Author

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Ikechukwu Ugwuanyi

Ikechukwu Ugwuanyi is a Technical Writer for Itechguides.com. He has an HND in Computer Science. Ikechukwu loves developing software and experimenting with new technologies. In Itechguides.com, He writes gadget buying guides, apps and software reviews, movies, and video games reviews.

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