ASUS ROG Strix GL502 Gaming Notebook Review – GL502VS-DB71

By Nathan Kirsch September 7, 2016

Final Thoughts on the ASUS ROG STRIX GL502VS

We’ve been using the ASUS ROG STRIX GL502 gaming notebook for several weeks and recently took it on a 5-state road trip. Being able to play all the game titles we want to play while traveling has been amazing and we didn’t have to sacrifice image quality settings in any of our game titles! Keep in mind that this notebook has the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 8GB GDDR5 video card inside and that you can always step up to the model that has the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8GB GDDR5X memory if you want even more gaming performance. Gaming is more than just FPS numbers though and we found the 1080P display brightness on the Anti-Glare Matte Type Screen to be satisfactory and the speakers were great for both gaming and movie watching. The refresh rate is maxed at 60Hz on the panel, but does support NVIDIA G-Sync technology that synchronizes display refresh rates to the GPU in your GL502, eliminating screen tearing and minimizing display stutter and input lag. Our only dislikes on this 15-inch gaming laptop would be battery life (around 4-5 hours with general use and not gaming) and the wide bezel around the display. Bezels have gotten so thin these days and our daily driver is a Dell XPS 13 with an InfinityEdge display, so going from that to the GL502 is a huge difference. To be fair is there ever a notebook review that doesn’t wish the battery lasts longer?

The system does get rather warm while gaming, but all the hot air is exhausted out the back of the notebook and shouldn’t bother you at all. We opened up the ROG Gaming Center with the convenient keyboard button and found that we were running at 78C on the CPU and 82C on the GPU in a typical air conditioned room. Not too bad for a notebook this powerful! You can also use the ASUS GameFirst III utility to enable network traffic shaping for better network utilization. ASUS really has a solid gaming notebook here when it comes to both the hardware inside and the software needed for a great gaming experience.

Inside the ASUS GL502 we love that you can easily upgrade the memory, SATA drive, M.2 PCIe SSD and the wireless card. The battery too can be replaced, but hopefully you won’t ever have to worry about that thanks to the notebooks 3-year warranty. None of these items are soldered down and can be easily swapped out down the road as you just need to remove some Philips screws to remove the back panel. This is a big deal for those that like being able to access hardware and swap things out, so kudos to ASUS for making it easy on the GL502.

One thing that we did notice is that only one of the two memory slots are being used and that this notebook features a single-channel 16GB 2133MHz DDR4 memory module. You could easily purchase another 16GB module for a dual-channel memory setup while at the same time doubling the amount of system RAM to 32GB. Those modules are still expensive though as you are looking at $169.99 shipped at Newegg for another module.

We’ve never been this impressed with a gaming laptop and this is the first time we’ve used a laptop for a Full HD gaming experience and not missed having a desktop. Gaming notebooks have come far over the past decade and this is without a doubt one of the best all-around gaming notebooks that you can buy today. The $1,699.00 price tag from Amazon isn’t exactly inexpensive, but the ASUS ROG STRIX GL502 delivers when and where it needs to. The ASUS ROG STRIX GL502VS easily gets our top Editors Choice award as

Legit Bottom Line: The ASUS ROG STRIX GL502VS plays the latest game titles in Full HD with ease thanks to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 GPU and Intel Core i7-6700HQ Quad-Core processor!