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TL;DR - This laptop is great for its price, and you aren't gonna find much better. The screen is OK, the battery life is OK, and the thermals/fan noise is OK, however everything else is very solid and the i7-7700hq and 1060 (Even though it has 3gb of vram) are more than enough for running games at 1080p 60fps and should still be able to hold out for 3-4 years. I definitely recommend it.
The Asus FX502VM-AS73 (wow thats a mouthful) was, when i first looked at it, a great deal for some great hardware. Thankfully, I just recieved mine yesterday and everything was in a good working condition and there was no damage to the packaging or the laptop itself. I did buy from amazon warehouse, but it was listed as Used-Like New and in its original, pristine packaging. Luckily that was true, and I found no dead pixels on the screen, no mousepad issues, or any other problems. It's as if it just came off the shelf and they accidentally opened it or something. However, not everything is perfect with this laptop, so i'll start with the negatives first and work my way to the positives
CONS:
- The screen is OK. I read a lot of reviews on amazon and saw that people said the screen was horrible, that it had horrible viewing angles and colors, and was very laggy in general. However, I find none of these claims to really be 100% true. Yes, the screen is not the highest of quality, and is nothing like their GL502VM laptop, but it definitely is still good. The contrast ratio is not that great at 300:1, and I would have been willing to pay a little more to get something better, but they needed to cut some corners, and im glad that they did with the screen, instead of downgrading to weaker hardware. The 1080p is great though, and I still had a moment of awe when I was playing GTA V, and was chilling on my yacht looking at the sunset (I was bored, ok). It didn't look low quality at all, and for a moment i thought I was playing on a much better screen, so the screen is definitely lacking, but it's nothing to be worried about; you'll still have a great experience.
- The mousepad sucks. It's very difficult to press both buttons at the same time (almost impossible) and it is way too sensitive right out of the box. However, I use a mouse way more than i do with the mousepad, and only really use it when im out and about. So im not too concerned with it
-The webcam sucks. Looks like its 480p. I wouldnt use it for anything other than a skype call with a best friend who doesn't really care about the crappy quality of your camera. Dont use it, please.
-The arrow keys on the keyboard are way too thin in my opinion. Plus they aren't really separated from the rest of the keyboard, so it's really easy to be hitting the numpad or special keys instead of the actual arrow keys. There seems to be some space on the chassis for a little bit wider keys, or some separation, so im not so sure as to why they chose to do what they did.
-The speakers aren't that great. They are good for casual things. Gaming is fine with them. I did actually like the stereo positioning of them much more than my old MSI laptop. It felt way more immersive, but there is practically no bass, so explosions and such were kind of lacking in "boom". I was listening to music and watching some videos and I wasn't appalled by the quality, so they will surely suffice for those kinds of things. However, If you are doing some kind of content creation, whether it be with music or videos, I would obviously ditch the laptop speakers and get some real speakers.
NEUTRAL:
-The battery life is what you'd expect for a gaming laptop. I was getting about 3 hours on casual internet surfing, and an hour while playing GTA V. I'm not sure why some people dont understand that gaming laptops do require way more wattage than a macbook or ultrabook, and fault gaming laptops for having weak batteries. Its a fact of life right now, and it'll probably be years before we start seeing gaming laptops that can run for more than 10 hours on battery life. I usually don't game when i'm not at home, and i leave it plugged in when i am home, so this really isnt much of a problem for me.
-Temperatures are OK. I would say im a little surprised by the average temps with this machine, in such a small chassis. The old laptop i had was a MSI gp60-1053 leopard pro, and my god that thing was a hulk. Keep in mind that laptop had a 950m and a dual core i5-4210h. With such low specs you would have thought it could be in a slim design and stay cool, but no, oh my god that thing got hot. Usually cpu temps were in the 90's and GPU temps in the mid 80's. However, this thing, which probably has like a 500% performance increase (I haven't actually compared the two yet so obviously that's made up) has decent temps while averaging mid 80's on the CPU and mid 70's on the GPU when i was playing GTA V for 2 hours with no thermal throttling when looking at MSI afterburner. However, it still does get hot. I dont really play any games in my lap, because I just find it uncomfortable to be using a mouse on a couch or my bed, so usually the laptop will always be on my desk when i game. However, when i am moving around, it really doesnt get annoyingly hot like some people have stated in their reviews. It gets warm, but not too warm, and unless you are wearing some heavy clothing, you shouldn't really notice it if you are watching some videos or surfing the web. (BE WARNED, IF YOU USE MSI AFTERBURNER, DONT TRY TO OVERCLOCK. 99% OF LAPTOPS AREN'T MADE TO OVERCLOCK. DO1N'T GET COCKY)
-Connectivity is good. 3 usb 3.1, 1 mini display port, 1 hdmi port, 1 SD card reader (which has average speeds in 80mb/s) ethernet port (Which has a interesting design where there is a flap you have to push down in order to fit the cable in, which is a big hassle and takes longer than it should) a kensington lock, and finally only one audio/microphone in jack, which could be a problem to those who have two separate for their headphones and mic
CONS:
- The size is great. At .9 inches and 4.9lbs, this thing is a beast for it's size. It's amazing that they are able to fit such powerful hardware into a chassis this small. Im not really sure how the Max-q 1060 laptops are going to play out though, especially when it comes to laptops like these. I feel the 20% decrease in performance to achieve low thermals a small design in the max-q laptops is not really worth it. When you consider shortening it to like .7 inches, and dropping the weight to around 3 or 4 lbs, I dont find the compromise in performance to be a good trade off. I would much rather carry around 1 or 2 more lbs, just to get my moneys worth and have a fully functional laptop 1060.
- On the topic of the 1060, this card is amazing. I do have a desktop with 2 970's in SLI, and while it is nowhere near as powerful as my desktop, it still blows everything out of the water. The main reason why i got this laptop was because I wanted something mobile i could take to college, so I could game on it when im not too busy with college work, but also use it in the classroom, but not have to lug around an 8 lb msi Apache laptop. The only game that I have completely tested is GTA V, but I have every setting on very high with msaa 2x on, and im getting around 50-60fps. I decided to turn down reflection quality, grass quality, and particles quality to high, and I got a jump to a solid 60fps consistently, without it looking not as good as the very high preset. I also tested unigine valley, and got 62.7FPS on the extreme HD preset, which is pretty good in my opinion, when you think about the hardware required to get a solid framerate on those benchmarks. Also, the GL502vm is basically the exact same as the fx502vm-as73, with the exception of a 1060 6GB, and a 120hz g-sync panel. First off, a 1060 will rarely use all 6gb, because it simply isnt powerful enough to, and also, 1080p gaming rarely goes above 3gb's. Unless you plan on hooking this laptop up to a 1440p monitor, the 3gb version is the way to go, and will save you $300 if you are on a budget. (It got 11721 on 3Dmark firestrike).
-The intel i7-7700hq is a monster. While it only has a 8-10% increase over the 6700hq, It still is an increase, and the price jump from a 6th gen i7 to a 7th gen i7 is really not that much, maybe $20 to $30 when i look at some of the models. The 4 cores and 8 threads have killed everything i've thrown at it, and is soooo much faster than my old 2 core 4 thread i5 on my previous laptop. It scored 750cb in cinebench r15 on the multithreaded workload, and a 140cb on the single threaded workload.
- The keyboard is also very nice. It has a nice, tactile feel and nothing (besides the arrow keys) is too squished to be really annoying. The red backlight keys is a nice touch, but i would have liked to seen some aspect of RGB in this day and age of RGB everything, especially when we are already playing a $1100 premium. The keyboard does get warm, but only in the middle. The WASD key and arrow keys stay cool, even while in an intense load. However, typing something while just coming off of playing an intense game, or running countless benchmarks in the background for some reason, typing becomes a little uncomfortable with the hotter keys in the middle
- The storage is good. a 128gb ssd is snappy and responsive. Boots in an average of 4 seconds. You can also upgrade it with another m.2 ssd to increase storage, or get a faster samsung m.2. The 1tb sshd is also good for your steam library and general workload. Nothing much to say about it really.
In general, I think that pretty much covers everything. There were some corners cut to keep this thing under $1200, but im glad they didnt sacrifice the hardware, which really makes this laptop so compelling. If you are like me, and dont feel like spending $1500+ on a laptop, especially when you dropped $2000 on a desktop, this is a great option to save some money.
| Standing screen display size | 15.6 Inches |
|---|---|
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 Pixels |
| Processor | 2.8 GHz none |
| RAM | 16 GB DDR4 |
| Memory Speed | 3.8 GHz |
| Hard Drive | 1000 GB Hybrid Drive |
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | Dedicated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 3 GB |
| Wireless Type | 802.11a, 802.11ac |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 3 |
