ASUS GL552V Review : among the best portable gaming notebooks
The ASUS GL552V comes with “Republic of Gamers” branding which means that this one is meant for gamers and designed by gamers. But unlike the beast that we reviewed earlier, this one is thinner, lighter and easily fits in a laptop backpack. In this review, we take a look at how good the GL552V is for daily home as well as gaming usage.
Package
The packaging is straight forward. You get the notebook, the power brick, few manuals and optical discs for drivers.
Key Specification
- Intel Core i7 6700HQ @ 2.60 GHz (6th generation Skylake chip)
- Nvidia GTX 960M GPU with 4GB GDDR5
- 16GB DDR4-2132 RAM
- 1TB HDD, 120GB SSD (M.2)
- 15.6″ FullHD IPS display
- VGA/HD Web Camera
- Weight : 2.66kgs
- Dimension : 25.6 x 38.4 x 3.2 cm
-
4Cells 48 Whrs battery
- Island style backlit full size keyboard with num pad
- Dual top firing speakers
- Ports : 2x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, 1 USB Type-C, 1 RJ-45, 1 HDMI, 1 DVD drive, Audio in/out, SD card reader, kensington lock, power input
Design
The dual speakers are placed above the keypad and the top half of the base has Mayan inspired detailing and ‘Rebublic of Gamers’ branding at the center, aligned with ASUS logo below the display panel. LEDs are placed on the frame to the left of track-pad. There are LED indicators for power, battery status, load, airplane mode, caps lock. The placement is such that your left hand will cover half of these indicators. To be frank, I do not see any use with these indicators so their placement does not matter to me. The power key is on the top right corner and it has an led that glows when the laptop is powered on. The palm rest area has soft feel (similar to that on the keys) and offers good grip. The Mayan style design above the keyboard looks great but the design covers only the top half of the base. The silver color Mayan lines look ordinary but glow as if they are silver lines when while light is focused on them.
Turn the laptop upside down and its all plastic down there. Replacing or removing RAM/HDD is super easy. Remove the two screws that hold the panel in place, remove the panel and access the HDD/SSD/RAM. The battery is in usual position and can be removed by flipping two notches. The air vents are placed on the left hand side and under the belly. Do note play games when the notebook is placed on a bed as you may end up over heating the components (as bottom air vents are blocked). For casual operation, there is no such restriction.
The webcam is placed above the display and there is an LED indicator to indicate when the webcam is on. The microphone is placed next to the webcam.
Keyboard and Trackpad
The keyboard is definitely one of the best that we have used. The spacing between keys is perfect, the 1.8mm key travel is perfect and the coating on the keys give a soft feel while typing. Those who are very good at speed typing will feel like the fingers are gliding on the keys. The feel is soft and there is hardly any noise from key press which is great as laptop keyboards are usually noisy. On 10fastfingers typing test, I ended up with 89 words per minute and on second try, I reached 94 wpm. I am sure that once I get used to the keyboard, I will cross 100 wpm. The typing experience on this one is THAT GOOD! How does a typing test determine how good the keyboard is? When one can type without any error at and such speed, the same person can excel at gaming, thanks to the accuracy and low latency input from keys. The lower 1.8mm travel takes less time for key press and this helps a lot in gaming (with keyboard and mouse).
I say this again, the numpad is irritating. The arrow keys were reduced in size to accommodate the numpad and even the keys on numpad are smaller in size. While typing, there were many instances where I pressed home or num-lock when I was wanted to press delete or backspace. Sometimes, I accidentally press number keys when I wanted to use arrow keys. All this will not be an issue once I get used to the keypad. I would, any given day, prefer a keyboard without a num pad and with extra function keys. About function keys, there are no Macro keys on this one. Being a gaming notebook, it is necessary to have macro keys! Period! The alternate option is to map the Macros to number keys when you are playing MMO games.
The trackpad is super smooth. If you have not used multi touch trackpads till now, you better optimize the speed and sensitivity till you get used to the trackpad. One problem with the trackpad is that the clicks are very noisy. Though it feels odd, the click sound on the track pad did grew on me and now, I prefer click over tap just to hear that sound and click feel :D. The alignment of the trackpad is such that the left border of the trackpad is aligned with left side of the space bar. So, there is a good chance of your right hand palm to accidentally touch the trackpad as you extend your thumb to press space bar or alt key. Once you get used to the positioning, you will love the trackpad. Given that the trackpad supports multi touch, you can configure gestures using ASUS Smart Gesture application. This is similar to the OS X application to setup gestures. You can have one finger, two finger or many finger gestures.Thanks to Windows 10’s superior gesture support, this is a very useful feature/application to have.
Using the app, I can opt to switch off (automatically) trackpad when mouse is connected and I can also use a smartphone to control my notebook (via Bluetooth).The application can be setup to disable trackpad when mouse is connected to the laptop. You can also setup remote link (to control PC using phone via Bluetooth).
Display
The first thing that hits you when you turn the notebook on is the gorgeous matte glare free FullHD display. Gamers hate glossy displays as the reflection from external lights (ceiling lamp etc) cause visibility issues when you are in a dark environment in a game. The matte display on ASUS G552V is a pleasure to look at. The display is free from glare and being IPS panel, looks the same in awkward angles. When I say IPS, this is not like those low quality IPS panels that we see in budget smart phones. This one screams quality. You can also switch between various display modes using ASUS Eye Care Switcher. Though the display is 15.6″ in size, it actually looks like a 17″ display. This is partly due to the 16:9 aspect ratio and the wide bezels around display.
The outdoor visibility of the display is very good and you will not face any issues with using the display while roaming.
Software and customization
ASUS GL552V comes with Windows 10 OS pre-loaded. Windows 10 is the best version of Windows till date and is very well optimized for gaming. The OS also supports wide range of gestures, has dedicated application store so that you do not search all over the web and install one tool from each website. The dark theme of Windows 10 is perfect match to the dark themed RoG notebooks. The GL552V also comes with wide array of RoG tools to overclock, customize and setup. The problem though is that there is truckload of bloatware and some of these tools are unnecessary. The most important tool among these is the ‘ASUS RoG Gaming Center’. Using this application, you can choose between normal mode or two over clocking modes. You can also load other applications like MacroKey, Splendid, GPU Perf limiter from this app. You can save up to four customized profiles and switch between profiles at the tap of button. The application also shows live GPU and CPU temperatures, frequency and the basic internal configuration (CPU speed, amount of ram used, amount of disk space used etc).
Sonic Radar application lets you setup game equalizer. You can use certain features of the Sonic Radar (eg: in counterstrike, app detects and displays the ticking sound of the time bomb). In short, the application makes one more attentive while playing. ICE Power application can be used to select from various audio output modes and this is very helpful for those who does not want to tinker will too many settings to get right audio output. For those, there is the SmartAudio application. The audio functions on your computer are controlled by SmartAudio, a powerful software program that allows you to configure your audio software to enhance and personalize your listening experience.
Gaming and Performance
If you are one of those who prefer gaming at around 30-40fps, the ASUS GL552VW will not disappoint. This laptop can play almost all the games above 25fps, whatever settings you choose. I have tried F1 2016 and the gaming experience was really good. To have a super smooth gameplay, it is recommended to go with slightly lower (till Very High but not Ultra) gameplay settings. It does not change much of visual detail and strikes right balance. The notebook started rebooting while we were downloading other games through steam and we reported the same to ASUS. This looks more like a faulty SSD or HDD. We will update details on other games once we get the replacement unit. Due to this hindrance, we had to dig through other reviews on the internet to see how popular games ran on this notebook and we are definitely impressed with the capability.
Coming to heat dissipation, this one has very good air flow mechanism. The left side air vent pushes lot of hot air out when you are gaming. Few minutes into F1 2016, I could feel hot air blowing on my hand and it felt like I placed my hand next to hair dryer. The fan noise is not much though and it is a relief.
Battery
This one charges a bit slow. It takes more than 2 hours to fully charge the battery. The battery discharge is good though. You get around 3-5 hours of battery life for non-gaming usage with Wi-Fi on all the time and display set to 70% brightness. While gaming, you get around 30 minutes of battery life. Once you overclock that chip, the battery drains quickly. Anyways, I do not prefer gaming when the laptop is running on battery backup (fast battery drain or not enough muscle power if battery saver is on).
Audio
ASUS makes some of the best audio cards for PCs and notebooks. When they make a gaming notebook, we can feel assured that they bring the best audio experience. This one is no exception. The audio quality is exceptional. There are wide range of audio tweaks and customization available to suit various needs. The chink in the armor though is the quality of built in speakers. When compared to mainstream notebooks, the quality of speakers is better. But this ain’t a laptop to use to watch some guy talking about business plans, right? The dual stereo speakers on this one are great but not among the best. The lack of sub woofer module is clearly felt. The speakers sound a bit too tinny so do not expect to do full time gaming using on-board speakers. The only time that the on-board speakers are good is when watching Vlogs on YouTube where there is nothing much but vocals.
Conclusion
After all, this is a laptop that is best suited for those who like to play high end games but not all the time. If it does not excel at gaming, it defeats the RoG branding and it is not suitable for day to day computing, one will question the need for this model. The ASUS GL552V has serious amount of power under the hood and looks amazing. Rarely do we see gaming notebooks that are not a pain to carry around.
So, where does the ASUS GL552V stand? It stands exactly where it should! The GL552V is the best of both worlds. If you want to use the laptop as a daily driver, it gives you bucket load of power so that you can do video editing, audio processing, number crunching, report writing, movie and music playback etc. When you want to sit down, relax and play a game, the GL552V will make sure that you get flawless performance. There are only a handful of games that the GL552V cannot run at highest video settings. And even these games can be enjoyed by reducing the settings just a little bit. Priced at Rs.85,000/-, the GL552V is highly recommended for those who prefer one notebook for all things (well, except for those who prefer ultrabook form factor). The ASUS RoG logo and branding is the icing on the cake.
Ilyas