ASUS ROG Strix GL702ZC review: Better for content creators than gamers

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The ASUS ROG Strix GL702ZC is a laptop made for AMD fans. While tech geeks were getting excited about the announcement of the Ryzen mobile processors and what they would bring to the notebook space, ASUS decided to throw a wrench into people’s expectations and make a laptop powered by AMD desktop hardware. Here's a quick intro video of what you can expect:-

The best part is that you can buy this now, while laptops with official Ryzen mobile processors are still nowhere to be seen on our shores.

Instead, you get a Ryzen 7 1700 desktop chip, an 8-core/16-thread part with a base clock of 3.0GHz and maximum turbo core speed of 3.7GHz. The clock speeds aren’t anything to shout about, but an 8-core CPU on a laptop is something you don’t see every day.

Even the overclockable Intel Core i7-7820HK is just a 4-core/8-thread chip, so the Ryzen 7 1700 affords considerable oomph in the multi-tasking department. However, it’s questionable whether this is the right choice for a gaming laptop, as we’ve already established that gaming isn’t Ryzen’s strong suit, especially at the 1080p resolution that the ROG Strix GL702ZC uses.

Work is being done to optimize apps for Ryzen, but there’s still some way to go before you can confidently say that more threads will net you a performance boost in games.

That aside, the laptop also comes with a desktop-class Radeon RX 580 4GB graphics card and support for AMD FreeSync, so it’s a match made in heaven for proponents of AMD’s hardware and technology.

Here’s an overview of the rest of the specifications:

• 17.3-inch 1,920 x 1,080-pixel IPS display
• AMD Ryzen 7 1700 (3.0GHz, 16MB L3 cache)
• 16GB DDR4-2400 RAM
• AMD Radeon RX 580 4GB
• 415 x 280 x 32mm
• 3.2kg

The above spec will cost you S$2,698, which is a relatively affordable price in a market where powerful gaming laptops normally go well over S$3,000.

Still, the ROG Strix GL702ZC goes up mainly against the pairing of the Intel Core i7-7700HQ (2.8GHz, 6MB L3 cache) and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. Laptops with the latter configuration retail for cheaper – for instance, the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming costs just S$2,199 – and have proven to be quite capable at handling modern games at 1080p.

Read on to find out how the ROG Strix GL702ZC stacks up against the competition.

Still a very beefy laptop

A laptop powered by AMD’s well-received Ryzen desktop processors and the Radeon RX 580 sounds really interesting. When you’ve had years and years of both Intel and NVIDIA providing the CPUs and GPUs that go into all gaming laptops, any break from the status quo feels like a breath of fresh air.

The status quo is indeed changing in the desktop space; Intel is no longer the obvious choice for content creators, gamers, and streamers who need strong multi-threaded performance. Santa Clara is still very competitive, but it’s no longer the only horse in the race.

As a result, it only seems fitting that we’re seeing a similar broadening of horizons in the laptop segment. As the first laptop to feature a desktop Ryzen 7 1700 processor and a Radeon RX 580 4GB GPU, the ASUS ROG Strix GL702ZC appears poised to rattle a few cages. 

That said, as I mentioned earlier, it’s not immediately clear that this is the best idea for a gaming laptop, especially given Ryzen’s less-than stellar track record at 1080p gaming, which is precisely the resolution that this laptop is equipped with.

Furthermore, other than the obvious boost to multi-threaded performance you get with an 8-core/16-thread CPU, the laptop doesn’t appear to offer any other compelling performance advantage to gamers. It isn’t particularly thin or light at 3.2kg and 35mm thick, and our results confirm that it isn’t too great at power efficiency. Overclocking on the GPU also isn't supported, although you can do that for the CPU.

Maybe I’m being too harsh, but my first impressions of the laptop are one of a hardware showcase as opposed to an attractive alternative for gamers. To me at least, this is an ROG Strix laptop, so its first priority should be delivering the best possible performance in games. 

That doesn’t mean I don’t like anything about the laptop however. Even though it qualifies as fairly thick and heavy, it’s actually quite manageable considering that you’ll need a beefy cooling system to handle desktop-grade components.

The Ryzen 7 1700 chip on board is also socketed, so the CPU is actually upgradeable. However, the Ryzen 7 1700 has a 65W TDP, which already poses a challenge for a laptop cooling solution. So while you can replace it with a 95W part, you may run into throttling issues, especially since the CPU and GPU share the same cooling system.

That aside, other components like the RAM and storage devices can be easily upgraded. ASUS has gone with single-channel memory to leave an extra upgrade slot open for you, but it'd have been nice to see dual-channel memory right at the start. 

The Hyper Cool Duo-Copper cooling system, as ASUS calls it, relies on eight heat pipes and two fans to channel heat away from the CPU and GPU, although one heat pipe goes to the power circuitry. Two heat pipes are dedicated to the CPU, while one runs directly to the GPU. Four other heat pipes are also shared between the CPU and GPU, and the load is split between both fans.

Heat is exhausted out the back of the laptop, and there are no vents at the side. I like this design, as I find that side vents, particularly ones on the right, can be quite annoying as they spit hot air directly onto my hand when using a mouse.

One odd thing about the cooling design is how fewer dedicated heat pipes appear to be assigned to the GPU than the CPU. The Radeon RX 580 has a TDP of 185W, and even though it’s been tweaked to be more suitable for use on a laptop – the base clock speed has been dropped from 1,257MHz to 1,077MHz – it probably still puts out more heat than the processor.

The dual fans are also asymmetrical, with the smaller fan dedicated to cooling the GPU. Two separate heatsink fins complete the cooling setup, where they help soak up the heat put out by both the CPU and GPU.

As you'd expect, the laptop is rather noisy, and you can quite clearly hear the fans working hard to cool those desktop components. Headphones are probably a good idea when using it, unless noise doesn’t bother you at all.

Design-wise, this is one of the less garish gaming laptops I’ve come across. Still, as a member of the ROG Strix series, it has orange accents on the speaker grilles, the ROG logo above the keyboard, and around the trackpad.

One new design feature is also the backlit ROG logo and accents on the lid, which powers down to leave a mirror-like finish when the laptop is turned off.

Most of the laptop uses a black brushed metal finish, and you can see it on the lid and the area framing the keyboard. And while the laptop is built predominantly from plastic, the lid actually has a thin brushed metal coating that isn’t present on the palm rest area.

The keyboard feels good to type on, even though it doesn’t use one of those fancy, low-profile mechanical switches. The 1.6mm key travel distance feels okay to me, but there’s some flex to the keyboard base when typing. It’s not a particularly big problem, unless you're really fussy about things like build quality.

There’s also no RGB backlighting, and you’re limited to just a single-color red backlight.

And as befits a gaming notebook that’s this large, there’s a decent select of ports and connectors. You’ll find a Mini DisplayPort and HDMI connector for display outputs, in addition to three USB 3.1 (Gen 1) and one USB 3.1 (Gen 2) Type-C port. A headphone and microphone combo jack and multi-format card reader rounds out the package.

When it comes to the screen and speakers, I’ve no complaints. The 17.3-inch display doesn’t bother with any bezel-free shenanigans, but it’s bright and reproduces colors quite faithfully, to my eyes at least. I’d expect no less from an IPS screen, and the wide viewing angles don’t disappoint either.

Finally, the speakers are also excellent, and the sound put out by the two small, unassuming speaker grilles (or slits, rather) is loud and quite clear. It handled the first Avengers: Infinity War trailer with finesse, and Samuel L. Jackson’s baritone voice sounded lush and detailed.

Test Setup and Performance

The ROG Strix GL702ZC will find itself going up against laptops equipped with Intel processors and NVIDIA graphics, most notably the Intel Core i7-7700HQ and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB.

To give you a better idea of how this AMD-powered notebook compares against NVIDIA’s product stack, I’ve included laptops powered by the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti to GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q.

You can expect the Radeon RX 580 to sit somewhere between the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 and 1070 Max-Q, and the results show as much.  

Here’s a list of the notebooks used:

• ASUS ROG Strix GL702ZC
• Gigabyte Sabre 15
• Aftershock PRIME-15
• MSI GS63VR 7RG Stealth Pro

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All the laptops were put through the following benchmarks:

• PCMark 10
• 3DMark
• VRMark
• Ashes of the Singularity
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
• Tom Clancy’s The Division

We used the 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme Stress Test for temperature measurements, and the battery life benchmark in PCMark 8 Home to test the battery (PCMark 10 doesn’t yet come with a built-in battery benchmark).

PCMark 10 Extended

PCMark 10 Extended assesses the performance of systems in a variety of workloads, including basic computing tasks, productivity applications, digital content creation, and gaming. Compared to PCMark 8, it also adds in new test metrics, such as app startup times, which quantifies how long it takes to launch a variety of real-world apps, and a rendering and visualization workload to simulate professional graphics and engineering applications. In addition, existing workloads have been updated to reflect modern usage.

Despite its 8-core CPU, the ROG Strix GL702ZC fell right in the middle of the pack. In fact, the MSI laptop took the lead in terms of overall scores, largely thanks to the stronger gaming performance afforded by its NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q GPU.

PCMark 10 may not be the best way to bring out the multi-threaded prowess of the Ryzen 7 1700, but it does show that many applications today still don’t benefit from that many threads.

3DMark

3DMark looks explicitly at gaming performance, and it puts systems through a range of graphics and computational performance tests at different resolutions, starting at 1080p and going all the way up to 4K.

Unfortunately, the Ryzen 7 1700 and Radeon RX 580 4GB combination don’t seem very potent in terms of graphics performance either, where it was just over seven per cent slower than the Aftershock PRIME-15 and its GeForce GTX 1060 6GB.

The gap narrowed in the more CPU-intensive Time Spy benchmark, but the fact remains that most games today are still primarily GPU-bound.  

VRMark

Futuremark’s VRMark benchmark is designed to assess a PC’s ability to handle high-performance headsets like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. If a PC passes the Orange Room test, it is ready for the latter two systems. The second graph shows how the VRMark score translates into FPS, where 109FPS is the passing mark.

The good news is that the ROG Strix laptop held its ground here, although it was still slightly behind the Aftershock and MSI notebooks.

Ashes of the Singularity

Note: The Gigabyte Sabre 15 won’t run the game in DirectX 12 mode, which is why there aren’t any figures for it in the relevant graph.

Ashes of the Singularity is a demanding real-time strategy game that puts thousands of units on screen, and it’s capable of pushing even the most powerful GPUs. However, it’s also rather limited by the CPU at lower resolutions and settings, a rare instance of a CPU-bound game.

The ASUS laptop did rather poorly here, and the Aftershock PRIME-15 was a whopping 64 per cent faster at High settings (DirectX 11). The latter also outdid the MSI GS63VR 7RG by around 19 per cent, despite the MSI laptop having a more powerful GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q GPU.

Previous testing has shown that Ashes of the Singularity appears to heavily favor the use of dual-channel memory, which the Aftershock is equipped with, so this partly accounts for the disparity. On the other hand, both the ASUS and MSI laptops are equipped with single-channel memory, which has half the bandwidth as a dual-channel configuration.

However, it’s important to note that this is an outlier of sorts, and most games don’t show any significant benefit from moving over to dual-channel memory, even if it is better in theory.

But once you turn up the settings and shift toward a more GPU-limiting scenario, this bias toward dual-channel memory isn’t as prevalent. For instance, the MSI notebook took the lead over the Aftershock at Crazy settings.

That said, the ASUS ROG Strix GL702ZC still lagged behind, and the Aftershock PRIME-15 was still 39 per cent faster.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Mankind Divided is one of the most demanding titles to run today, and it’s capable of pushing even the most powerful of cards.

The ROG Strix GL702ZC did better here, tying the Aftershock PRIME-15 and its GeForce GTX 1060 6GB for the most part in DirectX 11, and outstripping it in DirectX 12. The ASUS laptop was 25 per cent quicker than the Aftershock at High settings in DirectX 12, and it also managed to inch ahead of the MSI notebook.

AMD’s hardware is clearly better at taking advantage of DirectX 12 than the Intel/NVIDIA combination in the case, and it helps make up for the shortcomings in DirectX 11.

Tom Clancy’s The Division

The Division isn’t as demanding to run as Ashes of the Singularity or Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, but its Snowdrop engine can still stress cards with the use of dynamic lighting and the like.

The ASUS and Aftershock laptops were once again effectively tied, and at this point in time, it’s difficult to say that the ROG Strix notebook has any significant advantage over an equivalent GeForce GTX 1060 6GB laptop in terms of gaming performance.

Temperature

We ran a 40-loop run of 3DMark’s Fire Strike Extreme stress test to obtain our temperature figures. A infrared gun was used to measure the surface temperatures at the four quadrants of the notebook.

While temperatures never appeared particularly worrying, one slightly disconcerting sign is the notebook’s failure to pass the 40-loop stress test with a frame rate stability of above 97 per cent, the passing mark for that test.

The ROG Strix GL702ZC came in at around 90 per cent, which points to some thermal throttling going on. In other words, the GPU is only capable of operating at close to its maximum performance around 90 per cent of the time.

I’m reminded of the quirk in the cooling design again, where fewer heat pipes were dedicated to the GPU than the CPU. It’s difficult to say for sure that this is the reason for the laptop failing to pass the stress test, but it sure looks like a possibility. Furthermore, both these components are not cooled independently of each other, so heat output from the 65W CPU could also be affecting GPU performance.

Battery life and power consumption

PCMark 8’s Home benchmark was used to measure battery life on all the systems, which had their keyboard backlighting disabled and displays set at 50 per cent brightness  From that result, a power consumption figure was then calculated based on the battery capacity and how long it lasted.

Unfortunately, battery life simply isn’t the ROG Strix GL702ZC’s strong suit, and the notebook performed rather poorly. The idea of a desktop Ryzen processor is certainly appealing, but the lack of any integrated graphics means that the laptop will be utilizing the discrete GPU at all times. There’s no way to switch over to an iGPU, and the higher power consumption clearly has a big negative impact on battery life.

Portability index

Our portability index is an objective measure of how portable a notebook is, taking into account factors like size, weight, and battery life.

The abysmal battery life and chunky dimensions quite literally dragged the ASUS notebook down here. You won’t get far once you’ve unplugged, and the laptop has no business running off its 76Wh battery for any extended period of time.

It’s also pretty large and heavy, so even if battery life were decent, it’d still be quite a chore to lug around.

Get this only if you really need those extra cores

The ROG Strix GL702ZC is a pretty well-built laptop. The speakers are excellent, and the display doesn’t annoy you with poor viewing angles or washed out colors. The keyboard also feels good to type on, so the overall user experience is quite positive.

The only problem is what lies under the hood. This is a laptop for the most ardent of AMD fans. The Ryzen 7 1700 and Radeon RX 580 4GB provide decent gaming performance, but a laptop with an Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB is capable of matching it in most cases, and even surpasses it at times.

Such a laptop is also a lot cheaper. For instance, the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming costs S$2,199 with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. The Aftershock PRIME-15 with the same card that we tested is a bit more expensive at S$2,347, but that’s because it comes with a 120Hz display.

In other words, if you’re looking for a laptop that’s only going to be used for gaming, you could get equivalent or slightly better performance at less than the ROG Strix’s S$2,698 price tag.

However, while ASUS’ laptop doesn’t shine as a gaming machine, that doesn’t mean it’s a lost cause. It offers good multi-threaded performance, posting a Cinebench R15 score of 1404 to the Aftershock PRIME-15 and the Core i7-7700HQ’s 740, an impressive 89 per cent jump.

It’s just a little unfortunate that it’s also positioned as a gaming laptop, which isn’t where its strongest competitive advantage lies.

Ultimately, this AMD-powered notebook is an interesting proposition if you’re looking for a laptop that can handle heavily-threaded applications and serve up decent gaming performance. At the time of writing, no other laptops offer this level of multi-threaded heft at this price point, so it’s difficult to pass it up if you want that sort of performance in a laptop.

But outside that specific subset of users, the laptop may struggle to find mass appeal in a market where gaming laptops are still dominated by Intel and NVIDIA.

It also falls prey to the usual hazards of stuffing desktop-class components into a laptop, putting out considerable heat and noise and terrible battery life.

But for all its flaws, it faintly echoes the original launch of the Ryzen desktop processors, both in its potential to disrupt and serve as an intriguing alternative. It’s a pity that it isn’t quite as compelling as it could have been.

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