ASUS ROG Strix GL503 review - The Scar and Hero editions

Temperature and battery life

Temperature

We measured the external temperatures of the CPU and GPU the notebooks after looping the 3DMark Fire Strike stress test for 15 minutes. This amount of time is more than enough to get an idea of your average maximum running temperature for this workload. For this test, we can compare how the GL503s compare to some of the competition.

Both GL503 laptops fared quite well in our temperature tests. We can assume that the thermal efficiency controls and air cooling are working as it claims, even though it didn’t do as well as the Razer Blade in this department.

Battery Life

PCMark 8’s Home benchmark was used to measure battery life on all the systems below, which had their keyboard backlighting disabled and displays set at 50 per cent brightness.

The battery performance of the two GL503 laptops are disappointing, to say the least. We can cut both laptops some slacks when comparing it to the Razer Blade, since it’s running a smaller (and thus uses lesser power) 14-inch display as compared to its 15.6-inch displays. But it’s scant consolation, when we do expect it to perform much better (or in the Scar’s case, closer to) than its predecessor GL502, which is using an older 6^th-gen Intel Core processor.

It’s safe to assume you’ll want to keep the laptop plugged in when playing your games. Hopefully this is an area that ASUS can improve with a firmware update. Oh, and G-Sync is automatically disabled when the laptops are running on battery.