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Bearing the high-end Republic of Players (ROG) brand, the newest laptop from Asus assures to play “top video games” at 1080p without a hitch – however, unusually, prices less than £1,000.
Also, Asus isn’t only pitching the GL552 at players; it has its eye on creatives too. That’s no shock, given the amount of power inside this system.
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Asus ROG GL552 – Specification
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Display Size: 15.6-inch
OS: Windows 10 Home
RAM: 16GB
Hard Drive Size: 1 TB
Hard Drive Speed: 7,200rpm
Hard Drive Type: HDD
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M including 2G GDDR5 VRAM
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Asus ROG GL552 – Design
Asus gaming is always keenly designed, with a good stability between gaming laptop excess and good subtlety. It’s a good look, and Asus has achieved to load the design comes with effective connectivity options. The left-hand side has a two USB 3 ports, a USB 3.1 Type-C socket, and an HDMI output, and the right-hand edge has USB and a DVD and audio connectivity drive.
Asus ROG GL552 – TouchPad and Keyboard
The ROG GL552 keyboard flows sinister red light and features an extra band of red highlights along the bottom of the A, S, W, and D keys. Typing on the black plastic keys felt snappy, thanks to a pretty normal actuation typical 1.87mm of key travel and weight of 60 grams. Asus also managed to squeeze a 10-key Numpad on the right side of the keyboard.
That’s pretty spectacular since my usual typing pace ranges from 75 to 80 words per minute.
Whereas it doesn’t get the identical backlighting treatment as the keyboard, the 4.1 x 2.75-inch touchpad features a same level of responsiveness. The pad accurately and instantly registered my swipes, clicks and multitouch gestures, such as two-finger scrolling.
Asus ROG GL552 – Display
It comes with a 15.6-inch with good accuracy, top-tier brightness, and spot-on colors. It makes both watching films and gaming pleasure, and since the non-touch screen also features a matte coating, you are never pressured to stare back at your individual reflection. When I observed the trailer for the spider man, the Asus ROG GL552 display nailed Russell Crowe’s turquoise blue suit in a way that screamed the 1970s even louder than the teaser’s retro font.
Asus ROG GL552 – Graphics and Gaming
On this price range, you are not going to get a better graphics card than the GL552’s Nvidia 960M GPU including 2GB of VRAM, which places Asus’s laptop on the identical footing at its competitors.
When we performed Metro: Last Light on low settings at 1920 x 1080, the GL552 notched 59 frames per second. This was slightly behind the V15 Nitro’s 67 fps and about the identical as the Inspiron 15 7000’s 58 fps. However, when we pumped up the graphics to high, all three systems fell under 20 fps, which isn’t playable. However, on a less demanding game like Dota 2, the GL552 simply hovered between 80 and 70 fps on max settings. It’s only for graphics-hungry games like a Metro or GTA 5 that you will need to step down the settings if you wish to reach a stable 60 fps.
Asus ROG GL552 – Audio
The Asus ROG GL552’s stereo speakers feature SonicMaster tech that’s supposed to offer rich, high-fidelity audio, however, in my experience, both music and video games sounded a little shallow. When I listened to Ratatat’s “Cream on Chrome,” the twangy guitars and thumping bass didn’t have the identical depth and impact that I heard from different systems. Switching to the battlefield preset in the AudioWizard app provided a slight improvement in the bass, however still didn’t do sufficient to help the overall audio experience.
Asus ROG GL552 – Heat
On less demanding duties like streaming HD video from Hulu, the ROG GL 552 strayed simply 5 degrees over our typical 95-degree help threshold on its bottom. The space between the G and H keys and touchpad were cooler at 92.5 and 90 degrees.
The issue is that while gaming, temps near the vent on the left side of the system shot as much as over 125 degrees. On its bottom, temperatures rose only a couple of degrees, which means you’ll be able to still get in some laptop gaming; you simply need to be careful to stay away from its super-hot left side.
Asus ROG GL552 – Hardware and Performance
Asus put a Skylake Core i7-6700HQ processor under our test unit, paired with Nvidia GTX 960M graphics, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM and hybrid storage, with an M.2 SATA SSD and a 2.5” HDD. The PC runs Windows 10, and the preinstalled software package is frugal, with an Office and McAfee Trial, Dropbox and only a few different programs.
With such a highly effective configuration, the laptop feels very snappy in each day use. It easily handles browsing and multimedia content, together with 4K or HEVC clips.
Asus ROG GL552 – Battery Life
With a time of 4 hours and 44 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test, the GL552 fell between the strength numbers turned in by Acer and Dell. It lasted nearly 2 full hours longer than the anemic 2:40 mark of V15 Nitro, however, happened short of Inspiron 15 7000 (6:45) by around the same margin.
Configuration Options
When you’re prepared to go above $1,000, the re’s a $1,249 version of the GL552 which bumps up storage with a 128GB SSD + 1TB hybrid and a Nvidia 960M GPU with 4GB of video RAM, as an alternative of the 2GB you get for the base model.
Gallery
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Conclusion
The Asus RoG GL552 is a more inexpensive, lower-spec take on the RoG G752, which is one of the greatest gaming laptops cash can buy right now. Any resemblance is mostly visual, though. It’s not the perfect laptop. However, regarding offering a solid gaming experience for your money, it’s a decent buy. The GTX 960M GPU hits the sweet spot, where it cam handle demanding video games at affordable settings without costing as much as a second-hand car. One you’d want to drive, anyway. Display quality is a sticking level at this price. Apparently, £900 isn’t sufficient to have an IPS screen, even though earlier GL552 models (and current ones in different countries) use such a panel. So when you see a different version of the GL552 including an IPS screen, it’s likely to be a better purchase than this exact one.
Review Score
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