We are starting to see many gaming notebooks that approach the $1500 price tag have aluminum, construction so one can be forgiven their disappointment when they see that the GL531, is an all plastic build. Despite this it is very well built and and it's two way brushed finish gives it some, subtle flare and although it can show some fingerprints it's not as bad as say the Lenovo Y540.
The ROG emblem on the lid does not light up. You will notice that it has a hinge forward design and a cut out at the bottom right of, the panel to help with cool air being brought into the system. The keyboard deck also has a brushed finish mirroring the pattern on the lid. The windows precision trackpad is also plastic, has good tracking and I like the separate mouse buttons. The keyboard has a decent feel to it and is fairly rigid.
To the top left you have separate volume controls, mic on/off button, a button that switches, between the different power modes and a button to launch the Armory crate software. You also have keys that switch between several default RGB keylighting patterns. Note that they keys are not per key RGB or lit in different zones. You also have nice RGB lighting around the front and the sides illuminating your desk in the dark. There is no denying that it looks cool.
The software let's you chose various effects such as rainbow or strobing, as well as chose the colour, speed and in game lighting effects. The 120 Hz, 282 nit IPS panel is not super bright when alongside the new 419 nit Y740. But it does have a very good contrast of 1100:1. But with only 45% NTSC it may not be the best for colour accurate work.
Because of the hinge design to allow more airflow you will notice that it consequently, has a deeper footprint than the Legion series. The bezels are slim and Asus has chosen not to include a webcam. Screen flex is about the same as the Y740. The screen has an antiglare coating which does help when viewed with bright lighting. As for backlight bleed it was very good, just a small amount on the bottom right corner. Compared to a 144 hz panel there is more ghosting but to be honest I didnt notice any when gaming. You will notice that there are no ports on the right hand side, just the side mounted, speaker grill and air exhaust.
On the left you have 3 USB 3.1 gen 1 type A ports and a combo headphone mic jack. Round the back you have the ethernet port HDMI and USB C ports. There is no thunderbolt 3 or mini display port but both are connected to the dedicated GPU so you can use them with a VR headset.
I like that the power connector is at the back helping to keep cables out of the way. To get inside just remove some Philip's head screws and here is what the air intakes look like. Be careful not to damage the two cables that are for the side and front RGB lighting. Here is the 66wh battery good for 4 hours 40 minutes of streaming YouTube at 25% brightness. It's worth noting that the panel drops to 48hz when on battery which should help with, battery life.
The two side speakers are at the sides, there is an open 2.5" bay for which ASUS supply the Sata cable and screws. Underneath the m.2 card is the 9560 wifi card. The m.2 slots accepts both SATA and NVME drives. There are two RAM slots and Hidevolution can max this out at 64 GB. I like the big copper heat pipes, the CPU here and the GPU here. There are two shared heatpipes and the GPU has two separate ones. In total there are three heatsinks, which are quite large and use 0.1mm fins for increased, surface area.
And with air being brought in via the hinge, together with the 12v fans the cooling looks, quite impressive. Under load the system pulls 182w which is perfect for the 230w power brick. The software gives you silent, balanced and turbo power modes which not only increases, the fan speed but also increases the average GPU clock rate from 1428 Mhz in balanced mode to 1609 mhz in Turbo mode as well as increase the CPU boost clock so expect improvement, in some games.
You can also increase the fan speed of the CPU and GPU manually as well as overclock,the GPU. I noticed that out the box the GPU was actually already overclocked a bit but for my tests, i did tweak it more. I settled on an extra 188 Mhz on the core and 199 on the memory. Silent mode is literally that, once the system has cooled down and you are at idle there, is no sound from the fans at all. Even under load with balanced mode the fans are only 41db and when you switch to turbo mode we are still only at 45db, so this system is definitely recommend if you want a quieter,laptop.
Despite the low fan noise the chassis stays pretty cool. The keyboard deck running in the mid 30s, and as you can see alot of hot air is pushed, out of the three heatsinks. I am very impressed with the speakers, they sound full with good bass and are quite loud, without distortion. I'm also a fan of their position at the sides as it provides a good stereo separation effect at 5 lbs 5oz it's pretty standard fare for a laptop of this stature, the 230w brick is not huge so the total travel weight is 7 lbs.
In my real time audio test it was shame that latencymon reported that it was no suitable. In my testing I left the power limit 2 at 90w and power limit 1 at 70w, with no undervolt. In Cinebench R20 it scored 2911 points maintaining a high boost clock and great thermals, peaking, only at 77 degrees celcius. In my handbrake encode test the CPU settled at around 3800 mhz which is about 300 Mhz, higher than most, and as you can see the CPU was running at around 77 degrees again.
This resulted in a class leading time of 26 minutes some 4 minutes quicker than the Helios 300 which needed undervolting to get anywhere near it. So is there much difference in performance between balanced and turbo modes? Yes, in most games there are and you can overclock a bit beyond that. Here is Rainbow six siege as an example. 1080p ultra settings. On the left we have balanced mode with balanced fans- remember 41 db of fan noise. The CPU is pulling about 30w, 77 degrees and the GPU 69 degrees. In the middle is Turbo mode with turbo fan and 45 db of fan noise. CPU is pulling 55w yet still only reaches about 83 degrees.
You definitely see a frame rate boost over balanced mode. On the right is turbo mode and fan but overclocked. Again we see a boost in frame rate with very good temperatures. Here I compare it against the 1660Ti in the Y540. Balanced mode was basically the same as the stock Y540 but the Asus GL531 definitely had,some headroom to squeeze out a bit more performance. 195 fps is great. BF V DX 11, ultra settings.
Balanced mode on the left and turbo on the right. Again you see a few more watts to the CPU in turbo mode allowing for a better boost, clock yet still very good thermals. You also gain a few extra fps for only a small amount of extra fan noise. Again we see the turbo mode help push the Asus GL531 past the Y540. Remember also that the Y540 ran very hot too. The cooling on this Asus is very good.
Far Cry 5 I used the inbuilt benchmark to record the frame rate but here is some gameplay, to show you the thermals and clock rates. Using ultra settings. Balanced mode on the left and turbo on the right. If you can run Far Cry 5 with temps in the low 80s you know your system has good cooling. Again turbo mode does a great job of locking in a higher CPU clock rate and helping to, squeeze out a few more fps.
In fact overclocking in turbo mode gave an extra 10% here which is very good. It matches the Helios 300 with same conditions. So how would I sum up the Asus ROG Strix GL531? I came away very impressed. It is a very solid performer with great speakers and low thermals. It was a pleasure to game on. Battery life is ok too, if you can get over 4 hours on a gaming notebook that is good for me. The screen is fine for gaming but for those looking for a super bright and great colour, gamut may look elsewhere.
I dont know why they didnt use a standard 144 hz panel but backlight bleed was minimal and build quality is good. As usual Hidevolution did a great job on this and all their work is warrantied. If you chose the stock model I still think you will get good thermals perhaps in the high 80s and I think this may be one of the better 1660ti laptops I have reviewed.
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