Asus is one of those few brands that is actively launching laptops in different categories. The brand has a variety of products available in the market that caters to different audiences and with its ROG series, it focuses heavily on the gaming community.
The company recently unveiled a new premium and top-of-the-line Zephyrus M gaming laptop for the Indian market at a price tag of Rs 1,99,999, which is loaded with some nifty features and it is surely one of the powerhouses, you require for an intensive gaming session. But does it make a sense to buy this expensive laptop? Let’s find out.
Design and Display
There is a general belief that a good gaming laptop is quite heavy and difficult to carry around. However, with Zephyrus M, Asus has managed to make it a myth. The gaming laptop comes loaded with a neat design and it is quite lightweight as compared to other traditional gaming machines present in the market. Banking on the similar design language of the Zephyrus, the new model is made from brushed aluminium, which gives the much-needed strength and stylish look.
The lid of the laptop features a large ROG logo at the left side of the lid, which glows Red when the laptop is on. This surely looks an eye turner in its true sense. At the base of the lid, you will find Zephrus name at the middle of the air vent. Coming to the second half of the laptop, you will see a full-sized keyboard and a touchpad at the bottom.
The company has a full palmrest support, which is quite comfortable during your daily work schedule and long gaming session. Unlike, first generation model, the brand has removed the digital touchpad/numpad that was present at the bottom right corner. The power button is at the right corner and the company has also given four buttons including volume up/down, mute and ROG Gaming Center just about the F1-F4 keys. The left side of the laptop houses a power jack coupled with three USB 3.1 ports, one full HDMI ports and a headphone/microphone jack. That said, the Asus Zephyrus M is surely one of the sleekest gaming laptops in this price band.
Coming to the display, the gaming laptop is equipped with a 15.6-inch Full HD IPS panel with a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels coupled with 72 per cent NTSC colour gamut. The screen is an upgrade as it now supports a Refresh Rate of 144Hz and has a response time of 3ms. The display also supports NVIDIA G-Sync technology. That said, we faced no issue with the display during our review period. The gaming laptop comes with some good viewing angles and it offers punchy and vibrant colours. You will enjoy watching movies on this laptop. Moving to the gaming sessions, the 1440Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time were impressive as there was little to no latency.
Keyboard and Touchpad
Coming to the keyboard, the Asus Zephyrus GM501 keyboard is quite comfortable to use. You get a full-sized keyboard that gives good feedback and typing on this laptop was a delight as you good key travel. The keyboard is surely backlit in nature and it is divided into four zones with different colour options.
One can customise it by going to Auro Core utility, though we would have liked if the company gave an option to customise individual keys as we have seen in other gaming laptops of MSI. Coming to the touchpad, it is roomier which made it easier to navigate. The trackpad response well with multitouch gestures like three-finger swipe and more.
Performance
Coming to the performance, the Asus Zephyrus M is powered by an 8th generation Intel Core i7-8750H processor. It is backed by a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 with 8GB VRAM coupled with impressive 16GB of RAM and 512GB of NVMe SSD + 1TB of HDD storage. The machine is a powerhouse when it comes to performance.
In day to day usage, you will not feel any lag or something. We opened almost 20 tabs on the Chrome and watched some episodes of Marvelous Mrs Maisel on Amazon Prime Videos and even then the laptop never broke a sweat. Multitasking was fluid and smooth during our review period.
Coming to its major highlight, Gaming. We ran Fortnite, PUBG and couple of more graphics-intense games and we were quite surprised by the performance. The laptop was able to cross the 60fps mark during the gameplay and when you lower the settings, one can even get an average frame rate of around 80 FPS and more.
Coming to thermal performance, the laptop does tend to heat up a bit when you are into an intensive gaming session and the fan sound was particularly high sometimes. That said, there was no problem of over-throttling and the heat management was decent for which the credit goes to the company’s Active Aerodynamic System (AAS). When you open the lid, you will see a gap that opens the air chamber, which allows a better flow of air, thus reducing the overheating problem to a certain extent.
Battery Life
The Asus Zephyrus M comes loaded with a 55Whr battery and there is a 230W power adaptor. The battery is certainly not the strongest point of this laptop as, during our intensive usage, it merely lasted around 2 hours. Plus, the power brick is a bit heavy to carry around. So, if you want to play heavy games on this laptop, better find a sweet spot to place the power adaptor and this gaming machine.