Asus ROG G501 Gaming Laptop Review

Asus ROG G501 Gaming Laptop (MSRP: $1,599.00) available at Amazon.com, with a sleek—and more importantly thin—design, the G501 will easily slide into your bag as you dash to your next fragment. Throw in an Intel Core i7 4720HQ processor, 8GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX960M GPU. The G501 has the power to tackle video editing, photo editing, and gaming with ease.

While the G501 is outperformed by other gaming laptops on the market, it's about half the price of the top-of-the-line systems. If you’re a diehard PC gamer who's stuck on a budget, the G501 is a handy alternative to a bulky desktop—as long as you’re willing to compromise on raw power.

Design

The G501, like other gaming laptops, is a large and imposing piece of hardware that still has a touch of style. Asus opted for a red and black color scheme, including a keyboard that features an ominous red backlight. It's a neat touch that sets the G501 apart from the crowd. It's flashy, but as with most gaming hardware, austerity isn't the name of the game—it's meant to stand out.

The black case has a finish that resembles wood grain. It can only be seen when the light hits it just so, but it’s still a nice touch. An Asus logo and a large “Republic of Gamers” shield emblazoned the back of the lid, which keeps things simple yet adds a nice visual break. On the sides you’ll have full access to three USB 3.0 ports, a 2-in-1 card reader (SD/MMC), a HDMI port, a mini Display Port, and your standard audio port.

 

The 15.6-inch, 4K/UHD (3840 x 2160) resolution display requires a large footprint, with the G501 coming in at 15.1 x 10.0 inches—not exactly small. But, at less than an inch thick, it's ideal to slip in your bag with the rest of your gear. Thin or not, it does weigh a hefty 4.54 pounds—without the charger.

Asus had enough room to include a full numpad along the backlit keyboard—a great addition if you’re coming from a full keyboard of a desktop PC. And, if you weren’t already aware that this was a gaming laptop, the WASD (standard movement keys for games) are highlighted with a red band to denote their importance. It’s not just a band of color that sets these keys apart, though; Asus also used “Hyper Cool” technology, which is a fancy way to say the components have been designed so heat is directed away from the parts of the laptop most often used by gamers—like those WASD keys.

With three USB 3.0 ports, the G501 has enough ports to cover the basic needs of any gamer—like a keyboard and mouse. Anything more and you'll need a USB hub. Windows laptops are notorious for sub-optimal trackpads, but the G501 is one of the worst we've used. Using the default settings, the mouse is sluggish and clicking anything becomes a trial in patience. It also occasionally kicked us out of what we were doing and sent us to the full screen live tiles of Windows 8.1—although this seems to have been fixed with an update to Windows 10.

The good news is that you can tinker with the pointer speed and the amount of delay on clicks to help alleviate these issues. Our recommendation though? Stick to a separate mouse. Not only is it a better choice for gaming, but you won’t ever have to rage-quit from trying to open an app using the trackpad.

Software

It’s practically a guarantee that when you purchase a new Windows PC you’re also going to get some bloatware—useless or redundant software that’s pre-installed by the manufacturer. Some manufacturers are worse than others, but with the G501, the pre-installed software actually turned out to be pretty handy.

Arguably the most important is GeForce Experience. It’s a handy piece of software that lets users stream to an Nvidia Shield, auto-optimize the graphics settings of their games, record gameplay and stream to Twitch, and update your graphics drivers as soon as they’re pushed live by Nvidia. Sure, there are plenty of other ways to handle this kind of stuff, but by streamlining it into a single program Nvidia has cut out the middle-man and made the experience much more enjoyable.

Asus ROG G501 - Gaming Apps

AudioWizard and Splendid give users a ton of customization when it comes to the audio and video settings. Then there’s Asus Splendid and ROG AudioWizard, each of which are filled with presets for picture and audio settings respectively. Splendid adjusts your picture settings and comes with presets for Normal, Theater, and Vivid modes with another tab that gives users super fine manual control. AudioWizard comes with five presets for adjusting sound—War Room, Soundscape, Battlefield, Action, and Multimedia— and, just like Splendid, has manual sliders to customize each of the above mentioned presets.

Rounding out the gaming-centric software is ROG Game First III, which gives you control over your online bandwidth. With it, you can dedicate the bulk of your bandwidth to support your games, while still uploading, downloading, and streaming content in the background. That cuts down on lag without having to close every connected program. Upgrading to Windows 10 includes the chance to use Cortana, Windows personal digital assistant.

The G501 came to us running Windows 8.1, but seeing as Windows 10 dropped earlier this week, we decided to upgrade and see how the G501 handled the latest from Microsoft. After going through the painless process of updating the OS, everything ran like a breeze.

Except for a Windows 10 driver update that was waiting for us in GeForce Experience, there weren’t any problems running any of the aforementioned gaming apps. There also weren’t any big performance drops after the upgrade. If you already bought the G501 or were wondering how it’d handle Windows 10, rest easy knowing you won’t have any major issues—outside of personal preference for the OS that is.