ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX531GS-AH76 Review

Are you searching for a high-end gaming laptop? Then you’re in the right place. The ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX531GS-AH76 is the recent release from the ASUS ROG series and it comes as a high-end gaming laptop that targets serious gamers. It has all the bells and whistles you’d expect in a serious gaming machine and does cost a bit more than your average gaming laptop.

In this ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX531GS-AH76 review, we discuss the good, bad, and the ugly of this new gaming laptop. With excellent specs in place, how well does this laptop handle your gaming load? Can it run all the latest AAA games without compromising anything? Is this laptop worth your money? Let’s find that out.

Design

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX531GS-AH76 comes with a solid construction that makes use of military-grade magnesium alloy. The body of the laptop is solid and feels premium to touch. The hinge in the laptop is super smooth and you can lift the lid without any effort. 

The bezels around the laptop are pretty slim. This gives you more attention to the contents on the screen which is nice. These thin bezels also mean that you’ll get a smaller footprint and as a result, a portable laptop as well. Talking about portability, the laptop weighs around 4.63 pounds which is pretty good for a gaming laptop.

The cooling system is one of the main components in a gaming laptop. Here, we have a neat cooling system setup. There are anti-dust fans inside the laptop that take care of the cooling. You can also find a number of vents all over the laptop that helps let the hot air out.

The keyboard is one of the best features of this laptop. The keys are tactile and they come with a 20 million keystrokes guarantee. You get a decent amount of key travel which is fine for a laptop. ASUS calls this the AURA SYNC keyboard and you can RGB backlighting that can be customized to fit your needs. The touchpad is also quite nice to touch and slide. It is responsive and supports Windows gestures, so that’s nice.

ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX531GS-AH76 Specs

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX531GS-AH76 comes with a 15.6″ display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. This is an IPS panel and comes with excellent picture quality. You can see crisp images and sharp texts, thanks to the solid pixel density in this display.

You will enjoy watching your favorite shows and movies on this screen, thanks to this IPS panel. The viewing angles are excellent so you can observe the contents on the screen from any angle without losing any detail. The display is also great for work as this is a widescreen one.

One of the best features of this display is the refresh rate of 144Hz. As this is a gaming machine, ASUS has gone a little bit extra and opted for a display with 144Hz which is excellent for gamers. The movements on the screen are butter smooth and you can see that when you’re interacting with the OS elements itself. 

The audio output of the laptop is also quite impressive. You get good quality sounds from the laptop and it can fill a small or even a medium-sized room without any problem. There might be a little bit of distortion of sound when the volume is too high, but that’s okay. If you’re too serious about the sound in your laptop, then we suggest getting a dedicated gaming headphone.

Performance

The laptop is driven by an Intel Core i7 processor from the 8th generation. The i7 8750H is a high-end processor from Intel and comes with a typical clock frequency of 2.2GHz. The processor can make use of turbo boost and clock up to a maximum of 4.1GHz which is a lot of power for a gaming laptop.

This is a hexa-core processor, so you can expect excellent multi-core performance from this processor. The single-core performance is also pretty impressive. The processor gets a score of 12444 in the CPUMark benchmark confirming that this is a high-end chip suited for some heavy work.

The laptop is crazy fast and handles all your everyday tasks without any issues. You can browse the web, listen to music, stream your shows and movies online, and do even some office work without any problem. You can also run heavy applications on this laptop without any issues as well. Thanks to the 6-core chip, this laptop can run even the most resource-hungry apps without breaking a sweat.

The memory department in this laptop comes with 16 gigs of DDR4 type RAM. This is ample memory for a gaming laptop. This allows you to play pretty much any game out there. If you’re a multitasker, then you’ll enjoy this RAM as you can now do more at the same time without having to worry about lags and hiccups.

For storage, the ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX531GS-AH76 comes with a 512GB NVMe SSD which is a pretty smart choice. The SSD gives you enough storage space for all your games. It also gives you all the performance boost you need. The OS boots up in a few seconds, the applications and games launch faster than ever, and you can feel things being snappy even when dealing with the OS.

Gaming on the ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX531GS-AH76

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX531GS-AH76 comes with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card with a dedicated memory of 8GB which is pretty neat. This is the second-best graphics card in the Pascal lineup from Nvidia and is a high-end graphics card.

The performance of this graphics card is based on the cooling system of the laptop. Here, we have a decent cooling system in place and thanks to that, we get a solid gaming performance from the GPU. You can play pretty much any game on this laptop without having to worry about performance. The GPU supports UHD settings most games so feel free to keep things at peak gameplay.

Battery life and Connectivity

The battery life is probably the least exciting feature in the ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX531GS-AH76 laptop. With a light load, the users might be able to get around 3 to 4 hours of battery life. When you’re going to go full gaming mode, the battery will not last more than a couple of hours. 

The connectivity options on this laptop are also quite broad. You get a couple of USB 3.0 ports, a USB type C port, a couple of USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, an Ethernet port, and a headphone jack. The laptop also supports WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity which helps to eliminate wires to an extent.

Bottomline

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX531GS-AH76 is a solid gaming laptop that comes with a reasonable price for a gaming laptop. ASUS has gone full monty with the specs and you get excellent everyday performance from this laptop. The gaming experience on this laptop is second to none and allows you to do some hardcore gaming. If you’re looking for a serious gaming laptop for competitive gaming, this is it.