In case you stick to office work, you will easily get nine hours and restricting action to web browsing or YouTube should give you more screen-on time. That’s a pretty good figure for a gaming laptop. The deal breaker for me is battery life, which is easily seven hours, involving some video editing, gaming and usual office-related work.
Since Asus wanted to make it a laptop for all occasions, a built-in webcam would have been a welcome move. There is no built-in webcam on the machine but the box has a clip-on option but when travelling users may easily forget all about it. There is also a ‘panel power saver’ if you want to conserve charge but who wants to do that while gaming?! I usually went with performance mode which kept fan noise under check. Going into the Armoury Crate, you can manage system performance - Silent, Performance, Turbo or Manual. Most of the heat dissipation happens from the sides and also the back. What I got is consistent frame rates and experience. Asus went with a compact size, so there will be a limit on the power draw by the CPU and GPU but it doesn’t interfere with the flawless gaming experience. We also played a lot of Asphalt 9: Legends effortlessly.ĭuring the 10-day review period, there was no stuttering and heating was nothing out of the ordinary. Graphics-intensive games like Red Dead Redemption II played out on maximum settings and ray tracing didn’t turn out to be an issue. Powered by AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS with Radeon Graphics, every game you throw at it is well played out. Like on other premium Asus laptops, you get ErgoLift hinge on this one, meaning the keyboard gets slightly raised as you push the screen back, making it easier to type and even when you keep the screen at 180-degree, viewing experience is not compromised. Coming to the trackpad, it’s big, responsive and has a satisfying click. Anyway, that doesn’t take anything away from the laptop. Plus, it’s slightly odd to find black bezels on an off-white laptop. A suggestion: Get the grey variant because the backlighting is easily visible on that. The backlighting on the keyboard is simple but effective. The only quibble I have is the absence of a print screen key, something I use often. There are six speakers powered by Dolby Atmos technology - twin tweeters face front to fire sound directly at you while pairs of force-canceling woofers under the palm rests balance acoustics and minimise unwanted resonance. This is an added bonus because gamers tend to use headphones.
The speakers are on either side of the keyboard and they get pretty loud without sacrificing clarity. I could easily manage to knock out several copies on this laptop and editing videos was easy. The keyboard is large and quiet to type on and there is good key travel. Of course, most dirt-related problems can be taken care of with a micro-fiber cloth. The only flaw I see has to do with the dots that may gather some dust over time. Being made of magnesium-aluminum, you are ensured that it will tackle the march of time well. The model we have for review is the off-white variant, the lid of which is covered in a dot-matrix design that produces a rainbow effect when seen at certain angles. Nothing can be faulted about the laptop’s build, be it the premium finish of the lid or the keyboard and trackpad. After all, it weighs only 1.9kg, which is extremely light for this kind of powerful machine.
Good viewing angles and a panel that gets bright enough ensures you can set this machine down anywhere to get work done. So it’s best if you get a colour calibrator to get it right for video editing. Though it’s a great tool for editing videos, one has to remember that out of the box, the screen is well calibrated for gaming. The fine balance between being a gaming machine and a productivity tool can be seen right from the screen, which is an excellent 1440p panel with 165Hz refresh rate and 100 per cent DCI-P3 coverage on the colour spectrum, which is great for video editing. Perhaps the biggest feature about the G15 is its portability factor despite being a gaming monster. It has, in fact, the ideal chassis for a laptop. Everything about the machine is on point - good size, good weight and it packs in a lot of power.