Advice re new laptop

The MSIs are a terrific value.

I loved the trackpad on the Stealth – great, glass-surfaced MS Precision trackpad. Major thumbs-up.

I did not love the keyboard. I eventually got it where I was happy with the lighting, but the SteelSeries’ penchant for light-bleed-as-feature took some work to overcome the glare, especially the function key row, where the half-depth keys and a fairly high desk height meant that I often caught the LED light directly in the retina. I ended up putting them one notch from “off” to make it work.

I’m actually a little surprised that the Asus felt worth it to me, despite the higher price coupled with several technical shortcomings when compared with the MSI (no Thunderbolt, half the RAM, odd 24GB RAM cap, single 4-channel NVME capability preventing RAID 0).

Ultimately what won me over to the Asus when directly comparing the two in-house was the superior overall performance coupled with sheer refinement and attention to detail. What it does, it does really, really well.

The fans sound better (lower frequency, more airflow sound vs more fan noise), and do their job with slightly lower overall noise – although both are surprisingly excellent in this (provided you avoid Turbo like the plague, on either – and you almost certainly do not need it), but overall the Asus gets a slight nod in the fan department. That’s on the thin models, though – the DTR devices like the Raider should do better.

The keyboard lighting is the best I’ve used – great, saturated colors with practically zero bleed. Excellent key feel for a chicklet keyboard (no wobble).

The Asus loses points for the trackpad, partly due to size but mostly due to the material – it’s plastic so there’s too much friction compared to a modern glass trackpad. It works fine, with good gesture and scrolling performance, and the placement to the right of the kb works better than you might expect.

Those points are made up by the GPU performance. They use the top-binned Max Q GPU the way it was meant to be used: to enable a wide range of performance, from electron-sipping silent mode all the way up to rip-snorting desktop-level performance that still manages to keep the heat down. I have yet to see it exceed 75C (usually it is 71-73), and it’s basically pegged at 1500Mhz (+/- 100) when gaming in Balanced mode. It’s impressive.

I am a week into it now, and I can comfortably state that the 17" Asus Zephyrus S GX701GX is fabulous. The cooling system is the bomb in both functionality and acoustics. Polish and refinement abound.

Really recommended. And I am so happy that I went with 17" over 15.6 this round. With this new generation, the physical size difference is finally close enough to be outweighed by the significant screen, thermal, and keyboard benefits. Super recommended.

I also had a great experience with Excalibur PC with this purchase.

Awesome! I was sorely tempted by that one but as I said above I opted to go with the GE75 Raider for the full desktop 2080 (for less cost). Everything I read about it sounds good except I’ve seen several comments about how it can get quite warm under load, so I hope that isn’t a major issue. Your comment about the cooling system in the Zephyrus may make me really envious here in the near future! My laptop is finally arriving today, so I guess I’ll find out soon.

One nice perk I was just about to cancel EA Access and buy Anthem but I just got the email from Amazon with a code for Anthem, BF5, and Metro. Good timing!

Keep in mind, the 2080 (not to mention the 6 core i7) still produces a lot of heat so anything that is dissipating that heat will get quite warm under load. That is expected (and one of the more nonsensical things reviewers can say about a DTR gaming laptop, especially when they’re talking about the exhaust area of the chassis). What matters is that it can dissipate that heat without undue heat-related throttling.

The GPU temp under load in the MSI was fine (71-75 in my sample), as is the Asus. CPU was higher, but that’s seldom a bottleneck so I didn’t pay much attention when first looking at it. Both laptops did a great job there — and that’s with the thin and light models.

You can also take advantage of throttlestop to undervolt the cpu. Most of these have a good margin.

I’ve been very happy with my Razer Blade 15, but damn if the reviews of the new Stealth aren’t making me regret not waiting. It’s basically exactly what I was looking for — an ultrabook with an actually gaming-capable GPU — and nearly a kilo lighter.

Annual speed upgrades are a never-ending fact of life for tech purchasers that we (mostly) just live with. Form factor improvements, though, induce a whole different level of buyers remorse.

If it’s bugging you, eBay / Craigslist (take good pictures!) and upgrade! You might as well take the hit as an investment in future contentedness.

Which one, the ones with an MX150? Seems to be roughly equivalent with a GTX1050?

No, the new one with a 1650

Anyone here know about the practical difference between max-q & non max-q rtxs? I mean i have looked at things like the benchmark website but it doesn’t really help me.

I am heading off to finally join my wife for an undetermined length of time and will probably have to buy a laptop as no room for a desktop/portability.

And if I don’t plan on hooking up a monitor is Thunderbolt something I need to worry about? There’s always DP anyway if I change my mind after all.

Non-max-Q is going to be up to ~20-30% faster (@stusser?) but they’re generally also in larger, heavier cases with better cooling but much worse battery life and much larger power bricks (if not multiple).

There’s a lot of variability, though – the ASUS ROG Zephyrus 17 (with the fancy cooling) does much better with the Max Q than a comparable MSI, for example. It’s able to dissipate more heat, and Asus lets the chip run at considerably higher clock speeds.

Thunderbolt is nice for external drives, external GPUs, monitors, and multi-port hubs. I consider it a requirement, personally. At this point, any manufacturer producing an otherwise high-quality laptop without it is either being cheap or grinding an axe.

I wouldn’t buy a laptop over $800 or so without TB3, yeah.

thanks for that