You know what’s awesome? Reviewing a gaming laptop like the ROG Zephyrus that I’m currently typing this review on, and about. You know what’s not so awesome? Keyboards that make me question my typing skills. Still, as complicated and weird as the ROG Zephyrus GX531GW moniker is, the laptop itself is an amazing device to use. I’ve been using this as my daily driver for almost a week now, letting my personal MacBook Pro gather dust while I RGB-ed my way through the last week. So here’s my review of the Asus ROG Zephyrus GX531GW gaming laptop that’s priced at a whopping Rs. 2,87,990.

Before we dive into the nitty gritty of the ROG Zephyrus, let’s take a quick look at the hardware this laptop is packing inside its sleek body:

With the specs out of our way, let’s dive right in.

The ROG Zephyrus is the flagship thin-and-light gaming laptop from Asus, and it lives up to everything that Asus mentions on its product page, including the fact that it is incredibly thin and light. As far as gaming laptops are concerned, the Zephyrus GX531GW is definitely one of the thinnest (if not the thinnest) laptops I’ve used and it looks absolutely stunning.

Open the lid and you’re greeted by the magnificent bezel-less display that Asus has packed inside the laptop. It’s a big and beautiful 15.6-inch IPS-level panel, with thin bezels around it, and a massive bezel on the bottom – something that’s pretty much standard on gaming laptops for what I can only assume is a place to hold the display controller, and also something that doubles up as a place where Asus has engraved ‘ROG Zephyrus’ in that oh-so-cool font that I absolutely love.

One of my personal concerns with this laptop, especially due to the lifting backplate design that Asus uses, was regarding the sturdiness. I’m not the most careful when it comes to using a laptop, and a moving backplate, especially one as thin as this one, was something I was really worried about breaking or bending, but it hasn’t so far, and I’ve used this laptop every which way. I’ve used it on a desk, on my lap, on the bed, and the backplate held up just fine, so that’s cool.

One can argue that the display is one of the most important parts of a laptop, whether it’s a gaming laptop or not; after all, you’ll be looking at the display for most of the time you’re using your laptop, and the ROG Zephyrus has a display that doesn’t leave much to be desired.

There’s a lot to like about this display. For starters, it just looks good, even when it’s turned off, thanks to the minimal bezels that surround it. However, turn it on, and it’s even better. The brightness levels are great, it can go very dim for when you’re using it at night, and it can go considerably bright, for when you’re using it during the day. It’s definitely a pretty bright display, and that’s when it has a matte coating on it.

Performance

Speaking of massive hits, one thing that this laptop does really well, and which is a massive hit on the laptop (in a positive sense of the phrase) is the performance. The ROG Zephyrus packs in an 8th-gen Intel Core i7 processor clocked at 2.2GHz with a Turbo Boost of up to 3.9GHz. That beast is paired with 16GB of 2666MHz DDR4 RAM, and the GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q GPU taken from Nvidia’s latest lineup of raytracing enabled graphic cards. Together, all of that translates into amazing performance, and thanks to the thermals on this laptop, this laptop can keep that performance going as long as you want.

Other than using the ROG Zephyrus for my day to day work, which is not very intensive to be honest, I put it through some of my favorite games, which also happen to be pretty demanding. I played PUBG, Far Cry 5 on multiple graphics settings, and Battlefield V with RTX on and off on different graphics settings to see how it performs in all those scenarios, and from all of that, my conclusion would be that you don’t really need to play any AAA title on this laptop on anything less than High to Ultra settings – and that, dear reader, is freaking amazing.

I also played Far Cry 5, on multiple settings, and used the in-game benchmark to get an idea of the overall performance of the laptop while rendering different types of scenes. The results were pretty much what you’d expect from a laptop with these specs. In Ultra settings, the Zephyrus GX531GW pushed an average frame rate of 81FPS, going as high as 94FPS and as low as 60FPS. Even at the lowest frame rates, 60FPS is completely a playable frame rate to have, and for a game as detailed as Far Cry 5, it’s definitely impressive for a laptop this thin to run it this well.

At High graphics, the laptop maintains an average frame rate of 87FPS, going as high as 105FPS and as low as 72FPS; and when I switched graphics to low, it got an average frame rate of 99FPS, with a high of 122FPS and a low of 78FPS.

All those games aside, this laptop has an RTX GPU, so obviously I wanted to test out RTX enabled games on this, which brought me straight to Battlefield V, and this game absolutely pushed the laptop to its limits. Still, it didn’t bring it down on its knees, which is great.

So I set the graphics to High, and kept ray tracing on, which got me a consistent frame rate of 80FPS to 100FPS, with an average of around 90+ frames per second, which is awesome. So that’s the setting I played the game in, and it’s also the setting I’d recommend you to play it on. However, if random frame rate jumps aren’t that big an issue to you, you can easily play this game on Ultra with ray tracing enabled on this laptop as well. It’s all a matter of personal preference, really.

Synthetic Benchmarks

If you were reading the real world performance and screaming to yourself “but that’s not a standardised test!” don’t worry, I ran the usual benchmarks on the laptop as well. Here’s what they were like.

I also ran Geekbench, and Cinebench R20 on the laptop. In Geekbench, the Zephyrus scored 4,971 in the single-core test, and 21,410 in the multi-core test, which again, is higher than the scores from he MSI GS65 Stealth 8SF. What surprised me the most, though, is that in Cinebench R20, the Zephyrus scored 2,087cb in the CPU test, while the MSI GS65 Stealth scored 2,330cb — and both these laptops have the same 8th-gen Intel Core i7-8750H processor, clocked at 2.2GHz of base frequency. I’m not entirely sure why that happened.

Keyboard and Trackpad

Even though almost everything about this laptop is amazing and doesn’t leave you wanting, the same does not hold true when you get to the keyboard and the trackpad that Asus has put on this laptop, especially when you compare this laptop to others in its price range.

Sure, the placement of the keyboard makes sense when you consider gaming on this (which is the main purpose of the laptop) because this placement means even when the laptop gets hot, you won’t have to burn your fingers off trying to use the WASD keys. However, this keyboard is not up to the mark. Even laptops priced decidedly lower than this one have better keyboards.

Gaming laptops aren’t really gaming laptops unless there’s RGB of some sort at least — and while some laptops go overboard with RGB, and some keep the RGB-ing to a minimum, the Zephyrus seems to be smack dab in the middle… maybe leaning a little towards going overboard, but not in a bad way at all.

Still, I love how Asus has handled RGB on this laptop, primarily because it’s out there enough to look awesome and cool, but it’s not screaming “RGB forever!” to the world — which, in my personal opinion, is the perfect amount of RGB.

There’s also a considerable amount of software pre-installed on the laptop; some of which is useful, and some… not so much. Let’s take a look at the useful software and what it can do:

First up, the Armoury Crate, which is basically a control center for everything about your laptop. This includes, on the home screen, the CPU/GPU frequencies, the fan speeds, usage stats, fan-speeds, and more. This is also where you can set up profiles for your laptop ranging from Silent to Turbo, or you can opt for Windows to automatically set profiles according to its own smarts.

Full disclosure: I didn’t use this software at all, in all my testing, because I found that the display looked good enough by default (which is also the name of the setting the laptop came with out of the box). However, with Game Visual, you can set the screen color mode to suit the type of game you’re playing. There are settings for FPS games, Racing games, RTS/RPG games. There are also color modes for other uses, like Cinema, Eyecare, and Vivid.

For all things sound related on the Zephyrus GX531GW, this is the software to go to. It not only lets you set the speaker volume on the laptop (I fail to understand why anyone would use an app to adjust the volume), but it also comes with profiles to set the speakers’ equalization settings.

For everything related to system information and diagnostics, the MyASUS app is the place to go. It shows off the basic information right at launch, and from there, you can head over to diagnosing various common issues including BSoDs, slow or unresponsive system, and a lot more. There’s also a dedicated tab to talk to the customer support if you need it.

While most gaming laptops come with an overabundance of ports, the Asus ROG Zephyrus comes with ports that I’d say are ‘just enough,’ and it does miss out on one particular one. The laptop comes with one USB 3.1 Type-A port, two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, one USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C port with Power Delivery, one USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C port, an HDMI 2.0b port, and a headphone and microphone combo jack.

To be fair, in regular usage, you probably won’t need more ports. However, the lack of an RJ-45 ethernet port might be a sore-point for anyone who likes playing Local LAN games. Also a sore point: why is there only 1 USB 3 port, and 2 USB 2 ports? USB 2 is incredibly outdated and slow, and while those ports are definitely decent for connecting a keyboard and mouse to your laptop, it’s not something you expect from a laptop priced the way this one is.

Speakers

The Asus ROG Zephyrus GX531GW comes with 2W x 2W speakers with SmartAMP technology, and they sound pretty good. They’re not the best speakers I’ve heard on a gaming laptop, but they won’t let you down at all. The speakers get pretty loud, audio remains clear even on max volumes, and even though the bass isn’t that great, it still manages to sound very great.

When it comes to the battery, things take a bad turn again. The Zephyrus GX531GW comes with a 60Whr battery, which is a pretty small battery for a laptop packing in hardware like this. The Intel Core i7-8750H and the RTX 2070 themselves are a power hog and with 60Whr of battery, I wasn’t expecting this thing to last very long.

That’s not stellar battery life by any means, and if you’re looking to use this laptop for everyday work, don’t ever forget to carry that bulky 230W charger that comes with it.

The ROG Zephyrus GX531GW is definitely a laptop that does almost everything perfectly. It has a great design, premium build, the RGB is on-point and not overkill, performance is top notch for a device of this form factor, and on par with most laptops in its price range. There are drawbacks though, the keyboard is sub-par, the battery life is on the low-end even by standards set by most gaming laptops, and the I/O selection is not as wide-ranging as on other gaming laptops in its price bracket.