Ginsu
1 de julio de 2026
Have power, will travel (anywhere I can plug this in)
THE SHORT VERSIONThis thing is an absolute beast. It's crushed everything I've thrown at it, to the point where I'm not getting much gaming done because I just keep thinking of other things to try that I was having problems with on my old desktop.You aren't going to get better value for money for a computer for gaming right now. Desktops are so insanely overpriced that a laptop is your only option if you're familiar with the word "budget," and you aren't going to find a better price-to-performance ratio in a laptop. Buying this thing when I did really feels like catching the last chopper out of 'Nam, given the state of the industry right now.PERFORMANCE & GAMINGI got this to replace my aging desktop (3950X / RTX 3080). This laptop runs laps around it. It's so good it actually makes me mad how much it outperforms a full ATX system I spent 5 grand building 6 years ago.The Screen: I’d originally intended to hook this up to my TV when playing with a controller, but the quality of this screen made me abandon that altogether. 16:10 with 240Hz in G-Sync looks fantastic, and the color gamut on this display is not a joke. The first time I was flipping through the display modes and landed on DCI-P3, my eyes went wide and I haven't touched that again since.Forza Horizon 6: Absolutely no problems playing at higher settings than I was used to, looking significantly better than it does on my Xbox Series X. Seriously, I was shocked how good everything looked the first time I launched it on this because it was so much better than the XSX or my outgoing desktop. It's going to take a little bit for that to stop being distracting so I can focus on racing, lmaoCyberpunk 2077: I could never get this running at all on my old desktop, but it runs flawlessly at high to max settings on this with dozens of mods loaded. I've lost count of how many times I've played through this game on my XSX, and am really looking forward to dozens more now that I can mess around with mods!(Note: I disable ray tracing, motion blur, bloom, chromatic aberration, and lower shadow/reflection qualities immediately in every game that has said options, just as personal preference, not that any of those but the RT would have a meaningful performance impact on this. I also just flatly don't believe in framegen like DLSS, so I don't use it).(I also play Fallout 76 and Pragmata, but neither of those is as much of a challenge to run as the above, so it doesn't bear wasting your time going into detail on them. Suffice it to say, 👍👍)CONS, GRIPES, & THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW LEST YOU THINK I'M A SHILLARMOURY CRATE: A PLAGUE ON ASUS'S HOUSEThe very first thing I recommend doing upon getting past the initial setup and logging into a Windows is nuking Armoury Crate from orbit and going to GitHub to download G-Helper. I could not, for the life of me, get Armoury Crate to stop changing the color of my keyboard lights, or stop animating it at random, until I got rid of Armoury Crate and set the lighting settings through G-Helper. You'll get important driver updates through the MyAsus app anyway (and G-Helper can point out drivers that are out of date and give you direct links to downloading updates, regardless), so for the sake of your sanity, don't waste any time trying to bargain with the bloat, just get rid of it and get G-Helper.HEAT: THIS THING PRODUCES ITBlock the intakes or exhausts on this thing at your own peril. It has the most impressive bottom case design I've ever seen on a laptop, with feet raising it significantly and air channels cut every which way to draw in air from as many angles as possible, but the CPU sits between 95°C and 98°C while running Cyberpunk. You can absolutely feel it blasting out the exhaust vents, which are located near the back on either side, as if they wanted to make sure that if you're using an external mouse, they keep your mouse hand warm, whether you're a righty or a lefty! Credit to the thermal design, though, I've never once felt the keyboard get noticeably warm. I've been using a laptop stand/tray thing while gaming with this in bed or on the couch, and for your safety and the machine's, I highly recommend you do the same. I’m waiting on an IETS cooling pad to arrive before I try using it at my desk with my Odyssey so it doesn't melt into slag and damage my desk, or (more likely) throttle itself like crazy to prevent that from happening. (The community likes IETS and llano about equally from what I've seen, it just so happened there was a better deal available on the IETS when I went looking to buy one.)NOISE: REAL COMPUTERS MAKE ITThis doesn't bother me at all, but if I've learned anything from working 15 years in IT, it's that the average end user expects computers to be silent at all times, likely because they've never been anywhere near a datacenter. When you fire up a AAA game on this thing, it's going to get loud, because it has 3 small fans trying to dissipate the heat from an immense amount of TDP, and the smaller a fan is, the faster it has to spin to move more air, and the louder and higher pitch that's going to be. This is basic physics. Laws of the universe. Again, I have no problem at all with this, I expected this, I own both over-ear headphones and earbuds with active noise cancellation...I'm all set, but it bears mentioning that this monster is gunna make it known when it's working hard to make those frames for ya.BATTERYI mean, look at the specs. You're not going to want to stray far from an outlet, and you certainly don't want to ever leave home without the massive 280W charging brick. While one of its USB-C ports does allow for 100W PD, you aren't going to be gaming on that for long. I tested it, and the battery gains on a 100W charger hilariously quickly if you're running a "serious" game with settings cranked up. I got about an hour into Cyberpunk before it dropped into power saving mode, begging for a real charge.(Yes, you can set it to Eco mode and completely disable the 5070Ti to squeeze a few extra minutes out of a charge, but that's not what you're buying this for. I forgot I was testing Eco mode once and launched Cyberpunk, then laughed for the full 5 minutes it took to force quit it so I could turn the GPU back on, which took a couple clicks and then the game loaded in seconds.)KEYBOARD & THE TRACKPAD NUMPAD GIMMICKI don't like that it doesn't have a real numpad, it seems ridiculous that they couldn't fit one in given the size of this thing, and the mode-switching trackpad is a gimmick. Nobody who wants to use a numpad is ever going to say "oh, that works just as well." If you're right-handed and lazily scrolling through websites, prepare yourself to occasionally trigger it by accident.Amusing sidenote: If you connect an external keyboard and hit numlock, it lights up the numpad mode on the trackpad, making it the dramatic, overwhelming winner for "biggest numlock light I've ever seen." Speaking of indicator lights...THE BLINKING INDICATOR LIGHTSThe little status indicator lights that computers often have are not so little on this, are directly under the display, facing directly at you, are bright, and at least one is blinking at all times. Asus removed the functionality that allowed you to turn them off in software that existed on prior models, and no, even G-Helper can't save you here. The community response has been "cut some tape to fit over them." For now, I've covered all but a little dot on each one, but I might cover the disk indicator light entirely because really....it just blinks constantly, and the information conveyed by that wildly outweighs the annoyance, in practice, in my opinion. (Your mileage may vary based on how susceptible to annoyance you are and how well you can tune things out.)HDMI PORT VS. USB-CThe HDMI port wasn't as useful as I'd hoped. I tried hooking it up to my Odyssey 32:9 at my desk, and while it would push a full 5120x1440, it couldn't do HDR or G-Sync, and it was locked at 60Hz. For productivity, this is absolutely fine. Great, even. For gaming? I wasn't thrilled.The Fix: Get a USB-C to DisplayPort cable. The USB-C ports on this thing are wired DIRECTLY to the GPU. The instant I plugged that cable in, I was back to full functionality for my wildly unreasonable monitor, with 49-120Hz VRR, HDR, and full G-Sync compatibility showing in the Nvidia app.IN CONCLUSIONThe day I pulled the trigger on buying this was immediately after its replacement was announced, with no AMD CPU option and costing nearly twice as much because it's targeted exclusively at generating slop, not gaming. I spent weeks looking, and couldn't find a better price-to-performance ratio. For all the aforementioned faults, I love it. It's not perfect, but neither is the world we're living in. Happy gaming, folks.Ver másVer menos
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