Asus Zephyrus M GU502 First Impression – Charmer for Work and Play
Lakshmi Rajan
Asus has a solid reputation for gaming laptops in their ROG lineup. Within the Republic of Gamers series, there are many sub-series including the Strix and Zephyrus. Between them, the Zephyrus offers slim yet powerful gaming laptops. They are designed for people who want a powerful work and play laptop on the go and yet have a relatively less weight and dimensions.
The Taiwanese company has refreshed the ROG Zephyrus gaming laptops with new machines featuring 9-th Gen Intel CPUs, Turing-based Nvidia Graphics, RTX 20 series GPU, Pantone validated display. What I have today is the Zephyrus M GU502, which offers a potent mix of power and practicality for folks like me who want a work machine that seriously plays well, after all, who doesn’t want to fire the gaming adrenalin after a good day’s work.
Box contents:
Out of the box you get the,
GU502
Power adapter
Cable
Few documents
Zephyrus range gets a good treatment in terms of build quality and the GU502 follows the tradition. It’s encased in a metal chassis with a combination of magnesium, aluminium and plastic materials giving it a compact and lighter profile. It weighs 1.9Kg, measures 18.9mm in thickness and the moment I took it out of the box and unwrapped the plastic sheet, the build quality was reassuring. The finish is one of the better you can find in the market. The top lid gets the typical Asus matte brushed finish with their backlit ROG Logo glowing red when the machine is on. The design language, in general, is in sync with the Zephyrus lineup.
An interesting addition to the GU502 is type C 3.1 Gen 2 with display port and PD charging support. Yes, the laptop can be powered by a power bank. It has an input rating of 20V/3A and 9V/2A output. Apart from this, there are in total 3 USB ports (two on the right and one at the left), one HDMI port and an RJ45 ethernet port. A Kingston lock, 2 audio jack one for headphone and another for mic completes the bells and whistles.
There’s still no card-reader and no Thunderbolt 3. The power plus is placed in the middle of the left side, which I find a bit awkward.
The Zephyrus M GU502 is well-spaced and promises a good experience, let me admit it’s early days for me and will talk about that more on the full review. It has a dedicated multimedia keys and an extra row of function keys at the right. The keys gets RGB illumination with Aura sync. Asus’s packs an Armoury Crate app for full control over the machine, you can do a lot there including creating different profiles. There is a fairly large trackpad but there is no fingerprint sensor for login. More on that in full review.
The GU502 has a 15.6-inch Full HD (1920×1080) IPS-level panel. The display offers 144Hz refresh rate with 3ms response time and the colours are Pantone validated. So apart from gaming, if you are a content creator, the display would be apt for photo editing or video editing offering good colour accuracy. The bezels are relatively narrow for a gaming machine.
Talking about the specifications, the machine is powered by 9th gen Intel Core i7-9750H with Intel HM370 chipset. The graphics are handled by NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660Ti with 6GB GDDR6 VRAM Optimus. You stash up memory up to 32GB with 16GB onboard. It comes with NVMe PCIE 3.0 512GB SSD storage. There is a quite a fat 230W brick included for charging the traditional way. The built-in battery is rated 76Wh lithium-ion polymer battery.
Look forward to the review very shortly.
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