Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

UPDATE: 4/20/2018 I have changed the rating from 4 stars to 1 star. It has been about a year since I purchased this laptop. The laptop worked fine at first. However, as time went on, sometimes the laptop would boot to a black screen. The power LED was on and you could hear the hard drive spinning so it was on but the display remained black. I searched the ASUS forums and saw that other people shared the same issue with this laptop. A hard shut down (hold the power button until it boots off completely) helped to resolve the issue temporarily. The laptop would boot normally after a hard shut down. However, in the past few months, the issue became progressively worse. About a month ago, the laptop would boot the black screen but a hard shut down and reboot no longer worked. The screen remained black. I RMA'd the laptop to ASUS for repair. They replaced the RAM. The same issue persisted. I RMA'd the laptop again. They replaced the motherboard. The same issue persisted. A long story short, ASUS only offered a replacement. I did not choose that and instead spoke with Amazon, who kindly offered me a partial refund on the laptop. The fact that the two RMAs did not resolve the issue and that the issue is not uncommon (one can see on the ASUS forums many people have similar issues) leads me to believe this is a poor and faulty product. I would think carefully if you are deciding whether or not to purchase this laptop. My review below still stands in the scenario the laptop works. However, paying the amount of money for this laptop to essentially have a brick after a year is no good at all. Due to the RMA experience with ASUS and their customer support, I will no longer ever be purchasing ASUS products ever again unless there's a way to avoid having to go to ASUS for support (e.g. Microcenter's purchased warranties). There seems to be a lot of questions and sometimes misinformation floating around about this laptop so I'll answer the most common ones I see from online in this review. Is the display 1920x1080? Yes. Is the display IPS (In-plane switching)? Yes. Is the refresh rate of the display 120 Hz? Yes. Does the display have G-Sync? Yes. What form factor is the SSD? It is M.2. Is the memory dual channel? Yes, it's 2x8 GB. Is the power supply 230 W (probably the most common question for this model)? Yes. See the attached image I took of my GL502VS-DS71 and the power supply it came with. You can see the output is 19.5 V (Volts) and 11.8 A (Ampere). Volts * Ampere = Wattage (W). 19.5 V * 11.8 A = 230.1 W. How hot does the GPU run? From my testing of games, which were The Witcher 3, Overwatch, and Dragon Age: Inquisition, the GTX 1070 hit an average of 77 degrees Celsius with a peak of 81 degrees Celsius during extended gameplay. The ambient temperature in my room during this was about 23 degrees Celsius. How hot does the CPU run? When running the CPU on stock voltage, the CPU hit an average of 87 degrees with a peak of 93 degrees Celsius in the above mentioned games during extended gameplay. When I undervolted the CPU by -140 mV (this can be done either by Intel Extreme Tuning Utility or Throttlestop), the CPU hit an average of 83 degrees Celsius with a peak of 89 degrees Celsius in the above mentioned games during extended gameplay. The ambient temperature in my room during this was about 23 degrees Celsius. Now, the thing that jumps out the most probably is the CPU temperature. Is that safe? Well, according to Intel's website, the T junction for the i7-7700HQ is 100 degrees Celsius. I'll copy and paste Intel's definition of T junction below: "Tjunction Max is the maximum temperature the cores can reach before thermal throttling is activated. Thermal throttling happens when the processor exceeds the maximum temperature. The processor shuts itself off in order to prevent permanent damage. Tjunction Max (Tj Max) is also referred to as TCC Activation Temperature in certain processor datasheets." Intel also provides the following information on Tjunction, which I'll copy and paste below: "These terms are related to processor temperature for desktop and mobile systems based on Intel® Processors. To allow optimal system operation and long-term reliability, the processor must not exceed the maximum case temperature specifications as defined by the applicable thermal profile." So at least according to Intel, these CPU temperatures would be within spec. An average of 87 with a peak of 93 degrees Celsius is cutting it close though. I'd recommend undervolting, which gave me an average of 83 with a peak of 89 degrees Celsius, to give a little more headroom under the T junction. I wouldn't call these temperatures the greatest but considering the form factor of the laptop, they seem okay. Now for some miscellanous information: What color is the keyboard's LEDs and can it be turned off? Red and yes the keyboard's LEDs can be turned off via Fn +F3. The setting will stick with reboots. Does the laptop come loaded with ASUS's software (or bloatware if you prefer to call it that)? Yes and there's plenty of it. It's annoying but every manufacturer does that. Just uninstall it if you don't want it. This is a time to bring up something annoying regarding design decision. ASUS decided to put a key with the ASUS logo where the num lock key usually is (the num lock key is instead a Fn shortcut on the Home key right above). This key is meant to launch ASUS'S Gaming Center. If you uninstall ASUS's Gaming Center, the key is useless. In addition, as far as I can tell from researching online (as of April 2017), no other laptops out there have the specs of this laptop AND an IPS display. The other brands (e.g. MSI, Dell Alienware, or Sager / Clevo) have laptops that can match the GL502VS-DS71's spec for spec EXCEPT they have a TN (Twisted Nematic) panel instead of an IPS panel. I hoped this review helped to inform your decision as to whether or not to purchase this laptop. ***Update 5/28/17*** I looked into controlling the fan speed of the laptop. It looks like NoteBook FanControl does not have this model yet in their application so it can't control the fan speed. However, I discovered that with the Asus Gaming Center you can control the fan speed. I found that the default auto profile has the fan running at about 3300 RPM during gaming load. I decided to turn the fan speed to max, which is now about 4400 RPM. This has further dropped the temperatures for the CPU/GPU I had above by a few degrees. The downside is now the fan is much louder owing to the faster RPM. I also decided to drop my review to 4 stars considering how the user has to implement these workarounds to bring the CPU to more manageable temperatures. The laptop out of the box with stock settings does run too hot. However, if you're willing to utilize Intel Extreme Tuning Utility or Throttlestop (to undervolt the CPU) and to enable 100% fan speed whenever you're gaming with the ASUS Gaming Center, the temperatures are much better. The issue is that you would have to enable these settings each and every time you want to game. With Intel Extreme Tuning Utility or Throttlestop, you could google how to set them as a basic task to be executed at every log on via the Windows Task Scheduler so you don't have to open them every time. As for the fan speed, you can't set a user defined fan curve via the ASUS Gaming Center unfortunately. The last option (if you're looking to drop temperatures as much as possible) is to undervolt the GPU as well. One example is using MSI Afterburner's voltage curve editor. You can edit the curve so that the GPU sits at 0.800 V only. I chose to forego this option since it would mean your GPU would be running at lower clocks speeds, which results in lowered performance in games. Basically, be aware that if you aren't willing to do the workaround I talked about, this laptop runs a bit too hot. If you are willing to do the workarounds, the temperatures are much more acceptable but the downside of course is that the user has to put in all this effort.