Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX531 Quick Review: The World’s Thinnest Gaming Notebook

Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX531 Quick Review: The World’s Thinnest Gaming Notebook

We Get Our First Look at Asus’ Compact Powerhouse of a Laptop

Last week, we got a chance to fly out to Taiwan and visit one of Asus’ ROG centers to check their newly announced Zephyrus laptop. Like those that came before it, the new Zephyrus S promises to be a powerhouse of gaming notebook crammed into an even slimmer chassis and is currently the “World’s Slimmest Gaming Laptop”. Let’s see what hardware it’s packing and what improvements they’ve made to an already great laptop line.

What Is It?

If you’re unfamiliar with the Republic of Gamers’ Zephyrus lineup, it was a laptop that really wowed the crowd at COMPUTEX last year. It features NVIDIA’s Max-Q designed GPUs that offered nearly the same amount of power in a smaller form factor. This allowed manufacturers, such as Asus, to work their magic and deliver a powerful laptop that wasn’t THICC.

How’s the Build Quality?

The Zephyrus S is the latest of the bunch and is, as mentioned above, currently the slimmest gaming laptop on the block; measuring in at 14.95mm. That’s just a hair thicker than the Nintendo Switch with the Joy-Cons attached. It’s got a solid build with the lid that’s been CNC milled and the rest of the body made out of an aluminum alloy to keep thing as light as possible too. At a glace, it still pretty much looks like its predecessors but there’s one tell that’s a complete giveaway.

While you’ve got all your standard I/O ports that you’d expect (sans an SD card slot) but the HDMI port has been moved to the back. It’s unclear though if this was a conscious effort to help with cable management or restrictions of having a smaller frame. In any case, it works.

When you lift up the lid the changes the company has made to the Zephyrus S become more apparent. They’ve totally changed the hinge system to a “Scissor Door” style to mimic that of a high-performance sports car. This gives the Zephyrus S a bit of a lip on the back.

Is the Display Any Good?

One of the major complaints about the previous Zephyrus model prior to this one, the Zephyrus M, was that it has large bezels that made the design look a tad dated. Well, it looks like Asus heard you guys loud and clear because they’ve trimmed them down; giving you a 15.6-inch display with a footprint of 14.2-inches.

The panel itself has a resolution of Full HD with 100-percent sRGB coverage and has a refresh rate of 144Hz and 3ms response time to give you a competitive edge in first-person shooters. Sadly, there were no pre-installed titles in the unit we were allowed to check out but it should produce awesome results.

What Hardware Is It Rocking?

Under the hood of the Asus ROG Zephyrus S is an Intel Core i7-8750H processor with 16GB of RAM DDR4 2666MHz, a 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD, and up to an NVIDIA GTX 1060. This should be enough for gaming on-the-go or even some video editing if you’re a content creator. We’ll try to get a review unit as soon as we can to really stretch out the legs of the unit and see what it can do.

To keep temps down, Asus still utilizes its Active Aerodynamic System but has improved on the fan design to help increase airflow into the system.

Where Can You Get It?

Well, unfortunately, pricing for this notebook has not yet been divulged to us by the company just yet but it should be available by October and will come bundled with an Asus ROG Impact Mouse.

Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX531 Specs

  • 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8750H processor
  • 16GB of RAM DDR4 2666MHz
  • NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5
  • 15.6-inch Full HD IPS Display, 144Hz Refresh Rate, 3ms Response Time
  • 512GB NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD
  • 1x HDMI, 2x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.1, 2x USB 3.1 Type C
  • 4-cell 55Whr Battery

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