Asus ROG Zephyrus GA502 review: This laptop is for people who work in the day and are gamers by night

Build quality on the GA502 isn’t compromised. The device lives up to its thin and light promise, weighing about 2.1 kg and is just about 20mm thin. Several laptops in this price range are about 15 to 25 percent thicker.

The GA502 features a pretty standard laptop design; the keyboard isn’t shifted to the bottom with the touchpad on the side. The Zephyrus GA502 manages to find an elegance in simplicity with its “easy on the eye” design. The logo on the crushed aluminium lid lights up in a very subtle red colour, while the rest of the device is made from plastic.

The Zephyrus GA502 delivers on the I/O front with a good collection of ports and connectivity options. Three USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports, one on the left and two on the right, are well-positioned to provide support for gaming accessories. Additionally, the device also gets a USB Type-C port, headphone jack, HDMI output, Kensington lock, and the all-important Ethernet port.

Although the GA502 is equipped with a backlit keyboard; it doesn’t feature RGB lighting, which has become a norm in gaming laptops. RGB lighting apart, the keys only offer a travel distance of 1.1mm and 79gms of actuation, which does the job while typing but is a bit of a disappointment when gaming. The soft-touch wrist rest is comfortable both for gaming and typing.

Overall the keyboard is just about adequate and could be better. We had no complaints about the touchpad. The Windows 10 precision drivers ensure the touchpad is nice and accurate. There isn’t much to complaint about when it comes to keyboard and trackpad, they are good but not the best in this price point.

Build quality appears to be quite sturdy, there’s almost no chassis flex on this machine, and it doesn’t feel cheap in any way. The lack of any RGB lighting is a let-down. In terms of design, the Zephyrus G may not scream gaming but subtly hints towards it, while keeping things professional.

Display

The GA502 gets a 15.6-inch FHD IPS panel with a 120Hz refresh rate. The display has pretty thin bezels with a thick chin, which offers an excellent screen to body ratio for a gaming laptop but doesn’t extend the room for a webcam. The display on the GA502 is perfect for gaming, but that’s about it. When it comes to watching videos or doing anything other than gaming, there’s a lot to be desired.

Overall picture quality falls behind with the screen only covering 71-percent of the colour gamut. Given most gaming laptops clear the 100-percent range. The display also measured an average of 240 nits of brightness, well below the 270 average. Maybe we're too harsh on the screen, but that’s only because Asus has spoilt us with some of the best panels on gaming laptops.

If you have a 120Hz display, you are going to want a laptop that can deliver that kind of performance in games without having to make too many compromises on graphics. And, we’re pleased to say that the Zephyrus GA502 is almost that laptop.

The Zephyrus GA502 gets a 4-core AMD Ryzen 7 3750H CPU and an Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q graphics card with 6GB of DDR6 VRAM. In terms of memory, Asus has gone with 16GB of DDR4 2400MHz RAM and a 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD. Put together, that’s pretty impressive but let’s take a deep dive into real-world performance.

When you’re playing E-sports titles, the GA502 is easily going to get you to that 120fps sweet spot if you don’t crank the settings to the max. Overwatch on Ultra gave us 95 fps on average, while Apex Legends offered between 70 to 80 fps on average on high settings. PUBG on ultra-settings gave us little over 60 fps with the occasional drop to the mid-50s.

AAA titles like Battlefield V delivered 50 to 60 fps on average on high settings. GTA 5 on very-high settings delivered little under 60 fps, while Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Middle-earth: Shadow of War gave us 35 and 60 frames per second, respectively on ultra-settings.

We learnt that the best thing to do when gaming on the GA502 is to drop the settings on E-sports titles to make full use of the 120Hz display. It makes more sense for multiplayer gaming. However, when it comes to AAA titles on single-player, using ultra-settings and getting above 30 to 40 fps is more than sufficient.

We also ran a few productivity benchmarks. The GA502 recorded a single-threaded score of 155 and a multi-thread score of 778 on Cinebench’s R15 tests. The Cinebench R20 test saw the AMD CPU doing 1791 multi-threaded and 387 single-threaded points. The Geekbench 4.3 tests yielded a score of 14,080 points. On the GPU front, the GA502 scored 11,1533 on the 3D Mark Fire Strike benchmark.

While the AMD CPU may not be as good as a 9^th Gen Intel processor, it gets the job done well. When it comes to gaming, there’s little benefit going beyond four cores, so AMD’s approach gives you way more bang for your buck. Cooling on the Zephyrus GA502 is also optimised to ensure little to no thermal throttling.

Cooling

This Zephyrus G series laptop stays surprisingly cool under typical productivity workloads. Unsurprisingly, results differed when gaming. Playing games like Battlefield V requires Turbo mode, which makes the fans go berserk to compensate for the heat.

But Asus has updated the Zephyrus G with a self-cleaning thermal module, n-blade fans, and heat pipes to allow gamers to fully utilise that processor and graphics card with throttling down to a bare minimum. Recorded frame rate drops were significant enough to make a noticeable difference in-game.

Moreover, the air vents on the back and right ensure most of that heat steers clear of your hands, which means no matter how hot that CPU or GPU get, none of that heat affects your comfort level while gaming.

Battery

The Zephyrus GA502 gets a 76 Whr battery, but with all gaming laptops, a bigger battery doesn’t really give you more battery life because of those power-consuming components. However, the GA502 attempts to break from traditions, offering average battery life for a laptop. For a gaming laptop, it delivers the best battery life we’ve seen.

We reviewed the Intel version of this machine and got around five hours of battery life. The GA502 aced our battery test, delivering over six hours of usage on a single full charge. Our analysis included multitasking between Chrome and MS Office while lowering screen brightness to 20-percent.

Despite the screen’s generally low brightness level, turning it down doesn’t really affect work if you’re in a well-lit room. You can even game for over two hours on a single charge; that is if you can live with a noticeable drop in performance. When it comes to battery life, the Zephyrus GA502 delivers the best battery life we’ve seen on a gaming laptop.

Audio

In terms of sound, the Zephyrus GA502 gets the job done with two bottom-firing speakers. The bass seems a little underwhelming, and there’s little you can do in software or pre-set audio profile to change that. But you have to keep in mind that this is a thin, portable gaming laptop, and getting heavy bass in this profile can be extremely difficult.

Overall audio quality is pretty crisp on the Zephyrus GA502. The sound can easily fill a small conference room. More importantly, the blaring fans don’t overpower in-game audio. You can still hear the dialogues, even if the fans are operating in Turbo mode, and the fans on this laptop are loud.

Price

You remember when we said that the Zephyrus GA502 is “almost” the laptop that could offer a no-compromise approach to gaming. That’s primarily down to its price. The Zephyrus GA502 starts at Rs 99,000 and offers arguably the best price-to-performance of any gaming laptop. Most gaming laptops with similar specs are priced anywhere between Rs 15,000 to Rs 30,000 more than the GA502, and that list includes its Intel counterpart.

Price-to-performance aside, the GA502 also gets you the best battery life of any gaming laptop. It delivers some powerful hardware in a pretty slim chassis. In terms of price, we think Asus has got it spot-on with the Zephyrus GA502; you get exactly what you pay for.

Verdict

If you’re looking for best-in-class performance, then the Asus ROG Zephyrus GA502 is definitely not the laptop for you. But if you’re looking for best-in-class performance for the price, then GA502 makes a compelling case. One of the reasons why we find so many shortcomings in the GA502 is because we’re comparing it to laptops that cost nearly Rs 20K to Rs 30K more.

If you compare the Zephyrus GA502 to laptops in this price range, you’ve got an absolute winner. Moreover, the battery life on this machine makes it a strong choice for professionals who may not always be tied to a desk. The screen on the Zephyrus GA502 also isn’t as good as the 144Hz display on its Intel counterpart, but at this price, it is more than worth it.

The one thing we just couldn’t wrap our heads around was the lack of a webcam. If you build a laptop for professionals by day and gamers by night, you want to put a webcam on it for the “professional by day” part. What professional has a laptop without a webcam? The lack of a webcam is just silly, but it will still fail to convince you against buying this laptop.

The plastic on the chassis does show, but minimum keyboard flex and a nice metal lid, give it a premium feel. No RGB lighting makes the GA502 look and feels like a professional machine you can take into meetings, but it also takes away the gaming feel, which is more remarkable considering this is a gaming laptop.

When it comes to gaming laptops, the Asus ROG Zephyrus GA502 gets a lot of things right and a few things wrong. But at the end of the day, it still offers the best value proposition of any gaming laptop on the market and has to be worth considering. If you’re an E-sports gamer on a budget, then the GA502 is undoubtedly the laptop for you.

Full Specs