Asus ROG GL553VD [GL553VD-FY1114T]

Design

From the point of view of design, the laptop is something between a gaming and an office laptop, rather “not a boring gaming laptop”. The body is made of plastic, except for the cover, which is made of black brushed aluminium. The build quality is top notch: the lid does not bend, no backlashes were found.

The keyboard has a slightly longer travel than usual, but this is only beneficial — pressing is felt better. I would also like to note the presence of backlighting, and the WASD keys are highlighted with a backlit edging.

Screen

The screen is a high-quality IPS matrix with viewing angles of 178 degrees. It is made on the basis of PenTile with Full HD resolution (1920x1080 pixels), and the brightness is 280 cd/m2. PenTile is a technology for staggering sub-pixels (red, blue and green) to make colours more uniform and reduce power consumption.

The contrast ratio is a record 1000:1, which allows high-quality display of high-contrast images. The sRGB colour gamut was 88.5%, while the AdobeRGB colour gamut was 64.8%. In general, it gives a rich and bright picture, the factory calibration is performed at the highest level, and due to the high brightness and contrast ratios, it is one of the best on the market.

Iron

It is equipped with an Intel Core i5 7300HQ processor (Kaby Lake generation) with a clock frequency of 2.5 GHz, and a discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 with 4 GB of GDDR5 video memory is used as a video accelerator. Proper combination of processor and graphics card gives this laptop excellent overall performance and at the same time balanced heat dissipation, which is undoubtedly a "plus". For example, in The Witcher 3, it produces a stable 38 fps at high graphics settings and with Full HD resolution (1920x1080 px).

Drives, traditionally, are a 1000 GB HDD and a 128 GB SSD. The amount of RAM is 12 GB and can be expanded up to 32 GB.

Standalone laptop is able to work up to 4 hours with an average load.