The ASUS ROG Strix GL502VS Review: Mainstream GTX 1070 with G-SYNC

Battery Life

On an Ultrabook, this section is one of the most important, but for a large gaming laptop like the ASUS GL502VS, it is very clear that this is not one of the primary focuses by the engineers. The reason for this is that the laptop has just a 62 Wh battery inside, which is about what you would get in a Dell XPS 13, and less than the Microsoft Surface Book. Some gaming laptops go for the full 99 Wh battery size. For those that are unaware, airline regulations only allow batteries in individual items of less than 100 Wh capacity, so that is the upper limit for now. ASUS has chosen to save a few dollars here and go with a much smaller battery though.

Helping matters is the lower resolution display. 1920x1080 on a 15.6-inch notebook is not high DPI at all, which will help battery life, and Intel’s Skylake lineup of CPUs has gains here too. With NVIDIA now on FinFET as well, there is a chance that the battery life can be decent.

All of our battery testing is done with the device set to 200 nits, and on wireless with the device set the default power setting.

2013 Light Battery Test

The light test involves just the browser, and opening four web pages per minute. It has become fairly simple for any of the race to sleep processors, and as such it is being phased out, but in order to give a better sample against older machines, the data is still useful.

With just a 62 Wh battery, the ASUS GL502VS ends up very near the bottom, with only the desktop CPU based Clevos below it. It falls just short of three hours on this test.

2016 Battery Life

The 2016 test is a more complex web browsing test, with more realistic page viewing. It in theory should be more taxing on the CPU than the 2013 version.

Interestingly the 2016 test follows the same result as the Clevo, with a score that is slightly higher than the older version of this test. At the end of the day, without having Optimus, the GPU still continues to be a big part of the power draw, masking the results of a bit more CPU work.

Normalized Battery Life

By removing the battery capacity from the equation, you can take a look at the overall platform efficiency. As a true gaming notebook, the ASUS GL502VS lacks NVIDIA’s Optimus technology, meaning the GPU is always running. This impacts battery life quite a bit despite the move to FinFET for Pascal.

You can see that the ASUS would have much better battery life if it just had a bigger battery. Overall efficiency is not too bad, although interestingly it is not quite as good as the SLI GTX 980M GT80 Titan. The laptops that offer Optimus, which are the Lenovo Y700, Dell XPS 15, and Razer Blade, all show a big step up in efficiency with the graphics turned off, and the Lenovo especially but it has a poor display which helps a lot. The 2016 results are a bit sparse at the moment, but will fill in over time with more devices to be tested.

Tesseract Score

Since one of the most obvious ways someone would use a laptop, even one like this, away from the wall socket is to play a movie, it makes sense to test this as well. For this we use the Tesseract score, which is simply how many times could you watch The Avengers, which is 143 minutes long.

The ASUS will get through one running of The Avengers, but if you decide to watch it another time, or just another movie, you are going to need somewhere to plug in.

Charge Time

Although the ASUS is generally going to be sitting on a desk plugged into power, there will be times where the laptop needs to be used away from the desk for a bit. Charge time can be important, especially when the overall battery life is not great.

The charge time for the ASUS is right near the top, which makes a lot of sense considering it has a much smaller than average battery to refill, but still has a hefty 180-Watt AC Adapter powering it.