The ASUS ROG Strix G15 (G513QY) Review: Embracing AMD's Advantage
by Brett Howse on May 31, 2021 11:00 PM ESTBattery Life
Although generally less of a hinderance for gaming systems, which are most often used on a desk and connected to power, AMD has stated that the Radeon RX 6800M is able to go into a “Near 0 Watt Idle” state, meaning despite having a massive 150-Watt TDP GPU inside, battery life should not be compromised as severely as it is on other gaming systems.
ASUS outfits the G513QY with a 90 Wh battery, which is near the limit of what is allowed in a laptop, so that, coupled with the 7 nm CPU, and a power-gated GPU, should provide good results.
Web Battery Life
As much as the performance has been amazing on the AMD CPU and GPU combination, perhaps the battery life result is even more impressive. Typically, gaming systems are not very efficient, as even the systems that do allow the GPU to be disabled during light tasks still have a high base power draw, but AMD has really done amazing work to power gate the GPU when it is not needed. When coupled with the very large battery, the ASUS Strix G513QY dominates the battery life charts compared to other gaming-focused systems.
Looking at the platform efficiency with the battery size removed, the ASUS G513QY proves that the amazing battery life is not just down to the 90 Wh battery either. AMD has really done a fantastic job with system power with the Ryzen 9 5900HX and Radeon RX 6800M combination.
PCMark 10 Modern Office Battery
One of the newer tests to our laptop suite is the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test, which leverages the same workloads in the PCMark 10 benchmarking suite, and then runs them in 10-minute loops. If the system gets the work done quicker, it is able to idle for a larger portion of the 10-minute window, so that more performant systems are not disadvantaged. Once again, the battery life is really astounding for a system of this type.
Movie Playback
On thin and light laptops, movie playback is generally the most efficient task, since the media decode is offloaded to the media block. On the ASUS, the battery life was actually slightly less than the other tests, but still well ahead of most other gaming systems.
The Tesseract score divides the movie playback runtime by the length of The Avengers movie, and the ASUS G513QY can almost get through four complete viewings before needing to be recharged.
Charge Time
Thanks to a 280-Watt AC adapter, there is plenty of power available to charge the battery quickly, even if the device is in use. Interestingly, the ASUS G513QY also includes a USB-C port on the rear which supports up to 100 Watts of power delivery, and that can go both directions. You can charge something from the port if needed, but the power delivery also allows the laptop to be recharged from external battery packs if needed, or from a USB Type-C charging cord. It will not be able to delivery the full power for when the system is under load, but still makes for a nice backup power source if needed.
The charge rate is very quick on this system. Despite the large 90 Wh battery size, the system recharged the quickest of the sampled systems. ASUS claims 0-50% in less than 30 minutes and we measured 31 minutes to 50%.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
146 Comments
View All Comments
Tams80 - Saturday, June 5, 2021 - link
I hope ASUS update their X13 Flow to have this as an option. I doubt it tough.As for a built-in webcam being a must these days... why? People are hardly moving about a lot and external webcams offer better quality (and peace of mind privacy wise as you can just unplug them).
That's not to say that having a built-in webcam isn't preferred or handy. It is, but it really shouldn't be the issue so many make it out to be.
Gomez Addams - Wednesday, June 9, 2021 - link
"If you build it they will come" is accurate for my situation. I searched and searched and could not find what I wanted so I had to settle for something else. What I wanted was a laptop that has a 5900HX, a 3080 with 16GB, and a 17-inch display. I found several candidates with two or three out of the four but none with all four. I ended up going with one that has an Intel 8-core CPU and the other three attributes. I work with CUDA so an Nvidia GPU is mandatory and lots of video memory is also needed. I definitely would have preferred the AMD CPU but I can't complain too much because it's a really nice machine. The GPU has more cores than any other in the building which is rather amusing since it's a laptop.ballsystemlord - Tuesday, June 15, 2021 - link
Spelling and grammar errors (I didn't check the conclusion):"They key caps provide a slight bit of traction as well,...
"The" not "They":
"The key caps provide a slight bit of traction as well,..."
"Keyboard lighting, at least on this model is four zone RGB, which is always a bit odd."
Missing comma:
"Keyboard lighting, at least on this model, is four zone RGB, which is always a bit odd."
"The surface is very smooth, although like the laptop finish, it is very susceptible to fingerprints as well, so quickly looks grimy."
Run on sentance:
"The surface is very smooth, although like the laptop finish, it is very susceptible to fingerprints as well. So it quickly looks grimy."
R3Z3N - Wednesday, June 16, 2021 - link
The stickers gotta go, especially when aligned by 3rd world mentality of do it but not well.damianrobertjones - Saturday, July 31, 2021 - link
Is this the model that has rubbish ram that reduces performance across most tests? If so, did Anantech say anything about it?ckrishnachaitanya - Friday, December 10, 2021 - link
Really disappointed with ASUS . I went ahead buying this laptop reading the above sort of Articles ROG Strix G513QC_G513QC laptop which is brand new and just a month old is giving a battery life of 2 to 2.5 hours with 6 to 7 chrome windows opened and no software's installed . Thats is really really pathetic from what is given in the article .