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Asus GL552JX Review: ROG Gaming Series Laptop!

Every gamer out there wants to get his hand over the best gaming system that is available in the market. And when I say gaming system, what usually comes to mind are the extreme gaming desktops or dedicated consoles like the Xbox or PS4 and the gaming laptops like Alienware or the ROG (Republic Of Gamers) series of devices from Asus.

Following is the review one of the cheapest laptops from the ROG series, the Asus GL552JX, And we are putting it to the test with the latest games and some video rendering tests.

Asus ROG GL552JX Review 

Build Quality

The Asus ROG series laptop’s are known for their superior build quality, design and flawless frame rates, and this particular laptop isn’t any different. The GL552JX is a 15-inch gaming laptop, sporting the latest brushed aluminum styling and red back-lit keyboard, with special attention to the WASD keys (quite obvious!). It is by no means small or thin, on the contrary, it’s quite big and bulky but surprisingly lighter compared to its size.

Display & Design

In my last review of Asus R510J entry level gaming laptop, I did complain about the display for average viewing angles. But the GL552JX’s matte finish display is kind of perfection we look for in evey laptop. The 15-inch full HD screen prodices sharp colors and delivers incredible viewing angle’s. You won’t see any false color’s or any drop in the brightness of display from whichever angle you see it. Color reproduction couldn’t get any better.

Note: We have also done a live video review of this laptop with lot of Questions answered, Watch it here on our Youtube channel here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2GLNOVzhrI

Design of the GL552JX is pretty similar to the other ROG series la pops, with the placement of ports being the same. On the left side of the laptop, you have 2 USB ports, LAN, HDMI & VGA ports. Also you have a big air vent and the charging port on the same side.

On the right side, you have a single USB port, headphone jack & a DVD drive. There is a webcam at the top of the screen with a microphone. The micoSD card slot is placed on the lower side below the LED indicators at the front. The LED indicators for Battery, Power, Caps lock & flight mode

Hardware Specs

ROG stands for Republic Of Gamers, which is enough to tell you that this laptop will be packed with some serious performance juice. It comes with a 4th generation Intel core i7-4750 HQ quad-core processor with clock speed of 2 GHz, which can be boosted up to 3.2 GHz(cool, right?), 8 GB DDR3L RAM, 1 TB hard disk @7200rpm and a 4 GB Nvidia GeForce 950M graphics card.

The lack of SSD is compensated with faster read write speeds of 1TB 7200RPM hard drive.

Webcam has many features like brightness control, burst mode and different types of grid view like golden ratio, crosshairs etc. It is capable of recording 720p resolution video @30fps.

These specs are more than enough to get you going on whichever game you want to play or whatever task you want to accomplish. We did our testing by playing heavy games for hours and later did some video rendering using Maya and some video encoding with Premier Pro.

Gaming Performance, Rendering

It’s not every day that you get a dedicated gaming laptop to play with. So we did not waste any opportunity to try out a mix of resource intensive to performance hungry games.

Many hours on our first day with the laptop were wasted in the installation of most new game we had which included Witcher 3, Call Of Duty Black Ops 3, Just Cause 3 & Counter strike: Global Offensive just to name a few. We then subjected ourselves to the pleasure of enjoying these games. What we noticed immediately was the loading time of these games. Games loaded in comparatively much lesser time and ran seamlessly at high settings without any glitches or any kind of lag. We did encounter some obvious drop in frame rates when a visual effect intensive scenes were displayed on the screen, but otherwise games ran at an average of 30 FPS at 1080P. If you are looking for much higher FPS, dropping the resolution to 720P makes this a twice as much faster gaming system.

The gaming experience was simply awesome as the display was brilliant and games ran on 1080p resolution. We could see every minute details on screen very clearly. The keyboard provides a great tactile feedback and responsive enough to enjoy hours and hours of gaming, and it gets even better with the big palm rest that this laptop provides.

We definitely used the USB mouse instead of its mouse pad because no matter how good the touch pad gets, you can’t play games using it. The touch pad is actually a click-pad, with no separate keys, but I am fan of such big click pads, so no complaint there. Nothing to take away from touchpad though, it is impressively smooth and responsive, multi-touch tasks like pinch to zoom works just fine.

From killing some gruesome monsters of The Witcher 3 (avg 30 FPS), devastating explosions in the Just Cause 3 to to eliminating a terrorists with a head shot in Call Of Duty (avg 27 FPS) or Counter Strike (avg 50 FPS), we did it all! It was a very good experience similar to what we get on our gaming desktop with 750Ti series mid-range graphics card. And we experienced no lag or performance glitches overall. So we can say Asus GL552JX laptop upheld it’s ROG series’s brand reputation.

Those who know how to make videos are familiar with the complex process of video encoding image rendering, something that puts an computer system to its test. Even though the Asus GL552JX isn’t designed to be used as a workstation, we were amazed by its performance and, therefore, decided to put it to through some tests. Compared to our dedicated rendering desktop, the Asus 552JX did quite well than we expected. Thanks the Core i7 processor, videos were encoded at quite good speed and there wasn’t any screen freezing during the process.

Apart from all the high-end specifications and flawless performance, there should be a special mention of the cooling unit on this laptop. Many won’t notice it and that is because it is so good (people only recognize it when it doesn’t work :p). Even after 2-3 hours of extensive gaming, it just doesn’t get heated as much as we expect it to. It does get slightly warmer but not so much to be of any concern. The hot air is thrown out effectively by a very strong fan, we know this because we, out of our habit, kept our smartphone at a small distance from the air vent and just under 10 minutes our smartphone got really hot which made us aware of the kind of cooling system this laptop has. Despite the hot air blows, I experienced no heating of keyboard mouse or any top surface of the laptop, which adds another positive point to gorgeous design & the great gaming performance.

It does pack a little bloatware, out of which we only found the audio tool adds a little value from Asus’s already good sound system, but you can simply ignore the rest. Watching movies on this laptop was a good experience, but we had to make some adjustments to see some darker scenes in some low quality videos.

Battery backup is pretty average as it lasted for a little more than 3 hours for normal work but while playing games on full brightness, it lasted for less than one and half hours. Cooling system keeps the laptop and battery cool, so you wouldn’t need to be concerned of overheating problems affecting the battery as such.

Verdict

The ROG series laptop’s from Asus always managed to leave us thrilled with its performance and so did the GL552J laptop. At no point did we feel that there was any lack of performance or any low-quality material was used in crafting this laptop. Everything small thing on this laptop, including the back cover design is well thought and delivers a premium experience. We can not praise enough the brilliant display and an amazing cooling system, as they are the best features of this gaming laptop.

At about Rs. 75,000 it is a quite high priced gaming laptop for Indian gamers, but the Asus GL552JX  is worth every penny. So if you have can squeeze in some extra cash than buying a crappy mid range gaming laptops, this thrill of extreme gaming can be all yours!