Asus ROG Strix Hero II - Review 2022

Asus won united states over with its ROG Strix Hero Edition earlier this year, so color the states surprised that the computer maker released a sudden follow-upward to its MOBA-axial gaming laptop called, simply, the ROG Strix Hero Ii ($1,699.99, every bit tested). This new model packs a sparse-bezel 144Hz screen and a total-power Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics processor, equally opposed to 1 of the tempered Max-Q modules popping upwardly in some laptops of this stripe. Topping off the changes: Intel'due south 8th-generation "Coffee Lake" microarchitecture, here in the grade of a half dozen-core Core i7-8750H CPU. This all makes for a powerful machine, but one that costs a bunch, doesn't impress on battery life, and volition be MOBA-overkill for many buyers.

This Commonwealth Stands for Style

The ROG Strix Hero Ii is a handsome machine with a premium experience to the chassis. If you enjoy the at-times-ostentatious Asus Democracy of Gamers aesthetic, but adopt a dialed-downwardly version, the look volition appeal to you.

Black and gray dominate the body. So many budget and midrange gaming laptops that take passed through PC Labs of belatedly take been brindled with red accents that it'south refreshing to see a machine that doesn't scream "gamer geek" in the local coffee shop or a conference room. Autonomously from the glossy-inlay ROG logos on the hat and on the bezel under the display, the ROG Strix Hero II bears a tamer pattern than about clamshell gaming offerings. Considering that adults with careers are the likely majority of buyers able to shell out $i,700 for a gaming laptop like this, the mature design is appreciated.

Excepting the trim screen bezels and the underside of the machine, the ROG Strix Hero 2 features a metal chassis, which is atypical for a gaming laptop in this price range. It'southward thin, too, measuring ane.03 inches thick, with a xiv.two-by-10.3-inch footprint. That's not quite equally thin as some of the Nvidia Max-Q laptops we've seen (such equally the 0.68-inch-thick Razer Blade in its latest incarnation), just information technology too doesn't mean slightly suppressed performance, a side result of virtually Max-Q laptops, as testing will show.

The biggest design difference-maker in this auto is the thin screen bezel. It rims the display on 3 sides and measures just 0.42 inch thick. That meant, consequently, that Asus could make the chassis footprint smaller, only the ROG Strix Hero Ii doesn't extend that to a lighter carry weight. The automobile weighs 5.29 pounds, which is a lot more than than, say, the 3.9-pound MSI GS65 Stealth Sparse or the 4.63-pound Razer Blade, both of the aforementioned 15.6-inch screen size. That said, while those two laptops focus on portability, the ROG Strix Hero II prioritizes on-the-go performance that starts with the keyboard and touchpad.

The first matter you will notice about the keyboard is that the QWER keys are gear up autonomously by transparent keycaps. Whereas a mainstream gaming machine's keyboard might highlight the WASD keys for movement, Asus went with QWER considering of those keys' usual associations with the MOBA genre. In League of Legends, for instance, your four abilities are mapped to these keys by default. (More about the keyboard in a moment.)

The touchpad, meanwhile, tracks with decent accuracy, but what stands out is the implementation of discrete left and right click buttons. Most users volition find this solution amend than ii-fingered tap-to-click. With the ROG Strix Hero II, the concrete mouse buttons eliminate the need for this gesture.

A Console, and More than, Prepared for Battle

The ROG Strix Hero Ii's screen measures 15.6 inches diagonally. It has an anti-glare coating that makes it viewable under diverse conditions. The core console tech is in-aeroplane switching (IPS), which allows for viewing at broad angles off to the sides. The 144Hz refresh rate is an uptick from the 120Hz-refresh-rate console of the original ROG Strix Hero Edition, and it puts the screen on a level with the likes of the Razer Blade and the MSI GS65 Stealth Thin. (The Razer Blade has the option for a 144Hz panel, while the MSI GS65'due south display is 144Hz in all of its variants.) The screens in most gaming laptops, such every bit the Acer Predator Helios 300 and the Dell Inspiron 15 Gaming 7000, support a refresh rate of 60Hz; this is also the refresh rate of an ordinary laptop screen or usual stand-alone LCD monitor.

Because MOBA games tend to run at a fast step and offer less graphical challenges than other game genres, the high refresh rate can come in handy. In essence, if you're running a non-too-demanding PC game (MOBA or otherwise) at 1080p with a powerful graphics card, you're likely to churn frame rates well in backlog of sixty frames per second (fps). When yous practise, a 60Hz brandish panel is only able to show up to 60 screen refreshes per second; in a certain, simplified sense, the excess frames are "wasted." (In a more applied sense, very loftier frame rates might ensure that your minimum frame rate doesn't autumn below 60fps.) A 144Hz screen, in contrast, lets you show the full fruit of your GPU's efforts with games that your laptop can run at such loftier frame rates.

A brandish suited to games of that sort needs a keyboard to match, evidenced here by the QWER highlighting that I mentioned before. According to Asus, the keyboard features a 0.25mm-deep curve on all the keycaps, though in existent-world employ, the tops felt flat to my fingertips. The key switches are rated for 20 million key presses, and the layout features iv zones of customizable RGB lighting that you can tweak in an Asus utility chosen ROG Aura Core.

Asus claims that the keyboard supports N-cardinal rollover, as well, significant all keypresses should register no matter how many are pressed at once. I tested for this in OTD'southward Aqua Key Exam; it did the job in a 10-key mashdown, as evidenced by the screenshot below…

Forward of the role keys on the keyboard, the speakers on the ROG Strix Hero II sound crisp and articulate. At their maximum level, though, they don't crank up quite as loud as the speakers on another gaming laptops I've put my ears on of late, such every bit the Asus TUF Gaming FX504 and the Acer Predator Helios 300.

The port mix on this machine is on par for its size and toll, which is to say it is armed with a large armory of connections. On its left side, the Hero II has an Ethernet jack, a mini DisplayPort output, an HDMI-out, two USB three.one Gen i Blazon-A ports, one USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port, and a headphone/mic combo jack, every bit well every bit the power-adapter connector...

On its right side is a unmarried USB 3.one Gen 2 Blazon-A port, an SD carte slot, and a Kensington-style security-cablevision notch.

As for the onboard storage, the ROG Strix Hero 2 carries a ii-drive arrangment in the model I am testing: a flash-memory-based boot drive, and a mass-storage hard drive. A 1TB FireCuda solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD) is the latter, paired with a 256GB solid land drive (SSD) using the PCI Express bus and hosting Windows 10. Considering this smaller-capacity bulldoze is your kick drive, you can utilize it to store your become-to MOBAs, while the slower hybrid drive does the heavy lifting for the residual of your PC game library.

Other connectivity facets of the ROG Strix Hero II include an HD webcam placed on the lower right-hand side beneath its screen. For video conferencing, this angle is not ideal, given that the camera is positioned under your chin rather than existence closer to eye level, a mutual compromise in thin-bezel notebooks. (It affects the Editors' Choice Dell XPS xiii, too.) Wireless connectivity comprises Bluetooth v.0 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi.

The Asus ROG Strix Hero II comes with a ane-year international standard warranty, which is standard fare for its class.

Powerful Only Brusque-Lived

Although it'south marketed equally a gaming laptop for the MOBA set, the ROG Strix Hero Ii packs internal components that suggest this laptop should ace running titles from other, more demanding game genres, too. For starters, across the GeForce GTX 1060 GPU, it has a 2.2GHz six-core Intel Core i7-8750H processor and 16GB of RAM, and the PCI Express-bus boot SSD drive should evidence to be a screamer.

Look first at the productivity test scores. PCMark 8 is a test that rewards fast storage (it simulates day-to-day programme launches and operations, for which a fast kicking drive helps a bunch), and this laptop netted a healthy 4,414 points in its Work Conventional subtest.

Beyond that, because it packs the same processor, the ROG Strix Hero II comes closest to the Acer Predator Helios 300 and the MSI GS65 Stealth Thin in our CPU benchmarks. It surpasses the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming and the Razer Blade, since Dell and Razer's laptops tote older, seventh-generation Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors, respectively. And while information technology doesn't come up out on pinnacle in every multimedia examination, the ROG Strix Hero II proves itself a hardy worker when y'all're non gaming.

Come across How Nosotros Exam Laptops

In our graphics criterion testing, the Hero 2's operation paralleled the Acer Predator Helios 300's, predictable given that both laptops utilize the same full-fat GeForce GTX 1060 graphics chip and six-cadre processor. The Hero II emerged victorious in the low-finish Cloud Gate subtest of 3DMark (this test is typically CPU-limited, and so the six-core bit stood it in expert stead), and information technology came up just brusk of topping all of its GTX 1060-based rivals here in the Heaven test at Ultra quality. In Valley at Ultra quality, the Hero II shell out the GTX 1060 lot merely lost to the Max-Q-equipped/GTX 1070 MSI GS65 Stealth Thin by 11fps.

Also, the Hero II came in second, just behind the Acer Predator Helios 300, in 3DMark's Fire Strike Farthermost subtest, a GPU-intensive benchmark that stresses dedicated graphics chips like the GTX 1060. (The MSI automobile did not contend on this exam, possibly for thermal reasons.)

Real-World Gaming, and Draining the Battery

I likewise gave the Hero II a workout with a couple of popular game titles, and information technology performed right-on for an unconstrained GeForce GTX 1060. In the popular game title Far Cry 5, at Normal settings and 1080p, the ROG Strix Hero 2 managed an average frame rate of 70fps; at the more stressful Ultra preset and 1080p, it dialed in 62fps.

Next up, I tried the slightly older game Rise of the Tomb Raider, and the Hero II fared similarly. At 1080p, it delivered average frame rates of 76fps and 58fps at the Medium and Very High graphics presets, respectively. To take reward of the 144Hz display and its loftier-refresh characteristic in harsh games like these, you'll need to knock downwards the graphics settings a few pegs.

Off the charger, the Asus ROG Strix Hero 2 lasted 4 hours and 4 minutes (4:04) before it ran out of juice. That's about average for a big, beefy gaming laptop, a machine that's meant to be plugged in during intensive employ. However, seeing as our bombardment examination is a passive looping of the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings, most any full-size modern laptop ought to last more than four hours.

Competitors like the MSI GS65 Stealth Thin lasted 7:fourteen in our battery rundown, and the Dell Inspiron fifteen 7000 Gaming lasted a whopping 11:01. It's evident that the Asus ROG Strix Hero II is geared toward power users, not ability savers.

More than Just a MOBA Machine

Despite the MOBA-friendly gestures—the transparent QWER keys, the 144Hz screen—you might deem the Asus ROG Strix Hero Ii overkill for a laptop designed for games like those. And depending on how serious yous are near your MOBAs, you might well be correct.

This laptop is quite powerful, with its half dozen-core processor, 16GB of RAM, and GTX 1060, a component mix more for mainstream gaming and moderate media-crunching, than for simply playing League of Legends or Dota two. That said, if those games are your tipple, yous'll be able to power through them smoothly given the GPU, and see the fruits of all that ability on the complementary high-refresh screen. On GTX 1060-based machines with a 60Hz screen, those frames would laissez passer into oblivion.

Just it all depends on whether you are a competitive or a coincidental player. For bones, non-competitive MOBA play, a $1,699.99 request price is tough to justify, unless you can use the souped-up specs for other games, or for work/prosumer tasks. And that's the central takeaway here: For demanding media-creation tasks, such as total HD or 4K video editing, or playing full-fledged AAA games like Far Cry 5, the Asus ROG Strix Hero 2 is going to serve yous well. The MOBA-specific flavor and pumped-upward screen are fine extras that are mainly relevant only if you mean to go esports pro. Otherwise, for the same price or close to it, you tin can get a machine like the latest Razer Blade (our latest Editors' Choice in this class) or MSI's GS65 Stealth Thin, with longer battery life and a thinner, lighter chassis.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/laptops/28669/asus-rog-strix-hero-ii

Posted by: harrwalwascalith.blogspot.com

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