Last year's Asus ROG Zephyrus was the first gaming laptop we've tested built to conform to Nvidia's Max-Q Design philosophy.
In a nutshell, Max-Q enables powerful graphics processors to fit inside thinner-than-ever laptops by limiting the chips' power ceiling and heat output.
Asus has pushed the concept further with the ROG Zephyrus S ($1,999 as tested), an even slimmer version of that pioneering machine.
It's impressively thin for a high performer, though its battery life remains subpar.
Having to plug in so often counters the laptop's portability, though it's easy enough to carry when needed.
Its 144Hz display looks superb, even if you won't often hit frame rates that high with its core components.
It's a flashy machine with enough power for HD gaming, but the Editors' Choice Razer Blade does it all a bit better on the design and battery fronts.
See Me? I'm the Slimmest in My Class
Many of the design cues from the first Zephyrus iteration carry over here.
The most obvious: The keyboard is pushed all the way down to the near edge, and the skinny touchpad is located to its right on the keyboard deck.
This allows room for the extra ventilation between the keyboard and display hinge necessary to keep powerful components cool in this slim chassis.
The rest of the exterior design also went through some changes.
Its general aesthetic remains the same, including the split-tone lid and copper trim.
The lid logo is now a red-backlit mesh instead of silver, though, and the ventilation area forward of the keyboard has an entirely different texture than before.
Where before this panel was perforated to allow cool air through the top, the Zephyrus S has a slatted linear design.
It still allows air to flow through, but it looks different and, to my eyes, better.
This Zephyrus model definitely earns that "S" for slim: at just 0.62 inch thick, it's even thinner than the previous version (0.66 inch).
It's sleek for any laptop, but especially so for a decidedly gaming-minded model.
These machines are traditionally quite large, easily over an inch thick, but finally you can find multiple thin, high-quality gaming laptops on the market.
The Zephyrus S is the trimmest even among that crowd, which includes the Blade 15 ($1,999.11 at Amazon) (0.68 inch), the MSI GS65 Stealth Thin (0.69 inch), and the Origin PC EVO15-S (also 0.69 inch).
It's as light as the Blade at 4.63 pounds, though the GS65 is, impressively, even lighter at 3.9 pounds.
It's not purely through refinement that Asus got the laptop thinner, however.
The Zephyrus S tops out at a Max-Q GeForce GTX 1070 graphics processor, while the original boasted the option for a Max-Q GeForce GTX 1080.
Since the less-powerful card requires less cooling, Asus engineers had that much more leeway to trim down the chassis.
The drop from a Max-Q GeForce GTX 1080 is combined with a redesigned cooling hardware scheme—the fans have more blades (now 83 blades, up from 71 on the previous model) and run at a higher spin rate than before.
The CPU and GPU share two pipes and heatsinks, and each has an independent pipe linked to a dedicated heatsink.
(That's the internal apparatus below.)
As with the original Zephyrus, a bottom ventilation flap opens as you pull the screen clamshell open, propping up the laptop by about an inch.
This is another engineering element Asus developed to cool the components in such a thin body, but the first time around, the apparatus was a little flimsy for a premium machine.
The flap on the new model is a bit sturdier: In addition to using a magnesium alloy instead of plastic, it only starts halfway up the bottom of the chassis, instead of running all the way from back to front.
As such, it's not as long and saggy, and you won't put pressure on the flap if you hold the laptop on the bottom.
On the original Zephyrus, the bottom panel's flex when the laptop was open was downright worrisome, delicate for something so costly.
The new bottom isn't rock-solid, but it does inspire more confidence.
Customizable LED mood glow also pours out of each opening, for some extra flair.
High-End Price, High-End Features
More noticeable than that slight drop in thickness from the original version are the thin screen bezels, which look great.
Thinner bezels always help make a machine look sleeker and more modern.
For all the thinness of the original Zephyrus, its thick bezels stood out.
The new model's bezels allow the same 15.6-inch screen to fit into a smaller overall footprint, with the laptop coming in 0.8 inch narrower than the first-generation model (if an almost negligible 0.2 inch deeper).
The display itself looks superb, and is where a chunk of the high price comes from.
Like the original version, the display resolution is full HD (that is, a native resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels).
However, unlike that version, the new screen has a 144Hz refresh rate and a 3ms response time.
The original had "only" a 120Hz rate, though it did include support for Nvidia G-Sync, which this model does not.
The increase in refresh rate and response time should appeal to performance-minded enthusiasts, though you may value the smoothness of G-Sync more.
A Max-Q GTX 1070 likely won't push frame rates that exceed that refresh rate in most AAA games (lightweight esports titles are another matter), but getting as close as possible still makes use of the premium screen here, versus the "wasted frames" you wouldn't see on a standard 60Hz laptop panel.
The picture quality of the IPS panel is top-notch, and it improved my enjoyment of anything I played.
Between the sharp picture (it could've fooled me into thinking it was a higher resolution), the panel's matte finish, its vibrant colors, and the high refresh-rate ceiling, it's one of the best displays I've played on in a while.
I'm not saying you should buy the laptop just for the screen, exactly.
But you'll be happy to have it, as games and video really pop.
As on the past version, the nonstandard keyboard and touchpad locations take a bit of getting used to.
I kept reaching toward the center for the touchpad before remembering where it was, and the keyboard is a bit awkward to type on at the edge of the laptop, but it's a change you can adapt to with enough time.
The keyboard is still a little awkward when the laptop is against the edge of a table, as there's nowhere to rest your wrists.
But if you set it back slightly, it works as a more desktop-like experience.
The keys themselves are so-so in feel, a little on the mushy side without much feedback, but they do the job.
You can't expect much vertical travel given the dimensions of this machine, but a little more snap would have been ideal.
I think Asus is betting that the touchpad won't get a ton of use on a gaming laptop, and heavy typing jags won't be in the cards for this kind of laptop, either.
It does maintain a neat trick from the first model, though: a virtual number pad.
By pressing a dedicated button, you can turn the touchpad into a touch-sensitive number pad.
(This was a feature pioneered, ironically, by a scandalously large MSI mega-laptop some years ago, the MSI GT80 Titan SLI.) The touchpad itself lights up with a red numbered grid to emulate a numpad.
It remains a clever trick for fitting one onto a smaller body where there isn't physical space for more keys.
Configurations and Extras
The Zephyrus S comes in two models in the US, keeping things relatively simple.
Both include the same processor (a robust Intel Core i7-8750H "Coffee Lake" six-core chip), 16GB of memory, the same display, and the same ports.
(More on those below.)
The first model, the GX531GM, includes a full-power (not Max-Q) GeForce GTX 1060 and a 1TB PCI Express SSD for $2,099; this is the model available across retail and etail channels in the States.
The second ("GX531GS") model, our review unit, is an Amazon exclusive that includes the Max-Q version of the GeForce GTX 1070 and a 512GB PCI Express SSD for $1,999.
(As of the writing of this review, it's on sale on Amazon for $1,699, an even better deal.)
Above the touchpad is a dedicated ROG button, which pulls up all the Asus software you'll need.
That was true on the original model, as well, but it pulls up wholly different software on the Zephyrus S.
Asus has combined its Aura Sync lighting and ROG Gaming Center component-monitoring and control software into a new program, named Armoury Crate.
(Yes, mind the "U.") It's shared across new ROG laptops, desktops, and components, so while this isn't technically specific to the Zephyrus S, it may be your first opportunity to see it in action if you don't have a newer system.
The UI is pretty clean and intuitive, and I was able to figure out how to work the different sections after a few minutes of tinkering.
If nothing else, it's inherently nice to have lighting controls, shortcut functionality, and system monitoring all in one program, rather than having to poke through and keep an eye on several apps.
As for ports, Asus keeps it pretty straightforward and doesn't let the emphasis on thinness kick anything essential to the curb.
The Zephyrus S includes an HDMI connection, a headset jack, two USB 2.0 ports, a Type-A USB 3.1 Gen 2 port, and two USB Type-C ports (one Gen 1, one Gen 2).
You could say an Ethernet jack is a casualty of the slim design, but you're not guaranteed one on a thin laptop.
A USB-to-Ethernet dongle might be a good buy alongside this machine in the same e-order.
Testing the S: Trim Power on Display
For the performance benchmarks, I compared the Zephyrus S to a handful of machines that are either similarly priced or similarly outfitted in terms of components.
I should note here that at PC Labs, we recently began testing with a new suite of benchmarks and so, for the time being, have a limited set of data to compare the new results against.
To help alleviate that problem, we back-tested a handful of recent gaming laptops to get as many relevant points of comparison as we could.
We don't have the data from several of the aforementioned thin flagship gaming laptops, but the sample set below still provides a clear idea of performance and where the Zephyrus S falls in the market...
As comparisons, I've used the similarly priced and equipped Acer Predator Helios 500, the much more powerful and expensive Alienware 17 R5, the midrange Asus ROG Strix Hero II, and the new entry-level version of Razer's Blade 15, the Blade 15 Base Model.
You can see their specs in the chart above.
Productivity and Storage Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark).
The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows.
We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, Web browsing, and videoconferencing.
The test generates a proprietary numeric score.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a specialized Storage test that we use to assess the speed of the PC's storage subsystem.
This score is also a proprietary numeric score.
The Zephyrus S did quite well on these tests overall, showing its processing chops despite being the thinnest option here.
The beefy Alienware 17 R5 and the chunkier Helios 500 had the edge on PCMark 10, with the Zephyrus S in the middle of the pack.
It's not the fastest here, but with a high baseline among these systems, it's still quite snappy.
The SSD is clearly very zippy, within the margin of error of two other contenders here on PCMark 8 Storage while easily beating two more.
Since it's the only drive on board, you're in for some quick boot and load times.
Media Processing and Creation Tests
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads.
Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image.
The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark.
Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image.
We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time.
The Photoshop test stresses CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
The Zephyrus' quick performance in general use is all well and good, but as you can see, you'll also get high speeds if you want to use your pricey machine for more specialized tasks.
Its leading score on Cinebench is impressive, and only the exorbitantly priced configuration of the Alienware 17 R5 beat it on Photoshop.
You're likely considering the Zephyrus S as a gaming laptop, but if you do need it for media side jobs, it's up to the task.
Synthetic Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting.
We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems.
Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.
The results are proprietary scores.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp.
Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes.
In this case, it's rendered in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.
We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets.
These scores are reported in frames per second (fps).
Given the graphics cards at play here, these systems fall exactly where they should on the above charts.
These tests lean on and reflect the graphics card itself, barring a manufacturer dragging down or enhancing a GPU's capability with cooling or supporting components.
That doesn't seem to be occurring with the Zephyrus S, and as such, only the non-Max-Q GTX 1070 in the Helios 500 and the much more powerful GTX 1080 in the Alienware 17 R5 performed better.
The good news you can glean from this is that the...
