Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition review

The Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition is an all-AMD system with strong gaming and productivity performance and good audio. The build quality of the ROG G15 AMD Advantage doesn’t feel cheap, but the build quality could have been better, considering it cost $612.801.

Asus is a multinational hardware and consumer electronics company founded in 1989 and headquartered in Taiwan. Dedicated to developing products for the smart lives of today and tomorrow, Asus is the world’s No. 1 motherboard and gaming brand and one of the top three consumer notebook manufacturers. Asus rose to prominence in North America when it revolutionized the PC industry with the Eee PC in 2007.

Today the company is pioneering new mobile trends with the Asus ZenFone series and is rapidly developing products for virtual and augmented reality, as well as Iot devices and robotic technologies. Asus recently unveiled Zenbo, an intelligent domestic robot designed to support, entertain, and accompany families. In 2015 and 2016, Asus was named one of the world’s most admired companies by Fortune magazine and has been ranked by Interbrand as the most valuable international brand in Taiwan for the past four years.

The Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition has all A’s: AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, AMD Radeon RX 6800M and “AMD Advantage,” which means it is the first device to meet AMD’s guidelines for becoming a mid-range gaming laptop. And yes, it is also manufactured by Asus. We’ll say it now as a public announcement: If you’re looking for an affordable but incredibly fast mid-range notebook, you should skip everything else and buy the Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition, because it’s priced to die for.

Build and Design

The ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage Edition is the epitome of a stylish, eye-catching, and rugged ROG device. The notebook measures only 25.9 mm and weighs 2.5 kg: not exactly a thin and light notebook, but it can easily be carried in a backpack. However, the thickness is justified when you consider that there are multiple air vents on both sides and on the back. As soon as you take the notebook out of the box, you notice a bright, metallic ROG logo on the lid, complemented by a small AMD logo on the edge near the hinge.

The top of the notebook and the keyboard top are aluminum, while the rest is plastic. Red hot-swappable armor emphasizes the gamer aesthetic. A black and silver cap is included in the package. The notebook is a feast of light: first, each button lights up with the RGB button underneath, and second, there is an RGB strip on the bottom that runs around the case, or as Asus prefers to call it, a perimeter light bar. The speakers are placed on the bottom and sound quite detailed and loud when placed on a flat surface, but they lack bass.

Keyboard and Touchpad

Asus certainly thought of gamers when it designed the keyboard of the Strix G15. The keyboard is both smooth and bouncy, which makes for a very comfortable typing experience. In addition, with Overstroke technology, the company claims that the accuracy of the keys increases over time. We slightly exceeded my average of 70 words per minute when we took the typing test with 10fastfingers, typing 72 words per minute.

As on most Strix laptops, the G15’s WASDs are colored to stand out from the rest of the keyboard. In this case they are transparent, which makes the RGB lighting even more obvious. In this regard, I am disappointed that Asus continues to manage the lighting zones instead of using individual keys like its competitors. But I think it is a small trade-off for the price.

You can customize the four available zones (10 if you count the light bar) via Asus’ Aura Sync software, which is located inside Asus’ Armoury Crate hub. You can choose from eight effects, including Color cycle, Rainbow and Star. You can also sync with music or change based on CPU temperature or a game event such as low health.

Display

If you closed your eyes and imagined a gaming laptop, you probably would not think of anything too far from the Asus ROG Strix G15. This is as traditional a gaming laptop as you will find today, albeit in the nicer end of the gamer aesthetic. This gaming laptop has an all-black color scheme with red accents, both on the back of the laptop and on one that serves as a rubber foot for the laptop-which means you only see it when the laptop is upside down. Engraved on this rubber foot is text with the words “Back on Top” and the Asus ROG logo.

So, yes, this is indeed a gaming laptop. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if you don’t want everyone to think you’re grinding every time you pull out your laptop in World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic, it might not be for you. Although it has a somewhat dated aesthetic, don’t think of it as cheap. The top of the laptop and the keyboard top are made of aluminum, and although the keyboard top sags a bit, you have to push on it to make it flex.

Audio

When will laptop manufacturers learn that undercuts are for cooling, not audio? Asus placed the Strix G15’s speakers on the bottom, near the front edge. They barely fill our small living/dining area. However, when we listened to Cleo Sol’s “When we are in Your Arms,” we could not deny the warmth of the bass and the clarity with which we heard the strings and rainstick. And that was before G’s sweet soprano came in, begging her lover for security and intimacy.

When we played Control, Hiss’s nonsensical ramblings were disconcerting as usual, but not anxiety-inducing as usual. The lack of volume took away some of the menace. We wish there were audio settings to adjust, but alas, there are none applicable to this situation. The audio controls that Asus provides are related to the Two-Way AI Noise Cancellation section of Armoury Crate. Here you can adjust the noise cancellation levels for both the microphone and speakers.

Graphics and Gaming

It has been a long time since I last reviewed a laptop with AMD discrete graphics, and I must say that the wait has been worth it. The Strix G15 Radeon RX 6800M graphics card with 12 GB of VRAM is more than capable of competing with the top tier of Nvidia’s 30-series chips. The laptop put on a show during our benchmarking tests. Starting with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where the Strix G15 achieved 88 fps, equaling the Blade 15 (Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU) and beating the 80 fps average of premium gaming laptops.

The Stealth was not far behind with 87 fps, while the Alienware (RTX 3070) achieved only 77 fps. During the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey test, the Strix G15 hit a snag, achieving only 49 fps. This is well below the average result of 64 fps. The Stealth and Alienware achieved 66 and 67 fps respectively, while the Blade 15 achieved 74 fps. The Strix G15 achieved 98 fps in the Grand Theft Auto V benchmark, exceeding the category average of 95 fps and the Stealth’s 97 fps. However, it was not enough to exceed the Blade 15’s 107 fps and the Alienware’s 108 fps.

Performance

Of course, a slim 15.6-inch notebook should be able to do more than just play games. The Strix is equipped with AMD’s top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU. SSD speed is not exceptional, but otherwise the notebook is suitable for productivity. In Geekbench 5, the Strix G15 achieved a single-core score of 1,519 and a multi-core score of 7,746.

It was the highest single-core score in the field by a small margin, while its multi-core score was narrowly surpassed by the MSI GP66 Leopard. The Strix’s SSD did not impress. It copied 25 GB of files at a speed of 340.68 MB/s, falling behind the rest of the field. But the Asus notebook was the fastest in our Handbrake test, which converts 4K video to 1080p. The ROG Strix completed this task in 6:57, beating the Alienware m15 and the MSI GP66 Leopard by a few seconds. The Razer Blade Pro 17 lagged behind with 10:10.

Battery Life

All the work AMD has done to make its chipsets more efficient is paying off. The Strix G15’s 90Wh battery lasted 10 hours and 14 minutes in Laptop Mag’s battery test, which consists of continuous web browsing via Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness. Is that as long as the epic 11:32 of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14? No, but it is still impressive for those who want a gaming laptop.

It goes without saying that the Strix G15 exceeded the average 4:15 of premium gaming laptops. The Alienware only came in at 4:01, but the Blade 15 and Stealth struggled a bit more with times of 5:14 and 6:27, respectively. We also wanted to see how long the Strix G15 lasted in actual gaming, so we ran PCMark 10 until it failed. The results were not so great, as the laptop recorded a time of 58 minutes and 5 seconds. The Alienware had a little more staying power with 1:14.

Heat

It’s a tale as old as time. A thin laptop with powerful specifications needs creative cooling solutions. For the Strix G15, Asus has pulled a number of tricks out of the hat. Starting with ROG Intelligent Cooling, a combination of software and hardware implementations to maintain comfort. The laptop features a new vapor cooling design that dissipates heat over a larger surface area and a liquid metal thermal paste that Asus claims is 10 percent more efficient than standard thermal paste.

Thermal paste is that sticky substance found on the CPU and GPU when you open the system that helps keep the surface it is in contact with cooler, enabling better performance when using higher clock speeds.

The laptop also has four heat sinks, each of which is lined with copper fins only 0.01 millimeters thick, which help dissipate heat. The fan has an improved design, with 84 blades of varying thickness and shape for better cooling and quieter operation. There is also a self-cleaning thermal module that ensures that dust accumulation does not impede cooling, thus impeding performance.

Price and Availability

At the time of writing this article, we do not have a firm price for the Asus ROG Strix G15, but we have obtained an estimate of $1,650 for the AMD Advantage Edition configuration listed at right. This configuration with AMD Radeon RX 6800M is intended to compete with laptops with RTX 3070, which usually cost about as much as the Asus ROG Strix G15. In fact, we recently reviewed the Asus ROG Zephyrus G15, which has a very similar configuration, with a Ryzen 9 5900HS and an RTX 3070, but with a slower 165Hz display for $1,499.

This new AMD Radeon RX 6800M laptop has better gaming performance, at least on paper, and a much faster screen. But you’ll have to weigh these options against the extra $150 and see if it’s worth it. With this level of hardware, we don’t think a 300 Hz screen is necessary for the vast majority of people, but if you’re looking for a portable sports device that won’t make you spend too much, this might be the case.

Final Words

The Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition offers top-notch CPU performance, very competitive gaming performance, and solid value for money. We could only find one GeForce RTX 3070-based gaming laptop in this price range-most use GeForce RTX 3060 or next-generation Nvidia GPUs.

Most of these gaming laptops are also equipped with 10th or even 9th generation Intel CPUs, which are vastly outperformed by the Ryzen 9 5900HX in the ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition. Basically, you get one of the fastest laptop CPUs around with a GPU that can keep up with Nvidia’s best in mainstream gaming, all at an affordable price.

John Brister
John Brister
Meet John Brister, the prolific content writer renowned for his perceptive comparison articles on Bollyinside. Specializing in topics ranging from TVs to headphones and other accessories, John's knack for breaking down intricate details into reader-friendly insights has garnered him a dedicated following. Beyond his literary pursuits, John is an avid swimmer and equally passionate about tracking, often exploring new trails and routes, feeding his sense of adventure.

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The Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition offers top-notch CPU performance, very competitive gaming performance, and solid value for money.Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition review