In this article, I give you my Asus ROG Strix Scar II GL504 vs GL704 comparison with specs included. It’s a review we got to here which is the ASUS rogue Strix Skaar 2gl 500 4gw and the GL 704 GW. Those names are so long it’s already the end of the review right. All right. So much for marketing names and isos.
Anyway, the I’ve actually always liked the Strix line because it’s been a bit more affordable but it’s got your kind of meat and potatoes the stuff you need for good gaming performance. And they’ve made it better looking.
The the lids have gotten more rogue Zephyrus looking for example with the brushed aluminum 2-tone kind of finished lid on them. But there’s been price creep so. The Strix are now at $19.99 a piece. Doesn’t matter which size you buy. The good news is you have a full mobile Nvidia r-tx 2070 card. Not the max Q version.
Despite the fact that these are both relatively thin and light not as thin and light as the rogue Zephyrus models. That we just reviewed the 15-inch will be reviewing the 17-inch. But hey for less money and potentially room for more cooling a lot easier to upgrade. A totally normal design.
I’m kind of more psyched about these than the Zephyrus models. We’re gonna look at it now. First off for those of you who like a lot of the features that this laptop has but a little bit more money than you wanted to spend. The Zeus has a Strix car which is what we have here is car – technically. There’s also the hero line which is a bit less expensive because there’s an RT X 2060 instead of a 27 t card.
And the interior graphics are a little different. While this one goes with a mix of carbon fiber and sort of faux camouflage and the hero has kind of like a techno pattern instead of the camouflage pattern. Our units were provided there are loners from computer upgrade King cut USA. So if you’re looking for a place to buy them and they can do things like customize the RAM for you which is something you probably want to do in this case.
If you want to get different storage options and what comes with the stock model they can do that for you. Why do I say that about the RAM. Let’s get that out of the way first while we talk about the basic specs of the machine which are typical of all the gaming laptops in this price range for the most part. This has 16 gigs of DDR 426 66 megahertz. There are two RAM slots they went with single-channel.
Maybe they’re gonna change that at some point because you know I have that video about what a difference dual-channel versus single-channel Ram configurations means. Which means two aching modules instead of one 16 gig module basically. So yeah that it really that puts a hurt on both benchmark results and a lot of the frames per second that you’re going to see in games.
So what I did is I upgraded this one myself and I put a second RAM module and so we would have a dual channel configuration. Inside you have the usual Intel 8750 h6 core 45 watt CPU that you’re going to find in pretty much every gaming laptop and some mobile workstations. Will it be updated to ninth gentleman that’s available of course it will. I’m there’s going to be a very small performance boost with that for the CPU.
It does have Nvidia Optimus switchable graphics. So you have that in Nvidia r-tx 2070 model card with Intel you H d630 graphics. So helps with battery life if you’re not gaming you using it unplugged you’re just working in Word or a slack or streaming a movie or something like that. It has both an m2 SSD slot with a PCIe nvme SSD.
And they’re not the fastest we’ve seen kind of mid-range speed. And it has a hard drive bay. Now ours has the carrier only to hold that hard drive in the 504 model and no carrier even supplied with the 704 model and no cable with either. So you’re gonna have to source those for masseuse and connects directly to the motherboard that little cable it’s not a standard kind of cable.
The configuration that we have comes with a 512 gig m2 SSD and no hard drive installed. Some world’s your oyster if you want to put in a two and a half-inch SSD if you just want to swap out a bigger nvme SSD. You could do that. And it’s really easy to open. This is one of the reasons why I actually like this better than the more expensive rogue Zephyrus.
Unscrew that Phillips head screws on the bottom pry off the case which is pretty easy to do it’s a plastic bottom on it. And boom you’ve got access to everything on here. The Intel 95 60 AC socket and Wi-Fi card you’re not very impressive capacities 66 watt hour battery regardless of which size of this laptop that you go with. And it’s pretty easy to access that he pipes the fans too the fans if you want to repay sit you can.
Another prop for this is that it doesn’t use tripod heat sinks. That means there are four screws one at each corner for your CPU and your GPU for very even application of the heatsink on top of those. There are shared heat pipes here. There’s a good number of heat pipes and you can see the design is fairly cymbal similar whether you go at the 15 or the 17 inch.
And those shared heat pipes do result in some heat pollution. The the GPU runs a little hotter than we’re used to see actually in this kind of laptop. Usually it’s the CPU cores that kind of run hot not the GPU. It’s not alarming temperatures but seeing you know 81 to 85 centigrade where usually we see 75 centigrade in an RT X 2070 gaming laptop even a slim ones a little surprising.
The core temperature is yes. Like all of these gaming laptops in this generation with the six core CPU inside. It will thermal throttle unless you want to go ahead and do some under bolting. About looking at what a sous is done and we would look at hardware info I notice the voltages are already a little lower than normal. So there wasn’t a lot of room for under vaulting.
Usually, a 100 millivolt under volt is easy to do on any laptop in this class. This one we can only get about 50 millivolt under vaulting with stability. A sous armory kraid software is included with all of sous gaming laptops and it’s not bad really. And they have several different fan and profiles really a performance profiles. We use the balance mode for most of our tests.
They’re balanced mode it doesn’t mean the windows power plan balance mug. If you switch to tear above the fans will get louder and the performance will be a little bit improved. It’s not a huge difference but it’s a little bit it’s there for you. And you can play with your GPU settings and all that sort of thing. I guess features on this are actually pretty good.
Despite the fact that we see core temperature is in the mid to upper 90s when playing with triple-a titles like Far Cry 5 The Witcher 3 that sort of thing surface temperatures aren’t that bad. That’s probably because only the lid on these is metal. The keyboard deck and the bottom side are plastic which don’t just they just don’t get as hot as metal to the touch.
So he really you know it’s better for the laptop if you don’t block the vents be careful if you put on your lap when you’re gaming but it’s not a burning hot hot laptop. So highs how is actual performance in games using pro apps say using Adobe Premiere something like that. Excellent the performance on this is very good.
The frame rates that we see in games that you can see games running across the screen throughout this review are exactly where we would expect them to be for a machine with this spec in configuration set. Which is pretty good given the fact that like I said these are relatively thin and light machine. So not as much room for cooling and all that sort of thing.
So even with that thermal throttling going on they’re still maintaining pretty high clock speeds and the GPU is very performant. And it’s a full 120 watt version of that r-tx 2070. The keyboard on this it’s zoned backlit not an RGB backlit. Just like this efforts I don’t know what’s up with that because perky RGB backlighting has been a thing for at least a year now.
Especially when you’re talking about a $2,000 laptop. You can also control the front lighting on the front edge of these. That have a little LED bar and the logo on the lid or you can basically turn those off if you’re taking it to work and you don’t want to look like a lightshow. Keyboard has one point eight millimeters of travel and it feels really nice.
There is good actuation force news good bounce back and a Zen key rollover. If you’re using this for productivity for typing on it’s wonderful. It’s not bad for gaming either and even the 15-inch has a number pad and. So if you like a number pad keep that in mind that’s not always a common thing to see on a 15-inch laptop.
The trackpad is made by a LAN and it’s a ms precision trackpad. So a Miss precision drivers. It’s decent Ilan’s not my favorite trackpad manufacturer but it’s decent enough. This dedicated soft touch clickers which I prefer over super stiff ones. Ports on this are excellent which is nice to see again. A little bit better than the Zephyrus.
You’ve got HDMI 2.0 be you’ve got plenty of USB ports to them or USB a gen 1 one is USB 8 Gen 2 and there is a USB C Gen 2 port but it is not Thunderbolt 3. And in this price range that does kind of hurt. And again it’s the same thing with this effort which isn’t even more high-end laptop. I don’t know what soos is doing. They’re leaving Thunderbolt 3 on.
I know that’s gonna be a hard for some of you. We have Gigabit Ethernet on board as well. There’s also a mini DisplayPort 1.2 and that’s the one you’re gonna want to use if you want high frame rates because HDMI port typically connects the Intel UHD 630 ground. And content creators yeah there’s a full-size SD card slot here.
So great story when it comes to the ports. So how about that despite. Its the usual trendy 144 Hertz display. So that’s great if you’re playing esports kind of titles where you typically can get really high frame rates like overwatch or Apex something like that you know good stuff.
Three millisecond response time IPS the usual map non-touch full HD display high resolution. Fast refresh displays just aren’t readily available yet. That’s why you’re not seeing it more often. Even though the machine really could probably drive higher resolutions not probably definitely drive higher resolutions at least 2k easily even in triple-a titles.
It’s a good display again it’s the same one that’s used in the more expensive rogue Zephyrus line whether you’re talking about the 15-inch or the 17-inch and made by a you Optronics. Those efforts line does get that Pantone validated thing which means they’ve calibrated a bit better. For example, the white point on our 15-inch one was way high and kind of weird.
But you can calibrate these and they’re quite good. For laptop this gaming display there’s not much lightly going on here. The color representation is typical and they’re full srgb coverage. But nice now looking displays and they’re good enough for doing some pretty serious and knitting in Photoshop.
I mean if you’re professional photographer you probably want a wide gamut display if you’re working for print. But for the rest of the world it’s good stuff. So assume with those trendy skinny bezels and that’s a great thing on three sides. But boy this is one of the tallest chins at the bottom I’ve ever seen. It is not a pretty sight.
They do this because they need the bottom chassis to be a certain size so they have to match the top lid to the bottom lid. Moved up and as a result of that they’ve given you a chin cam. No MSI wa at the radar GE 75 they did manage to find ontinue the webcam to put up top anyway. But a soos just went with one down there. So when you’re twitching you’re twitching your jowls.
You probably want to clip on higher quality webcam if you’re doing something like twitch streaming. For sound you have that 3.5 millimeter combo jack that does both headphone and mic and you have two one watt stereo speakers. And yeah you know they’re not bad they’re not terrible at all in their average among gaming laptops.
They’re decent enough they don’t have a super lot of bass but they’re not tinny and thin. Not as good as this efforts but those bright because that one does too speakers instead but not bad stuff. And fan noise it’s not that at all. The fans are really well-tuned these are 12-volt fans. So it’s not a roaring loud laptop like you’re gonna have to put the headphones on Jessica it’s a game and be able to hear the game. Even in turbo mode.
Now you can actually adjust the fans yourself manually to. So if you really want to ramp up those fan curves then you probably do want to use headphones. So how about battery. You know a soos is still playing that game kind of where they use a smaller capacity battery to reduce the size and the weight of the laptop. 66 watt-hour whether you go at the 15 or the 17-inch model.
That’s not real big for a 6 core laptop with dedicated graphics like this. But you’re using it unplug so you’re mostly using the Intel integrated graphics. It actually does better than the Zephyrus model go figure. Who knows why this is. Ms battery capacity not really that different. But in it says about 5 hours with brightness set to 115 it’s a mix of productivity a little bit of photoshop some streaming video and that sort of stuff.
Kind of lightweight certainly not gaming. To take off the plastic bottom cover it’s really easy. The Phillips head screws are all visible here. There is nothing hidden under this little rubber foot here so. Then you just use a guitar pick pry it off. It’s not too hard start from the front edge that makes life easier. And the LED light strip stays on the body of the laptop. So do not try to pry that up it should stay there.
So internally these are almost identical but not quite which well there you have it. The Wi-Fi card is in a different location on the two of these for example. So we’ve got our cooling system right here and this one has two heat pipes over here versus three heat pipes.
So it’s a shared heat pipe on the 17-inch model. So slight difference there though it doesn’t like I said make a huge difference in cooling. Both of them have exhaust here and here and only single exhaust on this side. Ram slots and two of them in the same location on both of these. So you’ve got potential with two 32 gig dims to go up to 64 in theory with this.
As long as the bios is supporting it I believe that it does. On our smaller model the Wi-Fi card is located over here right next to the m2 SSD. We have a Kingston midrange II 512 gig nvme SSD and ours. On the 17-inch model the m2 SSD is in the same location. They’ve just covered it with some foil tape and this one for insulation.
And the Wi-Fi card is on the opposite side. You’ll get an Intel 95 60 AC Wi-Fi card regardless of which size laptop you bond. And the same battery in them and the same hard drive bay location. So this one has two RAM modules not one because I added the second one like I said for my testing so I could test it in dual channel mode where performance is notably better.
So should you get the 15 or the 17-inch model. Usually the bigger the chassis the cooler it runs and that’s one the selling points. In this case really the thermal difference in terms of core temperatures and CPU temperatures and surface temperatures wasn’t that different. But if you look at these two machines together you can see how compact the 17-inch model is.
Is there really isn’t a whole lot of extra volume inside. So don’t go running to the 17-inch simply for thermals. But if you want a bigger screen and you know it really isn’t that much bigger and it’s about a pound heavier not too bad then I get it. So there you have it the 15 and 17-inch versions of the Isuzu rogues Trix car 2 GL 504 and 704.
Both of these are GW models which means Intel eighth generation cpus and NVIDIA r-tx 2070 graphics. And as you can tell I like them a lot in terms of the fact that it’s very easy to open them up upgrade them clean them Rapace them whatever you want to do. You have good normal keyboards here with the ample key travel 1.8 millimeters.
Normal nice track pads with Microsoft precision drivers made by a lawn but they okay. And good display is the same as on the higher-end Zephyrus models. So yeah there’s a lot like. The cooling like so many of these gaming laptops particularly the you know obviously not chunky desktop replacement ones is you know the core temperatures are pretty high but not any higher than any of the competition for the most part. The only one that this really directly competes with that does have significantly better cooling is the MSI ge70 5 of the GE 63 like I mentioned. Also, those look a little less gamer II well particularly the 17-inch model but other than that there ms:i are run for their money here.
