Hello, this is The Provoked Prawn, and this is the Asus ROG Strix G15. This is the
2021 model which is said to be smaller, seven percent more compact, the smaller overall
footprint than the previous model, and with an 85 screen to body ratio as well as a really
nice design that includes some design changes such as a larger trackpad. It also features
NVIDIA's latest 3000 series graphics cards so you can get it with a RTX 3060 or an RTX
3070. Now this is an unboxing video, but I've been using this laptop for a couple of weeks,
working and gaming and browsing, just generally having fun with it and I'm actually gonna say a
lot of good things about this laptop. I don't generally like 15-inch laptops because I find
them a bit too small but this one's very nice to use indeed, and it has an overall nice design to
it and a really nice set of features. But it does come with a rather chunky power brick, however I
will note the insane battery life on this makes up for that because this thing is capable of going
for hours and hours. Managed at least five or six hours working on this thing during the day,
and obviously you have RGB lighting on the keyboard, and as you will have seen from the clips
as we go through there's an RGB lighting strip around the front as well that gives you a nice
glow, so adjustments like that are obviously going to affect the battery life but overall performance
of this has been really good, to the point that you can actually use it on battery while gaming
as well. Now the other highlights of this laptop is the design of it. As I said it comes with a
30 series graphics card, it also uses AMD's 5000 series CPU [inaudible]. There are various options
available, but this is the R7 5800h CPU which is partly where it gets that awesome battery life on,
but also delivers some fantastic performance. I've done some real world testing with various
different games and some benchmarking and I'll leave information on that in the description but
I'm also going to cover it as we go through. I also want to talk about the overall design
aesthetic of it and the build quality, as well as the nature of the beast. Now you can see it has
various different ROG accents on it. It also has a design which features a numerous different USB
ports, and I'll talk about those set up in a minute, along the left hand side, and the rear,
but there are no USB ports on the right-hand side which means if you plug anything over it on that
side it's not going to get in the way of your mice and other devices and things that you might have
on that side so you've got plenty of room and space on the other side. As you'll see on the
back you also have an HDMI output and an Ethernet port which is unusual for a 15 inch laptop, but
there is no DisplayPort connection unless you have a DisplayPort to USB-C connection because that
is set up there. You'll also note it is a thin laptop, from the clips in this video it doesn't
look particularly thin but it is quite a small compact laptop. As such it uses NVIDIA's Max-Q
GPU setup, which results in a powerful and yet cool-ish design. It has some very nice accents
with four different exhaust ports and a setup that you can see features some large exhaust
ports around the outside to keep things running cool, and actually quiet and cool is the name
of the game here and I'll talk a bit more about that later on because this thing has actually been
quite quiet to use, which is very unusual for a thin laptop, and very pleasant. Also has a really
nice design aesthetic to it, that RGB lighting strip around the outside for example leaves a
nice glow on your desk. Obviously you can turn all this stuff off with an Armory Crate if you don't
want to use, it but it has a nice accent to it. I liked it on the previous Strix laptops that I saw,
the other previous ones, and this one is similar as well. Now, for reference, the screen on this
thing is available in various different setups. You can get a IPS panel, which is full HD as
in 1080p 144 hertz, or you can get a 1080p panel with a 300hz refresh rate and a three millisecond
response time, that is the setup that I'm using for this unboxing and review, but you can also get
a 1440p panel with a 165 hertz refresh rate and a three millisecond response time, so there are
a number of different choices, if you want to go for 1440p, which is something that NVIDIA and
partners are doing this year with a lot of laptops to give you a 1440p panel, cram some extra pixels
in there but still make the most of the RTX 3000 series graphics cards, then you can do that as an
option with this one. Which is very nice but this is the 300 hertz refresh rate panel,
and that allows you to make the most of that. Another negative point I want to talk about that
you might have noticed if you've been paying close enough attention is that the screen has very thin
bezels which means there's no room for a webcam, so like previous Asus laptops that I've looked, at
the compact small laptops for some reason they've opted to not include a webcam which is, you could
say, not a problem because you probably would find that laptop webcams are kind of rubbish anyway and
so it's better to have an external one, however I think you could counter that argument with
the fact that there are so few USB ports. So you have three USB 3.2 gen1 type A's, one USB 3.2 gen
2 type C, which is DisplayPort and PDW 100 watt charger capable, but that's it. Now if you fill up
those slots with a headset, a mouse, a keyboard, and external things like that, then obviously you
all filled up already, where are you going to plug in a webcam? Yes you could go for a stream
camera something like that as a USB-C connection instead, so that's a potential option, yes you
could get a hub to plug things into. I think it's a shame that they've opted not to include this
even if a basic - if you're not planning on streaming or anything like that, if you're on
zoom calls or teams calls or whatever for work or for school, it's a real downer to not have a
webcam and have to get an external one and plug it in. I think it's a shame and it's a weird thing to
skimp on so I don't really know why they've done it because it's not exactly a cheap laptop either
so you're paying quite a bit of money, you really shouldn't have to pay extra. And when you look at
the overall design includes a lot of other nice things, such as for example the thermal design
of it, the internal specs, the setup there and the fact that they've included an ethernet port,
it seems very odd to miss out on something like this. Its's a small point but I think it's worth
noting. In terms of audio I'll cover off a bit more about how the sound was with games a bit
later on but it does come with Dolby Atmos capable speakers, it has two speakers1 it also has AI,
the noise cancellation system which is basically designed to deliver a good sound quality as you're
using the built-in microphone, and I found that was okay actually, it was actually better than
previous laptop mics that I've used so I was playing with friends and using discord and
they could hear me well enough over the speakers, and the speakers are actually very good as well,
they do manage to overpower the sound of the fans on this one which is quite nice because usually
with thin and light gaming laptops, under load, under heavy load playing games the thing can get
quite loud and be a bit too obnoxious, but a bit more on that later on. Now I said earlier on that
you can change the RGB lighting on it, you'll note that you can use [function key] and then [F4] to
go between the various lighting settings, and you can also use [F2] and [F3] to turn the brightness
of the backlit keyboard up and down. This can also be adjusted within the Armory Crate software which
is downloadable on the laptop within windows and also on your smartphone. A bit more on that later
on. Now as I said earlier on I've been using this laptop, gaming on my lap and on a desk as you've
seen, and the performance has been very nice. Here you can see me playing a bit of DIRT 5.
This is with the thing set to maximum settings and it is plugged in and I'm getting somewhere
around 90 frames per second so decent performance on max settings with automatic scaling set up on
it. With that turned off and it just set to standard mac settings it was 60 to 70. I also
ran it on a Samsung Odyssey G7 panel you'll see a bit later on that's 1440p so I was outputting
through the DisplayPort with that connection and I was getting around 50 to 60 FPS now in rainbow
six siege with max settings on that I was getting up to 200 FPS on the G7 and somewhere between 150
and 200 FPS just on the panel itself and as you can see the screen is really nice I've captured
multiple angles of this to show off the quality of it and that's the highlight of something like this
it's a powerful laptop with really good internal specs, the RTX 3070 obviously you can push it
really hard, yes Rainbow 6 Siege is an older game, but if you're looking to make the most of that 300
hertz refresh rate obviously that's aimed at people that want to play Rainbow Six, CS:GO,
those sort of competitive shooters that aren't too taxing on the system but you can get maximum FPS,
really good smooth performance from. Found it was really good in that way, it ran really well,
high FPS, smooth gameplay, fantastic, really good looking, really vivid and clear screen as well,
and you can also change the display on the fly from the software or from your phone, too,
so you can adjust the various settings and flick between a number of different display options that
include like FPS and vivid and Icare and Cinema mode and that changes the view on the screen,
changes the color setup, changes the brightness and things like that automatically
to specific settings and I really like that on ASUS laptops and I really like it on this one,
using Icare during the day for example really eases the blue light on your eyes and reduces the
amount of glare and therefore makes it easier to work on and a bit less taxing. Another thing that
you will have noted is I had my phone next to me there so I can keep an eye on the performance of
it and the temperatures and things like that, and it's really nice to be able to do that. What I did
notice though is that under load it was getting quite hot still, you're getting somewhere between
75, 85 degrees on both the CPU and the GPU even when running Rainbow 6 Siege. So yes, thin laptop,
compact, yes, it has got good cooling in it and it does run quite quietly. That is something to
mention is that you can adjust the fans on the fly. There's a button at the top of the laptop
in order to do that, and you can press that and switch between various different modes.
You can go between windows mode, silent mode, performance mode, turbo mode, and manual
settings where you can basically choose what the focus is on. This also makes use of NVIDIA's
Whisper 2.0 Technology which basically allows it to run really quiet while also performing well.
And what I found is that even with the fans set to that higher performance and turbo modes,
it still ran quietly, and because the speakers are nice and loud they also overpower the sound
of the fans quite well as well as keeping things running in a pleasant way, I didn't find that had
to strap on a headset regularly to deal with the sound of that. Now here you can see me playing,
I wanted to test and see what it was like outputting to a bigger screen and I found
that the results were still really good, so I've got the Samsung Odyssey G7 32-inch screen that I
will be looking at shortly and ran the games on that with various different performance
results from it and it still performed really well, that's a 1440p panel so obviously you're
not going to get the same performance versus that 1080p screen but you're still going to get a good
performance out of it and I'll make some notes on what I got in the description so you can see
that but. Here you can see the Armory Crate app, there's an app that you can download that you can
access on your phone you just need to scan a QR code that's in the Armory Crate software and then
you can access this app and you can connect to your device, and this not only gives you controls
to change things like the fan speed and the visuals on the screen, but it also lets you see
the performance metrics in terms of the load the CPU and GPUs under and the temperatures that
they're running at and control those things from a distance. One thing I will note though is that
the connection on it isn't that solid, you find that disconnects quite a lot then you have to
open the app and rescan the QR code again so you have to sort of be wary of that, it's a
bit of a finick to get going, yes you could just alt-tab out but it is nice to have that access.
Obviously if you're running on a bigger screen as I have been doing with the monitor, you could just
have Armory Crate running on the laptop itself and have easy access to be able to see the performance
of it up at a glance anyways, but it is a nice little quirk to have this extra. And you can
see the temperatures that I was getting here I was getting around 67 degrees, this is while
I'm running the game. 67 and 80 degrees somewhere like that so it's running quite hot but. And you
do have access to all the different things, you can see the game visuals, you can turn off the
trackpad, you can put the panel on overdrive, you can do all sorts of things from here.
So the end result has been a very nice experience for the most part. I actually did find out
something by accident as well, while I was running with Rainbow 6 Siege, playing with friends, I
accidentally kicked the charger without realizing I was doing it and the power pack had disconnected
ever so slightly to the point where it wasn't plugged in properly, and the laptop went into
battery mode but didn't notify me of such and what I found was that the game was still playable
and so I could actually play it with reasonable FPS, I think it was getting somewhere between 30
and 60 FPS and it still ran smooth enough to not really notice a major problem,
and the result of this is actually that you can play with this laptop on a fairly high
end game and still get good performance while running on battery which is something that
really surprised me because when I've tried something similar with RTX 20 series cards,
couldn't really manage it very well, so it's nice to see that here. So for testing purposes
I actually did this again and managed to get about an hour's battery life out of it
while doing that, so you can play on battery for about an hour, though you are getting a very small
amount of performance out of it, the FPS is obviously a hell of a lot lower than when
it's plugged in but it is still nice to have that opportunity. All in all a fantastic laptop with a
really nice design aesthetic and a lot of great features going for it. Be sure to check out the
information in the description to find out more and stick around and come back to see
the Odyssey G7. This has been The Provoked Prawn, thanks for taking the time to watch this video,
I hope you found it useful, interesting, hilarious, or all of the above. Be sure to
check out the description for other information you might find interesting, and subscribe,
and watch these other videos as well that I think might be useful to you, and have a great life.