The ASUS Zephyrus S17 is one of the most powerful gaming laptops I’ve ever tested, you’re
going to want to stick around to see what it can do in this review!
I’ve got one of the higher specced options with Intel i9-11900H processor, Nvidia RTX
3080 graphics, 32 gigs of memory, a 3TB RAID 0 array, and a 4K 120Hz screen, but you can
check out other configurations as well as updated prices with those links down in the
description.
The S17 has an all metal magnesium-aluminum body with a dark finish, the interior has
some sort of soft touch finish which feels kind of rubbery.
There are no sharp corners or edges, and build quality feels decent.
The laptop alone weighs about 2.8kg or 6.2lb, then 3.8kg or 8.4lb total with the fairly
large 280 watt power brick.
It’s on the thinner side when closed considering the specs inside, not too large for a 17”
machine.
Now it’s important to note that the S17 is available with two different screen options.
I’ve got the 4K 120Hz one here, but there is also a 1440p 165Hz one, and that 1440p
version has advanced optimus and G-Sync, so the 4K model that I’ve got here is stuck
with optimus, but it does at least have adaptive sync.
I mention this because I would expect the advanced optimus model to perform better than
this one in games, as it can bypass the integrated graphics.
The 17.3” 4K 120Hz screen has decent color gamut and ok contrast, though I was expecting
better from a 4K panel.
It gets quite bright though, above 500 nits when at full brightness, but expect different
results to what I’m showing here with the 1440p 165Hz screen.
The ASUS Armoury Crate software, the control panel for the laptop, gives us the option
to enable or disable panel overdrive.
With overdrive off we’re looking at an 8.15ms average grey-to-grey response time, there’s
a link in the description explaining these numbers.
If we instead enable overdrive, which is the default, the response time lowers to 5.3ms
but there’s more overshoot now.
It’s doing well compared to others considering it’s a 4K screen, the only other 4K 120Hz
laptop I’ve tested is the MSI GE76 which uses the same panel model, but I guess without
an overdrive mode as that one was slower at 7.6ms.
Mine had no noticeable backlight bleed, but this will vary between laptops and panels.
There’s a 720p camera above the screen in the middle, no IR for Windows Hello though.
This is what the camera and microphone look and sound like, this is what it sounds like
while I’m typing on the mechanical keyboard, and this is what it sounds like if I set the
fan to full speed, so it’s not doing a great job of isolating my voice over the fan noise.
The keyboard of the S17 raises up by 5 degrees when you open the lid.
This gives it the ability to pull in cool air through this gap to the internals, and
also helps improve the typing angle.
It took a little getting used to, but personally I think I prefer the subtle angle.
It’s got optical mechanical switches with 1.9mm of travel, so the key presses are a
little louder compared to others, but I definitely liked how they felt more compared to say Alienware’s
m15 R5.
It’s got per key RGB backlighting and all keys and secondary functions get lit up.
There are three levels of key brightness using the F2 and F3 shortcut keys, while F4 can
be used to cycle through a few effects, however there’s more customization available through
the Aura Creator software.
The power button is separate to the keyboard, so less chance of accidentally pressing it,
and it’s also a fingerprint scanner, which I found to work quite fast and accurately.
There’s a wheel for adjusting volume above the keyboard on the left, you can scroll up
or down to increase or decrease volume respectively, or press it down to mute and unmute.
There’s a light next to it which gets brighter with louder volume, and turns off when muted.
The precision touchpad is huge.
It’s smooth to the touch, clicks down anywhere, and works very nicely, and despite the larger
size I never had any problems with it getting in the way while typing or playing a game.
The left has an air exhaust vent, the power input, HDMI 2.0b output, gigabit ethernet
port facing the preferred way so you don’t have to lift the laptop when unplugging, a
USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A port, two Type-C ports, but only the left one has Thunderbolt 4, followed
by a 3.5mm audio combo jack.
The right has two USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A ports, a full sized SD card slot, and there’s an
air exhaust vent on this side too.
Now both of those Type-C ports can be used to charge the laptop, and they both also have
DisplayPort 1.4 output, however the Thunderbolt 4 Type-C port and the HDMI port connect directly
to the Intel integrated graphics.
Only the Type-C port at the very front bypasses optimus and connects to the Nvidia graphics
directly, and I’ll show you how much of a speed boost this gives us in games soon.
The front has two speakers on either sides near the corners and there’s a little part
that sticks out in the middle to help with opening the lid.
Unlike others from ASUS, the ROG logo doesn’t seem to light up here, the lid just has a
subtle dot pattern.
Lid flex wasn’t too bad considering it’s a larger 17” and on the thinner side, I’m
guessing due to the metal finish.
Keyboard flex varies.
Generally it was quite sturdy and it didn’t move at all while typing, but you can see
here that there’s an area in the middle where there’s more flex, and this is because
it’s held up by pieces of metal on the sides.
I doubt this is an issue, given ASUS claims to have done pressure testing with 12.5kg
and noted there weren’t any problems.
The bottom panel doesn’t appear to have a whole heap of holes for airflow, presumably
as most air comes in below the keyboard, but we’ll check thermals soon.
Getting inside requires removing 11 TR5 screws of two different sizes, and the one down the
front right corner doesn’t remove and instead helps with opening, though I found my panel
basically popped off without any tools needed.
Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, and it’s surrounded by three M.2 SSDs.
There’s a single memory slot towards the center above, and the Wi-Fi 6 card is on the
left.
Like other laptops from the Zephyrus series, there’s either 8 or 16 gigs of memory soldered
to the motherboard to keep the machine on the thinner side, so you’ve just got the
one SODIMM slot for upgrades.
You need a stick installed in order to run in dual channel.
There are 6 speakers in total, two front facing tweeters below the screen, two on the front
left and right sides, and two subwoofers underneath on the left and right towards the front.
I thought they sounded pretty good, there’s some bass, though it was harder to notice
at higher volumes, as it can get quite loud.
The latencymon results were looking good too.
Speaking of sounds, it plays this one by default on boot.
You can disable it through armoury crate or the bios though, but apparently a lot more
of you than I expected seem to like boot sounds.
The S17 has a 4-Cell 90Wh battery, however I didn’t find the battery life to be that
impressive, lasting for less than 5 hours in the YouTube playback test.
This is in spite of the S17 automatically lowering the screen’s refresh rate down
to 60Hz and turning off panel overdrive when you unplug, a feature that generally offers
nice battery life improvements.
Let’s check out thermals next.
The Armoury Crate software lets us change between different performance profiles, which
from lowest to highest are silent, performance, turbo and manual, and you can also swap between
them easily with the F5 shortcut.
Silent mode enables Whisper mode which caps FPS in games to 60, but you can disable that
manually through Nvidia GeForce Experience.
You can only use up to performance mode when running on battery power.
Both turbo and manual modes apply the following overclock to the GPU, while manual mode also
lets us adjust power limit sliders for the CPU and adjust fan speed.
There are plenty of heat pipes inside, and there’s Thermal Grizzly liquid metal on
the CPU.
The BIOS also allows us to undervolt the processor by up to -0.08v.
The idle results down the bottom are on the warmer side, but not really an issue.
I’ve run stress tests with both the CPU and GPU loaded up to represent a worst case,
as well as playing an actual game.
Overall the temperatures are seriously impressive here.
Worst case we’re getting up to the low 80s, most laptops I test easily sit between 90
and 95 degrees on the CPU.
The cooling pad is only making minor changes, probably because there are only relatively
small intake holes underneath, but hey it doesn’t seem to need a cooling pad anyway,
the lift up keyboard design seems to be doing its job.
These are the clock speeds from the same tests.
Although the CPU speed improves greatly in manual mode, it seems to be at the expense
of lower GPU clock speeds, possibly due to dynamic boost.
The i9-11900H has an all core boost speed of 4.4GHz, so we’re actually hitting this
even in the worst case stress test in manual mode, and in the game with the cooling pad
in use, though I’m not really sure what difference the cooling pad is making given
the CPU was 72 degrees without it, relatively cool.
The RTX 3080 graphics was using the most power in turbo mode, above 120 watts, though in
a GPU only workload with the processor idle dynamic boost could run up to 140 watts, so
it just depends on what’s going on.
The GPU lowers to around 110 to 115 watts with the CPU still up to 65 watts in manual
mode, which is quite an impressive result given the temperatures.
Given the 280 watt power brick and low temps, it would have been good if manual mode was
also able to keep the GPU power up like turbo mode.
Despite the GPU potentially doing better in turbo mode, with an actual game running we’re
seeing the same result as manual mode, though this could vary based on the game tested and
might matter more at higher resolutions.
Here’s how the different modes perform in Cinebench R23, a CPU only workload with the
GPU now idle, so reasonable improvements as we step up to the higher performance modes.
I should also note the -0.08v undervolt applied in BIOS consistently got a 13,000 score, so
it didn’t seem useful compared to just stock manual mode.
It’s doing quite well when compared to others.
The single core score is actually the highest I’ve ever recorded as far as actual mobile
processors go.
Technically the i9-11900K up the top is slightly ahead, but that’s a desktop processor.
Otherwise multicore is only being beaten by a couple of Ryzen 9 5900HX machines.
The multicore score drops quite a bit when running on battery power though, which is
in contrast to Ryzen based laptops from ASUS which are taking the top 5 places here, however
the single core score from the Intel 11900H hardly changes and is above all others.
The keyboard area is in the low 30s when idling, same as most others, though there’s a warmer
point above the touchpad.
The wrist rest area is warmer compared to the keyboard with the stress tests, but the
elevated keyboard still felt fine.
Performance mode is similar, still a warmer wrist rest but the keyboard is fine.
Turbo mode continues this, a little warmer still, and we can see hot air appears to be
going onto the screen in the middle.
There’s not too much difference in manual mode with the fan on maximum, the left and
right sides of the keyboard are quite cool, let’s have a listen to the fans.
The fans seemed to turn on and off when idling which could be annoying.
It’s relatively quiet in silent mode even with the stress tests going, then it gets
progressively louder stepping up to higher modes.
Compared to other laptops, I didn’t think manual mode with maxed out fans was too loud,
the smaller G14 I recently tested was louder at 59 decibels for instance.
In manual mode with the fans at max speed after a few minutes of the laptop just sitting
there doing pretty much nothing I did find that the fans would slow down, which I guess
is probably preferable from the perspective of if you’re not doing anything you probably
don’t want the laptop making a lot of noise, but for me I want it to stay running at max
if that’s what I’ve set it, so I figured it was worth mentioning.
Now let’s find out how well this configuration of the S17 compares against other laptops
in games, again keep in mind that I’ve got the 4K 120Hz model which we’re stuck with
optimus, I would expect the 1440p version with advanced optimus to perform better than
this.
Battlefield V was tested in campaign mode with ultra settings, and I’ve got the S17
highlighted in red.
It’s actually doing quite well here when you consider that the 4 results below it and
3 above it all have a MUX switch and aren’t limited by optimus, and it’s able to beat
other RTX 3080 laptops from ASUS like the Scar 15 or Zephyrus G15 which are more than
20 FPS behind.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the games benchmark.
Again the S17 was doing well here, though it could be beaten by 3070 laptops that let
us disable optimus such as MSI’s GP76 or the XMG Neo 15 just above it.
Far Cry 5 was also tested with the games benchmark at max settings, and as a game that seems
to favor Intel it’s not too surprising to see the 11th gen 11900H coming out quite high
again here, it’s only being beaten by other systems with i9 processors, that again let
us disable optimus.
As one of those Type-C ports connects directly to the RTX 3080 graphics, connecting an external
screen will mean that we’re bypassing optimus and the iGPU, so this should represent the
performance that would see from the 1440p advanced optimus model.
I’ve got both the results with the laptop only and with an external screen connected
highlighted here.
We’re looking at more than a 20% increase to average FPS in this game, an impressive
result.
The S17 is beating the thicker GE76 by a couple of frames, it’s only behind the far more
expensive desktop replacement with 11900K.
Here are the results from 3DMark for those that find them useful.
Now for some creator tests.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark.
The S17 was able to offer me the best score in this test out of any laptop that I’ve
ever tested so far by a fair margin.
It’s scoring 18% higher than the much thicker 11900K desktop processor in the Clevo machine
just below it.
The S17 was doing quite well in Adobe Photoshop, the 2nd best result, though it wasn’t able
to beat the 11900K machine this time around.
DaVinci Resolve is more GPU heavy, and the S17 is again back at the top here, despite
the Clevo X170 just below technically having a higher GPU power limit, so some of the difference
must be due to the CPUs, rocket lake vs tiger lake.
I’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads.
I’ve got three 1TB PCIe Gen 4 M.2 SSD’s in RAID 0, so the performance is nothing short
of insane.
It’s worth noting that Intel’s 11th gen Tiger Lake platform has 20 lanes of PCIe 4,
so 3 M.2 slots of 4 lanes each means the RTX 3080 gets 8 lanes, though as we saw earlier
that doesn’t really appear to be holding it back once optimus is removed.
The UHS-II SD card was performing well too, maxing out my V90 card.
The card reader is positioned awkwardly, you can’t really see it without trying to look
under the edge, but the card clicks in and doesn’t stick out.
The BIOS has the standard options that most other ASUS laptops have, however there’s
a section in here for undervolting the processor, which can go as low as the -0.08v that I mentioned
earlier, though I didn’t really find this to help in Cinebench.
I booted an Ubuntu 21 live CD to test Linux support.
Out of the box the touchpad, keyboard, speakers, ethernet, camera and volume wheel all worked,
but Wi-Fi wasn’t recognized and the keyboard shortcuts for screen brightness and keyboard
brightness didn’t work.
Unfortunately I can’t really discuss pricing right now, because I can’t find it for sale
anywhere.
I’ll stick some links down in the description that should have updated prices once it’s
available, but for now I’ve honestly got no idea, but for a top end spec model like
this I wouldn’t expect it to be cheap.
Putting price aside for the moment, I think the ASUS Zephyrus S17 is a very impressive
gaming laptop.
Thermals in particular were next level, barely getting to 80 degrees Celsius while offering
high levels of performance.
It certainly appears that the unique lift up keyboard design is helping.
I liked typing with the mechanical keyboard more so compared to the recent Alienware m15
R5, but that is personal preference, but the 5 degree incline did grow on me.
This is definitely a better solution compared to the last gen model where they had the keyboard
down the front and the touchpad crammed over to the right side.
Not only is it a traditional layout, but the touchpad is big, works well, and we get a
full size keyboard with no compromises.
The screen in my model is decent, but I’d probably lean towards the 1440p option with
advanced optimus and G-Sync simply because that will offer a speed boost in games, but
if you’ll be using an external monitor anyway then as we’ve seen you can still get a speed
boost with the 4K model.
The battery life was lower than I would like to see, but otherwise there’s not really
too much for me to complain about.
Except for I guess probably the price, again I don’t know for sure, but I’m assuming
it’s not going to be cheap, but that’s always going to be expected with a higher
end machine like this with all the bells and whistles.
In both CPU performance and gaming the S17 shows us that 11th gen Intel can be competitive
with AMD’s Ryzen 5000, but I’ll compare Intel and AMD fairly in a future video, so
make sure you’re subscribed for that upcoming comparison as well as for future laptop reviews
like this one.
Come and join me in Discord and get behind the scenes videos by supporting the channel
on Patreon, and come and check out some of my other videos over here, I’ll see you
over in one of those next!