ASUS ROG Zephyrus S Ultra Slim Gaming Laptop, 15.6” 144Hz IPS-Type Full HD, GeForce RTX 2080, Intel Core i7-8750H CPU, 16GB DDR4, 512GB PCIe Nvme SSD, Aura Sync RGB, Windows 10 Pro - GX531GX-XS74

Design (5/5): Mechanically, this laptop is beautiful and elegantly designed. The bottom air vent that opens when the screen lid opens which was a pleasant surprise! Something so simple, yet useful. The RGB/AURA lighting works as intended and is a nice, non-ostentatious touch. EXTREMELY thin and light for such a huge powerhouse.Screen (5/5): The screen is bright, crisp, and quick. The 144 Hz. refresh rate and deep black level makes everything look beautiful.GPU (5/5): The RTX 2080 handles everything I can throw at it and just keeps churning, but that's to be expected.Cooling (5/5): Under full load, bench, and stress tests, the LT increases RPM fan speed as needed. Very quiet considering the amount of power it is usingUsefulness (5/5) : Both my GF and I travel and frequently work from home. This LT, in combination with my desktop, allows us to never miss out on productivity and fun. Whether it is gaming, rendering 3D images or any other CAD, it's a seamless transition.I highly recommend!Worthwhile mentions: All of the included ASUS software is extremely easy for the end user to navigate. Giving you as much control as you can handle.

ASUS has the worst support, and Microsoft Windows 10 is terrible. I thought that updating to Windows 10 2004 would be a good idea, but that was a bad idea. Now I can not get back to the previous version, and there are a couple of games that can not run on 2004 -- resulting in a blue screen BSOD. I reinstalled Windows 10, using the "local" option, so not from the internet, but it's 2004 somehow. There are no options in the settings to roll back and MyAsus also provides no guidance. ASUS support TERRIBLE (and so is Microsoft). Crappy, spending this much money on a laptop that isn't usable.

If you want no compromises for gaming (or really and GPU/CPU intensive) task, this one is for you.While still being thin and light, it's easy to carry without breaking the back and still managing to pack a punch.Asus seems to have solved the thermal throttling issue that would plague most other configurations with an i7-8750H and 2080 RTX MaxQ thanks to the unique cooling design that takes in air above and below the laptop surfaces, and ejecting heat to the back and sides.Observation so far (a week into ownership) with regards to power management is that the 230 watt power brick or the power management system (windows firmware ) maybe inadequate for this particular configuration. While gaming on 1080p in Ultra settings on BF5 (ray tracing enabled), the battery will discharge below 90% and continue to do so even after quitting all intensive tasks and simply browsing or idling. The battery only begins to recharge after at least 30 minutes of idle activity. I do use a USB-c hub and plugging in an additional type C power source rectified the discharge problem.

Cons: Limited linux support at this time. Which is understandable since it's brand new hardware. I am pretty sure that I could get this working with a little effort. I am even more sure that it'll be supported fully out of the box with popular distros in a few months or less. I'd have paid a few hundred more for a thunderbolt3 port or two. The USBC ports appear to be just that, USB. All of my usability complaints are related to windows 10. I am not saying "Windows sucks", it just isn't what I am used to. It does seem to have issues with driver signing and CUDA, which is a PITA but not really the laptop's fault. I just boot w/o driver signing and it works.Pros: Wicked fast. So fast that I really don't care that I am running windows. Hashcat benchmarks at 27G MD5/sec, 8M MD5crypt/sec, and 49G (!) NTLM/sec. that's at 63 deg C. This drives an Oculus Rift with some effort (fans), and I have only wittnessed heat induced framerate drops once, and the system had other apps running alongside the game (Gorn). I did some research and determined that this is 50% faster than the fastest computer in the world in June of 2001, which drew megawatts of power and filled a computer center. I don't mind the keyboard/trackpad arrangement but I also have used many awful keyboards across my nearly 40 years of using computers. The same goes for the screen. I see complaints about bleed here and there but, really, this screen is amazing. After some time getting it setup and getting used to windows I can honestly say that I am about 90% happy with it given what I paid. One more observation. For CUDA workloads this is 50% slower and 15% hotter than a Tesla V100 under real world workloads. It's also 1/4-1/3 cheaper than a V100 and runs right out of the box w/o suffering the indignity of installing the V100 in a suitable computer. I almost want to build a cluster of these laptops for teh lulz.

I'm not a hardcore gamer but having lived with a Dell E6410 for the last 10 years I knew I wanted to upgrade once that system could no longer even play World of Warships.. So I researched around and decided on this system from Asus. I do like Asus products to being with, they always seem well made to me. I decided to go with the RX 2080 GPU so as to get as many years out of this thing going forward as I possibly can, obviously the GPU blows away anything I'm trying to use it for now. I'm not an expert so I just plugged and played World of Warships with max'ed out settings and was getting 75 fps on average, good enough for me to be impressed. My only regret is that there wasn't a larger SSD drive configuration with either 1TB or 2TB at the time I bought the laptop, those were not options on the item at the time.

I used this laptop for gamin and programming. I don't like that home and end works thru fn, not convenient when programming.if it used for programming it's ok, not so noisy, however when you play game it's too noisy! need to use headset

Arrived in a timely manner and was packaged well. So far, everything works great and it is performing exceptionally.