ASUS ROG Strix GL502VT-GS74 Gaming Laptop Review
Battery Life, How We Test, and Noise
In the following benchmarks we employ two very different battery life tests: Battery Eater Pro and a custom 1080p HD video loop test, to prove out battery life with our test group of machines. In all tests, Windows 10 Quiet Hours have been enabled and displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. For the average notebook this is somewhere between a 45 - 60% brightness setting. Since notebook displays significantly affect power consumption and battery life, it's important to ensure a level playing field with respect to brightness of the display for battery testing. However, since many notebook displays vary in brightness at each respective brightness setting in Windows, this calibration with the meter is also critical to ensure all displays are set to as near identical brightness as possible before testing.
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Battery Eater Pro wears systems down quickly with a heavy load on all subsystems, including processor, graphics, memory and even storage. This is a worst-case test that will give you a sense of how a machine will hold up under heavy strain, when gaming or under heavy-duty continuous content creation workloads, for example.
Battery Eater Pro provides us with a bit of a worst case scenario, which in this case translates to between an hour and an hour and a half of run time. We were actually able to squeeze a few extra minutes out of the laptop when using the GeForce GTX 970M to run this test. As with most gaming laptops, you'll want to stay near a power outlet, especially since
Our custom HotHardware video loop test takes a 1080p HD video with a 16Kbps bit rate and loops it repeatedly, with 1 minute break intervals in between. A timer log file increments minutes of uptime every minute and a final minutes total recorded before system shutdown is stored in the log. This is a lighter duty test that is still a bit more strenuous than say many office productivity tasks, but it's not nearly the strain that Battery Eater puts on a system.
Battery life more than doubled in our custom video test, though still left us unimpressed with a run time of less than four hours. It's worth reminding here that the battery is not easily removable, not in the sense that you can quickly take it off and snap a spare in place. To replace the battery, you need to take off the bottom lid and uninstall the existing one.
Acoustics
The ROG Strix GL502VT-DH74 tends to heat up quickly around the back of the unit during game play and other activities that stress the CPU and GPU. That also kicks the fan into high gear, which is a bit noisy but not obnoxiously so.
