ed here with the digital digest and today i wanted to take a trip down memory lane let’s revisit the asus g15 now i purchased this gaming laptop a little over one year ago and my life was never the same well that’s not really true it did begin a i would say love-hate relationship with the asus g15 and that’s because on paper the g15 pretty much checked just about every box anyone could ever have wanted and the other thing that made it a unicorn was it was delivering all brand new hardware in a single machine now generally that doesn’t happen so what were you getting at 850 us dollars and by the way i’m including a link in the description because the asus g15 is still 1850 us dollars over a year on the market and it is still one of the best laptops out there so the brand new ryzen 9 chipset that it launched with fantastic performance also fantastic battery life this machine gives you the ability to trickle charge over type c you’ve got an nvidia rtx 3070 max-q variant so it’s not a powerhouse but it’ll pretty much play anything you throw at it and a gorgeous brand new again at that time 15.6 inch 165 hertz refresh rate ips panel it was the first qhd panel of its kind and of course after it came out and by the way you couldn’t even get this right it was out of stock pretty much permanently for like 10 months or eight
months every manufacturer followed suit because well this was a refresh on hardware so brand new display brand new cpu brand new gpu and then a magical 10 hour battery life of course you’ve got to turn off the discrete rtx 3070 but big deal and again trickle charging so well what wasn’t so perfect first and foremost the ram is soldered half of it not all of it which means the most you’ll get out of this particular build again the one i’ve linked that’s eighteen hundred and fifty dollars and it does go on sale quite often uh for around fifteen fifty and if you want it i recommend trying to hang out and wait for that uh this has eight gigs of ram soldered and then one slot to upgrade so if you throw a 32 gig card in here which i did back at launch and now have done again first crucial now i’m working uh with sabrin which just started to roll out their ram then you’ve got something that isn’t going to give you any sort of workstation experience but you have a very good processor a very good gpu neither of which are best in class but still incredibly competent and potent if you will in 2022 paired with a great display that kind of paved the way for all machines going forward as far as i’m concerned with this higher resolution higher refresh rate and higher
color accuracy and that’s what made it appeal to me as a content creator you know it wasn’t enough just to be thin and light have great battery life a solid gpu a solid cpu two nvme uh drives can be installed in this at once but don’t try to push it i think you know leave the hynix one terabyte that comes in there this only supports gen three and that’s perfectly fine i’ve discussed this it’s a great nvme drive ssd and then in the secondary drive you know you want to throw something like a severant uh four terabyte drive it’s gonna work beautifully i mean that this is what i’ve had in there uh basically since launch but i did go through many headaches with this growing pains the soldered ram was something that really had me torn the fact that there’s no integrated webcam you know nice microphones on this machine but no webcam in a pandemic i mean no webcam and no pandemic is weird but do it inside of a pandemic granted you know it is what it is right i hate that expression but you know it worked out i really enjoyed it i knew i didn’t need the webcam i have plenty of webcams and devices with integrated cameras and many cameras if you follow my channel you don’t have too many cameras so with all that said you know really the only thing that ended up being a drawback for me was the lack of thunderbolt because again everything i’ve told you is pretty much flawless about this machine now
optimization for amd is still a work in progress i feel like for everyone who does the ra ra cis boom amd is changing the game that’s a half truth maybe it’s a little more than half they forget to tell you that while amd is making you know great strides in efficiency and that’s admirable because we need all of uh this business to to move in that direction you know apple has done it obviously amd is working on it and intel’s kind of sitting on their hands but optimization for intel is still better what does that mean it means that a wide array of software whether we’re talking about games creative software just tend to do better in certain instances still with intel and greater stability for me with video editing in the first few months i used this machine i had so many crashes it almost turned me off i mean if you go back and watch the chronicles you’ll see it i had a lot of problems with the nvme drive upgrades random blue screens of death the speakers making poppy farting noises all of that’s fine now it all ended up getting resolved and i covered that blow by blow and the machine is still working just as well as it did when i decided to keep it it’s working just as well as pretty much anything you can buy in the marketplace now and it still has just because of those three
things i mentioned again the display cpu and gpu and battery life i’ll make it four things it still has what is incredibly coveted here in 2022 and while this has been refreshed there are new models we’ve got the ti gpus i still think this is going to be the way to go as its price drops you know as this gets phased out we get to clearance and you can start picking picking this up for a little over a thousand dollars don’t even think about it grab it you’re basically stealing this thing at that price as far as i’m concerned and that’s because its performance isn’t going away you know the newer machines that i’m reviewing just starting to get with 12th gen intel chips and similar max-q gpus i expect that they’re going to have a little bit more of a gain are they going to change what you’re able to do with the machine no are you going to get better battery life out of those machines likely not and by the way i didn’t even mention the matte display on here i love love love love and that is something that i think if you care about it’s it’s important now this
isn’t the only machine with the matte display there are many but just something i felt compelled to point out and it doesn’t hurt that the keyboard and trackpad are excellent and the speakers which i should have spoke spoken about earlier even though they were making farts at the beginning they still ended up being some of the best speakers you’ll find on any gaming machine let alone a machine in this class in this form factor and when it comes to io really good still the design and styling not my favorite the fact that the chassis feels like it’s predominantly plastic even though it’s a mix of components you know what i expect is aluminum because you can feel that it’s cold around the edge of the body that sounded weird in retrospect headphone microphone combo jack two type c ports capable of display out their displayport 1.4 a type a usb port ethernet hdmi it is not 2.1 that’s one thing i wish they had done and then of course your charging port
and also the rapid charging on this right in line with today with everything that’s out i mean it charges up fast and you get long battery life that is what people want now the leds uh being there not the best idea from a design standpoint i haven’t seen any issue with the chin so to speak the bezel people were worried about it becoming deformed from the heat venting on it i haven’t had any issues with that and i have used this machine quite a bit kensington lock more ventilation a card reader which i absolutely love that’s another thing that you just won’t find me really picking a machine for personal use if it doesn’t have a card reader i mean i would really have to fall in love and then another type a port so solid support uh trickle charging i mentioned if you want to go ahead and throw a 65 or 100 watt uh into that type c port it will charge the single thing up which means you do not need to carry its power brick although it’s kind of worthwhile for the extra performance and for the fact that it does charge the machine up so quickly so all in all easy to still recommend this i didn’t think i would ever be able to say that i mean when i kept it i knew it was one of the best machine out
there but i didn’t think that it would necessarily be this long lasting in fact durability was one of my key concerns with this machine and if you remember my coverage you remember that distinctly but here in now may of 2022 the asus g15 is still irregular in my day-to-day uh whether it’s work play the machine can do it all and it’s still thin lightweight great battery life easily a recommendation now do i think you should buy it for eighteen hundred and fifty dollars absolutely not do not buy this for eighteen fifty i understand why it’s still priced this way because of its specifications and most people will not know the difference between this and refreshed hardware but if you’re going to spend close to two grand get a new machine get something that’s not over a year old that’s still really good like this get something that’s great that’s brand new do yourself a favor because it’s probably going to get refreshed in three months anyway that rounds it out folks oh and the wi-fi performance is good too kind of important any questions or comments please feel free to post them hit that like button and as usual please feel free to subscribe and please stay safe later
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