Hardware Overview and System Performance
If you've been closely watching the gaming laptop scene for a while now, the hardware in the GL502VS won't surprise you at all. There's an Intel 'Kaby Lake' Core i7-7700HQ processor, 16GB of DDR4 memory, a 128GB SSD (there's a 256GB SSD in my Australian review unit, but this configuration is not available in the United States) plus a 1TB hard drive, and of course, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 with 8GB of GDDR5 memory.
This is the only configuration option available in the United States, and it's priced at $1,699.
The Intel Core i7-7700HQ is a four core, eight thread CPU clocked at 2.80 GHz with a boost clock of 3.80 GHz. It has 6MB of L3 cache and a 45W TDP. There's also an integrated GPU inside, though with the GTX 1070 in this laptop, the integrated graphics is only used sparingly.
Speaking of the GTX 1070, this is effectively the same GPU as found in desktop graphics cards: the GP104. However, the notebook variant has 16 SMs unlocked as opposed to 15 in the desktop card, which results in 2048 CUDA cores, 128 TMUs and 64 ROPs. The wider GPU has allowed Nvidia to reduce the clock speed relative to the desktop card, resulting in similar performance. The GPU here is clocked at 1442 MHz with a rated boost clock of 1645 MHz. There's also 8GB of GDDR5 memory at 8000 MHz on a 256-bit bus for 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Let's take a look at some system benchmarks.
The GL502VS performs as expected in our range of system benchmarks, and performs particularly well in PCMark workloads that rely on GPU power. There are no surprises here, and this is what we expect from a high-end laptop.
The performance of the 256 GB Micron 1100 SSD in my GL502VS wasn't as good as I expected, with many other gaming laptops outperforming it in this regard. Random performance was worse than but not significantly behind other laptops, however its sequential performance is where the SSD really disappointed.
I also think the 128GB SSD in the variant available in the United States is a little slim, and I'd rather Asus offered the 256GB SSD in this region to give a bit more app capacity on the main OS drive.