Can anyone share their experiences with the Zephyrus M?

[leftisthominid]

I am looking for a laptop with a GTX 1070 and an i7 8750H. There are four main laptops from major brands that meet this spec (MSI GS65, Gigabyte Aero 15X, Razer Blade 15, and the Asus ROG Zephyrus M; please correct me if I am missing anything)

I am on the verge of ordering a Zephyrus M. I was wondering if anyone here have had noteworthy positive or negative experiences with it.

Also, I wanted to know

1. How is the SATA drive and how easy is it to replace? I know it is a hybrid drive, but I read somewhere that the HDD portion in only 5400 rpm.

2. How easy is it to open up?

3. What are your experiences with game performance when hooked up to a UHD TV/monitor? (The Witcher 3 and Skyrim SE are the next two Windows games on my backlog)

4. Does the throttling persist when the fans are set to their max?

5. Does the BIOS play nice with eGPUs? I have heard of other laptops (such as the Alienware 13) not playing friendly with the Razer Core. (I am going for the GTX 1070 version, so I won't need this for a good while but it is worthwhile information to have)

[genexis_x]

I can answer a bit even though I don't have it. @Kenotbi has one

 

1. As long as you can open the bottom cover, it's not hard to replace the HDD

 

2. Quite hard but at least it's upgrade friendly

 

3. Slight performance gain for sure

 

4. Need undervolt+LM to prevent throttling

 

Also keep in mind that you need to add thermal pads on VRMs, Asus uses thermal paste on them for a stupid reason

[Kenotbi]

For no. 3, I don't have a UHD TV/Monitor so I wouldn't know  But, I'd advice you not to play demanding games like The Witcher 3 on a laptop this thin. Not unless you've pushed the undervolting as low as you can, apply good thermal paste and pads, and making sure your room is cold before starting your laptop because it can get warm fast under load.

 

Mine is a 1060 variant and I undervolted mine to -100v without a repaste (yet). I played games like TF2, World of Tanks Blitz and Fortnite with G-Sync enabled and on high settings. All of which are well-optimised and pretty light games. I noticed my temps (cpu and gpu) were hovering around 54 - 68°C max. Repasting and playing in a cold environment would improve these temps but, don't expect it to decrease any more than 10°C. Surface temps did get a little warm for me.

 

Best part about this laptop is that you can switch between G-Sync and optimus very easily and the screen is just beautiful. Not Macbook or 4k beautiful but vibrant. 

 

One negative would be the placement of the charging port which is pretty annoying if your plug is on the right side. 

 

I would say that this is the better choice compared to the GS65 and Aero 15x because both of them have either worser build quality or temps according to other users and reviews.

 

Hope this helps!

 

 

[leftisthominid]

Outside of this forum, no one else seems to be talking about re-pasting.

 

I am buying this laptop for single-player gaming. I am not not going to play intensive games on it. I generally play with an Xbox One controller, so being warm to the touch is less of a concern.

 

[leftisthominid]

I just ordered one. By any chance do you know if it has two sticks of 8GB or one of 16GB? I have seen different reviews with different answers.

[Kenotbi]

12 hours ago, leftisthominid said:

Outside of this forum, no one else seems to be talking about re-pasting.

 

I am buying this laptop for single-player gaming. I am not not going to play intensive games on it. I generally play with an Xbox One controller, so being warm to the touch is less of a concern.

 

You may wanna head to this forum instead. There are lots of talk about repasting there. http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/asus-zephyrus-m-gm501-owners-lounge.815303/page-29

8 hours ago, leftisthominid said:

I just ordered one. By any chance do you know if it has two sticks of 8GB or one of 16GB? I have seen different reviews with different answers.

I'm not sure about that because I think every region has different configurations.