From PC World: The laptop world we live in dictates that as weight drops and dimensions shrink, capability get squeezed out of the picture.
That’s the fine line Asus has to walk with its new G501 gaming laptop, which boasts a tour de force of check-off features while remaining impressively svelte.
The G501 features a 15.6-inch, 3840x2160-pixel 4K IPS panel in a 4.5-pound body that measures 15x10 inches and only 0.81 inches tall. That’s about 20.5mm thick, for the metrically minded out there.
The CPU is, of course, a 4th-generation quad-core Core i7 4720HQ chip. Why no 5th-gen quad-core? Because while dual-core Broadwell chips have existed for nearly five months now, Intel still hasn’t released quad-core CPUs. That in and of itself has spurred whispers that quad-core mobile Broadwell chips will be thrown out the airlock before ever being released, but Intel officials have told us they’re still on schedule.
Since this is a Republic of Gamers laptop, there’s a discrete GPU—but it may be a little off in the power scale. It’s Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 960M, essentially a process-improved GeForce GTX 860M. Performance of the new 960M hasn’t been reviewed by PCWorld yet, but I don’t expect it to measure up to its siblings, the 980M, 970M or 965M, for gaming. I also think it’ll fall far, far short of being able to drive the 4K panel at its native resolution for gaming.
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