The ASUS ROG Strix G15 and G17 Advantage Edition laptops have both an AMD CPU and GPU.
Announced during Computex 2021 in Taipei, the new ROG Strix G15 and G17 variants are among the first laptops to meet the criteria for the new AMD Advantage series of laptops. Similar to how devices had to meet stringent requirements to be classed as ultrabooks, the AMD Advantage laptops must also meet minimum requirements to bear the moniker.
AMD Advantage Performance Criteria:
- Premium displays
- 144Hz+
- IPS or OLED display
- <3ms response rate
- Freesync Premium
- Amplified performance
- High-end AMD processor (Ryzen 5000 series)
- High-end AMD GPU (Radeon RX 6000M series)
- 100+ FPS gaming experience
- Fast boot with M.2 NVMe SSD
- Thin and light design
It should be no surprise that the ROG Strix G series laptops clear this bar effortlessly, matching or exceeding the requirements at the same time as bringing the excellent ROG cooling system and stylish RGB-heavy design.
ASUS Rog Strix G15 and G17 Advantage – Performance features:
- Ryzen 9 5900HX (OC) CPU
- Radeon RX6800M GPU
- 300Hz/3ms FHD or 165Hz/3ms QHD Display options
- Freesync Premium
- 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD
- ROG Intelligent Cooling
- Liquid metal thermal compound on both CPU and GPU
- Full coverage vapour chamber
Aside from the new RX 6800M GPU, these specs are almost identical to the ROG Strix Scar 15/17 laptops, sans the RTX 3080, and similar to the ROG Strix G15 we reviewed, though the Strix G15 used a Ryzen 7 5800H and RTX 3070 GPU.
The new RX 6800M GPUs are an unknown entity as of yet, and we don’t know how they compare to the latest RTX cards. From what we have seen so far, though, in traditional rasterised graphics applications the results seem to be on par with the RTX 3080. Ray Tracing, on the other hand, sees the AMD RDNA 2 GPUs seemingly at a performance deficit in comparison to the more refined and established RTX 30 series cards. This isn’t surprising, and it ties up with what we’ve seen from the newest AMD desktop cards.
The displays will no doubt just be carried over from the existing range of ROG laptops. That’s totally fine by us, as those displays are among the best we’ve seen on a laptop, with glorious, rich colour vibrancy, excellent contrast and brightness, and smooth performance with almost no ghosting or smearing of fast-moving images.
Audio quality is again something ASUS has addressed remarkably well with its 2021 range. It has been refreshing not having to resort to the line, “It sounds ok, for a laptop.” The Strix G series has very capable speakers, and although they could do with being a touch louder, they are free of any distortion and produce a wide range of sound that covers a significant portion of the lower frequencies.
The following new features will sound familiar to anyone who has used the newest Nvidia GPUs, as they are essentially the same technology under a different name.
AMD SmartShift dynamically distributes power to either the CPU or GPU depending on the workload – essentially, this is AMD’s answer to Dynamic Boost, which is used to great effect on the new RTX cards. AMD claims its hardware boosting interface and machine-learning algorithms can increase performance by up to 15%, meaning more frames in games (and as we all know, frames win games).
Smart Access Memory is another new feature you may already be familiar with. If you have any knowledge of what Resizeable BAR is, and how it works, you know where we are going with this. Smart Access Memory helps remove bottlenecks between the CPU and GPU by allowing the CPU to access more of the graphics memory at a time. Without this restriction, the CPU can access the full memory of the GPU at once, giving a significant boost to performance.
These new all-AMD laptops have the potential to be very good, and if you plant your flag firmly in the corner of Team Red, they are the first AMD powered machines that look like being able to truly bring the fight to Nvidia.
Pricing and availability are as yet unannounced, but we’ll keep you updated as we find out more, and we’ll have the full review, performance benchmarks and comparisons as soon as we get our hands on a review unit.
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