The original ASUS ROG Zephyrus was hailed as one of the best showing of ASUS in Computex 2017. Hailed as the thinnest gaming notebook with an NVIDIA GTX 1080, the Zephyrus has now met its match; the ASUS ROG Zephyrus M (GM501).
The most significant departure of the Zephyrus M from its predecessor is its thicker size, which now measuring at 19.9mm compared to the 16.8mm of the original Zephyrus. Despite the increase thickness, ASUS has found a way to fit a 1TB FireCuda (or a 2TB HDD) as well as increase the battery life for up to 3x compared to the original Zephyrus.
Cooling of the Zephyrus M has been improved as well. The fan has been upped from a 5V fan to a 12V fan that allows for a stronger fan. Fan size has been increased by 33% and the number of fan blades to 71 all of which allows for 15% better airflow. Better airflow might also mean more dust that can flow through the chassis, right? Well, ASUS has solved that problem by placing anti-dust thermal tunnels just beside the exhaust that channels and blows it out outside the chassis.
Performance has been upped from the 7th generation processors from the previous version to an 8th generation Coffee Lake-H i5-8850H with 6-cores and 12-threads with a Base Clock of 2.6GHz and a maximum Boost Clock of 4.3GHz. It also comes with 9MB of L3 cache and a 45W TDP. This Coffee Lake-H processor is backed by up to 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 512GB NVMe SSD.
The display has been upgraded to a 15.6-inch 144Hz IPS display with a 3ms response time and NVIDIA G-Sync for seamless gameplay. In terms of pixel pushing prowess, the Zephyrus M can come with either a NVIDIA GTX 1060 or an NVIDIA GTX 1070P.
For I/O, the Zephyrus M comes with an HDMI 2.0, USB Type-C with Thunderbolt, USB 3.1 Type-A ports, and 3.5mm jacks.
