Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Battery, Thermal And Display Testing
Battery Test - Tomb Raider 2013 Battery Rundown
To test battery life, we set each laptop’s battery profile to Balanced while running Tomb Raider’s built-in benchmark at the lowest detail preset. The frame rate is locked at 30 FPS through GeForce Experience’s Battery Boost to limit the strain on the battery. Meanwhile, a script running in the background monitors and time stamps the system’s battery percentage. The laptops are set to hibernate once battery levels reach 5%.
On battery power, the Strix GL502VM is capable of delivering an outstanding 1 hour and 49 minutes of play time. The two other GTX 1060-equipped models in our tests, the MSI Leopard Pro and Alienware 15, delivered at least 20 fewer minutes of game time, making the Strix an ideal pick if gaming on the go is your heart's desire. At just under two hours long, the Strix will handle short commutes to and from your destination easily.
Thermal Testing
For our thermal testing, we used our Optris PI 640 infrared camera to measure the laptop’s thermals. More information about how we test, be sure to check out our Measurement Science article. We captured a thermal image during idle, and after 15 minutes of a Furmark GPU stress test. During the Furmark test, a temperature log of the GPU diode is recorded using Aida64.
At idle, the Optris detects cool temperatures ranging between 39°C and 42°C. After running Furmark for 15 minutes, the Optris detects between 66°C and 79°C, while Aida64's GPU diode sensor detects 66.1°C on average. The cooling exhibited in the Strix GL502VM is acceptable on the lower end, but the temperatures detected in the CPU and GPU heatsinks run a little too warm. So long as these hot spots don't cross into 80°C and more, you should be fine. Compared to the other three laptops, the Strix is the second coolest system, just below the Alienware 15. The cooling solutions of the Leopard Pro and P37X v6 aren't as robust as that of either the Strix or Alienware laptops.
Display Testing
We used the SpectraCal C6 Colorimeter to measure the Leopard Pro's display. Be sure to check out our Display Testing Explained article for a full description of our test methodology.
The Strix GL502VM has good contrast ratio at both lowest and highest brightness settings. At 0% brightness the Asus was a bit bright, which is great for white luminance, but not so much for black luminance. At maximum brightness the Asus would have benefited more from a brighter white luminance or lower black luminance, bringing its contrast closer to the P37X v6, which has an excellent display.
The Asus laptop retains a good color balance at most brightness levels, but lacks a bit in green levels. At higher brightness levels, the green levels drop while red and blue levels rise. Gamma was fairly inconsistent, only hitting 2.2 at 0%, 100%, and around 37% brightness. From 0-37% the gamma is too high, and from 37-100% the gamma is too low.
Finally, the 15" Strix's grayscale and average color accuracy differences are too high, enough for the errors to become visible to the naked eye. Our Strix GL502VM's grayscale DeltaE 2000 is particularly high, the second worst out of the four laptops in this comparison set. The average color accuracy isn't as bad as some of its competitors, like the Alienware or Leopard Pro, but it's still outside the acceptable range.
