Welcome to a laptop battery specialist
of the Asus Laptop Battery
Are ASUS Republic of Gamers machines your absolute favorite brand of laptops in the whole world? Then sure—but if your fandom isn’t as strong as your reason, hold off. The ROG G501 is a good machine that hits all the right notes to stand out as a quality thin gaming laptop—but it’s priced like a great machine. It’s good. Really good, even. It isn’t great.
For the same $2,000 the G501 would set you back, you could have a 14-inch Razer Blade with a more powerful graphics chip, a smaller frame and a slightly better mouse and keyboard—for a little more (though I don’t recommend this) you could even get the Blade with a super high resolution display. For less than the cost of the ASUS laptop, you could have a 15-inch MSI GS60 Ghost Pro with better internals and better speakers. Hell, you could even buy the Ghost’s 17-inch brother, the GS70 Stealth, and still come away with a more powerful, less expensive computer.
Okay, but what if you don’t really want a gaming machine: you want a 15-inch Windows laptop with a screen and chassis to rival the MacBook Pro with Retina that can still play games sometimes. Okay—you have something to think about. The ROG G501 won’t get the same battery with like Asus AL23-901 Battery, Asus AP23-901 Battery, Asus Eee PC 1000 Battery, Asus A22-700 Battery, Asus P22-900 Battery, Asus Eee PC 900 Battery, Asus A31-W5F Battery, Asus 90-NHA2B2000 Battery, Asus A32-W5F Battery, Asus M5000N Battery, Asus 90-NH01B2000 Battery, Asus W5F Batterylife as a Retina MacBook Pro, but it’s just as thin and portable, has a higher resolution display and way more internal power. The ROG’s 512GB SSD is twice as large as the similarly priced MacBook Pro with Retina, too. That’s pretty fierce competition.
Bottom line: the ASUS ROG G501 is a good gaming PC, but its mid-range GPU keeps it from being the best value in thin gaming PCs today. As a general 4k Windows laptop with decent battery life the ability to moonlight as a gaming rig? It’s definitely worth your consideration.
Correction: We originally misstated that the ROG G501 had a two separate storage discs and a mini DisplayPort. That was incorrect: the laptop actually features a single 512GB PCIe SSD, a Thunderbolt 2.0 port and two accessories (a headset and mouse) we neglected to mention in the original review. The text of this review (and the conclusion) have been modified to reflect the correct information.