It’s smooth, responsive and most importantly, in the right position.Īdding to my delight with the new keyboard has to be the Multiwheel – a small tactile roller that you can use for adjusting volume and much more. This new touch pad, with the keyboard back in it’s rightful place, is a more traditional glass that’s well sized for your everyday scrolling, swiping and gestures. I most certainly don’t miss Asus’s weird dual touch/numpad implementation from the GX701.
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I like that it’s a generously spaced, full keyboard with a number pad and it doesn’t feel cramped like some other 17-inch laptops. For something so thin, it doesn’t wobble or flex – a great testament to Asus engineering and build quality.
I am also impressed at how rigid the keyboard deck is. Even as I type this review on the S17, I’m amazed at how far laptop mechanical keyboards have come in the last two years. The keys feel so deliciously crisp and make that nice clicky sound that’s really satisfying.
Most impressively, even with this tilting keyboard, the new S17 remains amazingly skinny at 19.9mm, just a hair over a millimeter thicker than the18.7mm S17 GX701’s.Īnd guess what else Asus did with the keyboard? They fit a damn good, low profile Optical mechanical keyboard with per key RGB lighting and a deep 1.9mm of travel. The big payoff of course is that massive 12mm air intake that the S17 uses to suck in a ton of cool air. The 5° tilt makes for a delightfully comfortable typing experience that I desperately craved from its predecessor. It blows my mind that even with this thinness, there’s still room for the top half of the keyboard deck to split into two revealing the S17’s defining characteristic.īorrowing the design of it’s sibling, the Asus Zephyrus Duo but instead of having a second titling screen, it’s the keyboard that tilts. Asus has trimmed as much fat making for an impressive 88% screen-to-body ratio. Even with a it’s big 17.3-inch display, it feels like a smaller laptop. Overall, the S17 GX703 is still a skinny machine at just 19.9mm thick. But at the end of the day, is all that enough to justify its hefty $5,999 price tag? Asus Zephyrus S17 GX703 Review
Additional improvements over the GX701 include a brand new 4K 120Hz display, 11th Gen Intel i9 and of course NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 for a power combination that shreds everything I threw at it. The new S17 corrects all the sins of its forefather with an even cooler solution(pun intended) that returns the keyboard to its rightful place while making it far more usable than before. Asus tried an innovative approach to laptop cooling that ultimately ruined the usability of the laptop. I thought that was a stunning machine with its skinny profile, performance but ultimately let down by it’s terribly placed keyboard/ touchpad. This successor to the Zephyrus s17 GX701 that I called the would be God roll way back in 2019. There really is no such thing as the perfect laptop but gosh darn it, the new Asus Zephyrus S17 GX703 is as close as I’ve ever got.