 If you are looking for a powerful gaming laptop without having to play with it on the streets afterwards, the Asus FX502VM surely is a great choice. Welcome to laptop media. The laptop offers an exceptionally fast GTX 1060 GPU paired with a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700HQ processor for almost half the price of other similarly configured machines. You can check the laptop's price in the description below. The design concept sports a brushed aluminum lid and plastic all around. The bottom piece uses a hard plastic surface with interesting ornaments like the ones on the GIL502 and even the grills are positioned similarly. Only the ROG logo is missing. The back of the machine integrates two big vent openings for pushing the hot air out. Opening the laptop we see a strong resemblance between this one and the recently released Asus ROG gaming notebooks. It's made of plastic imitating brushed aluminum. The keyboard feels clicky, stable and typing on it won't take much time to adjust. However, we feel that the key travel is shorter than it should be for gaming. Sometimes the clicky feedback just isn't enough for a comfortable gaming experience. We were also disappointed by the touchpad, which seemed to be really jumpy and inaccurate times, but I doubt that you'll start gaming without an external mouse. You seem to be really vocal about TN panels in the comments and unfortunately the FX502VM uses one as well. It offers narrow viewing angles. Surprisingly for TN panel the maximum recorded brightness is slightly above average. We recorded 233 nits in the middle and 221 nits as average across the surface. The cover temperature is really close to the optimal 6700K. The display covers nearly 51% of all sRGB covers. This is insufficient for a good multimedia or gaming experience. Fortunately for those of you interested in the laptop we develop unique profiles tailored for this laptop and many other models. We will show you just how easy they could be purchased in use to enhance your viewing ability. We recommend you do profile so you would have a better usage of your laptop. Firstly, for working with Photoshop, Coral Draw or just overall usage of the laptop, we'd recommend you the Officework web design profile that will maximize the FX502VM's cover accuracy. You can see main and additional covers with 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% saturation inside the sRGB gamut pre and post calibration. We've created a profile with 114 nits luminance, cover temperature of 6500K and a gamma set to 2.2. We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used covers. You can check out the results at factory condition and also with the Officework web design profile. The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light. The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings where the right one is with our gaming and movie nights profile which upon activation will make your gaming experience better. More information about the display profiles can be found in the description below. You can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances. One of the most important things for proper gamers in a machine is the screen's response time. We recorded a full time plus rice time of 15.1 milliseconds. This is a fairly fast response time for a notebook display. We were pleased to see that the display doesn't use PWM at all. All brightness levels are flicker free and thus the display can be used for prolonged periods of time. Nevertheless, you can always use our health card profile that will completely eliminate the screen flickering and will also reduce the harmful blue light emissions while keeping the covers of the screen perceptually accurate. Just check the laptop media website for your notebooks model because every profile we make is individual. If you are not familiar with the hand from blue light emissions you can learn more about it in our specialized article that I will link in the top right corner of this video. The other two profiles will improve visibility while gaming and watching movies and enhance our accuracy. Again, the purchase link of all of our profiles can be found in the description of this video. The motherboard integrates a soldered 8GB DDR4 chip and for a notebook of this kind offers only one free slot. You can only upgrade the machine with up to 24GB which is more than enough for a general user and for gaming. As expected, the laptop offers a 2.5-inch 1TB hard drive manufactured by HGST spinning at 7200 rpm as well as an M2 PCIe NVMe enabled SSD slot. Since we reviewed the very basic model, the latter was empty. The FX502 VM sports a relatively big battery rated at 64Wh but since the notebook features the latest generation NVIDIA Pascal GPU, the integrated GPU of the processor is out of the equation and thus delivers subpar battery performance. For average user and web browsing it withstands for around 3 hours and 30 minutes while the gaming battery test took its toll and from the notebook you can take out around an hour and 28 minutes of playtime. The Skylake Intel Core i7-6700HQ has 4 cores sticking at 2.6GHz and can go up to 3.5GHz for one active core and 3.1GHz for 4 active cores. The CPU is suitable for heavy applications in gaming. We compare the Asus FX502 VM with other notebooks with the same CPU. You can check the full review and more information about the CPU in the laptop media website. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 GPU aims to be the mid-tier graphics card from the Pascal generation offering similar or even better performance than last year's GTX 970M and 980M. The GPU also features the same amount of cooler cores as its desktop counterpart, 1280, and it's clocked at the same frequencies, 1506 and 1708MHz. The extreme nature of the stress test that we perform isn't a good representation of a real life situation but at the same time it's the best way to determine the cooling capabilities and the stability of the system in the long run. We started off with 100% CPU load and we were pleased to see that the notebook keeping relatively normal temperatures while utilizing the full clock speeds 3.1GHz for 4 active cores. Unfortunately though after turning on the GPU stress test as well, things went south really fast. The CPU reached dangerously high temperatures while the GPU's frequency slowly decreased and the system shut down to prevent any damage due to the high inner temperatures. While we were expecting a bit hotter than usual casing considering the thin profile of cores, we actually didn't expect the notebook to shut down by itself. While this seems alarming just keep in mind that the extreme nature of this stress test forced a system shutdown. This will never happen during normal gameplay but it's a clear sign of failed cooling design nonetheless. Also, since the system shut down before we were able to measure the surface temperatures, here's a heat map during normal gameplay. As you can see the upper part of the keyboard tray between the hinges and the center of the keyboard gets hot. To be exact, the hottest point reached 54°C. Regardless the palm rest area remained cool. All in all the FX502VM is a powerful gaming notebook with impressive hardware for the asking price but as with every performance centric laptop you will have to make some serious sacrifices along the way. The real problem with the notebook is the unreliable cooling system which keeps the internals hot under load. Along with the cooling system there is a serious issue with the screen as well. Asus uses a lackluster TN panel to keep the cost slow which can be considered okay for some users but we really would have appreciated a better TN panel or a budget IPS solution at the very least. So do we recommend the Asus FX502VM? Well, it really depends on your needs. If the extremely good price performance ratio is the most important factor then, yes it's really worth considering. But if you are looking for a more balanced solution we suggest looking elsewhere. Thank you for watching laptop media, we have many more reviews waiting for you in our channel. Also consider subscribing so you always be up to date with the latest laptops, desktops, VR technologies, phones and everything our technological future will provide us. For more extensive information about this model and many more visit laptopmedia.com.