Essentially a follow-up to last year’s Zephyrus S series, the new S17 sports some new and stark changes, both to its design and hardware. Let’s start with the hardware underneath the hood; at the heart of the laptop is Intel’s latest 8-core 11th generation Core i9-11900H CPU, a default 16GB DDR4-3200MHz RAM that can be expanded to 48GB, and three NVMe PCIe Gen 4 SSDs running in a RAID 0 configuration, and up to a 16GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 125W laptop GPU. For all your maximum graphical presets. To accommodate all that power, the display is either a WQHD (2560 x 1440) G-Sync panel with a 165Hz refresh rate or a 4K (3840 x 2160) panel with a 120Hz refresh rate and Adaptive Sync. Regardless of the configuration, both panels have a response rate of 3ms and colour accuracy of 100% DCI-P3, as well as being Pantone Validated. Powering all that hardware is a large 90WHr battery.
On the surface, the S17’s keyboard takes a page out of the Zephyrus Duo; instead of a second display, ASUS has fitted the laptop’s keyboard on to the Ergo Lift, thus elevating it at an angle upon being opened and giving the user a slightly more comfortable typing experience in the long haul. On top of that, the S17 also has a larger, customisable scroll wheel, that ASUS says can serve multiple functions and not just to adjust the volume. Like the M16, all that hardware is tucked into a thin, magnesium and aluminium alloy chassis, that is no thicker than 2cm. As to when the ROG Zephyrus S17 will be available in Malaysia, sadly, ASUS says that, at the current moment, the laptop won’t be coming to our shores anytime soon. That said, the company could change its mind a little down the road, so fingers crossed.
