needing help on choosing asus laptop to buy, GL553VE-FY117T?

[haihane]

hi,

preface/ disclaimer:
i'm a proud owner of ASUS zenbook ux303lb, and since i'll soon be gifting this laptop to my dear brother who'll soon be graduating, which means it's time for me to shop for another laptop for myself.

just... when i was travelling overseas and felt i had the need to do some in-hotel gaming, the downside of the zenbook became apparent (even with its GTX 940m). when i tried to do some quick Heroes of The Storm light gaming, 30 minutes into the game, the zenbook became uncomfortably hot. shortly after realizing that, i gave up trying to game on it altogether and uninstalled HOTS.

i realized i was asking too much from the zenbook (it's a freaking ultrabook, not a makeshift gaming laptop damn it, i kept reminding myself). for the original purpose i bought the zenbook for (portable web browsing, office productivity work), it was more than satisfactory.

maybe i felt it's time for a switch in tastes. so i'm here asking for help, opinions, advices on a new laptop i could be buying soon.



conundrum:

initially i fell in love with this:

at the time of this writing, it's not available for purchase at my area.


what i'm looking for in a laptop:
1080p IPS panel? check. 1440p is a plus, but 1080p is the absolute minimum i'm willing to go compromise with. it has to be IPS panel, however. i don't care about TN response time. i'm not skilled enough to react that fast that a few ms matters all that much. but display screen beauty matters quite a bit for me. I flat out rejected Dell Inspiron 15 7000 series laptop despite it being beautiful looking just because Dell cheaped out on its display.


7th Gen Intel processor series? check. (i was willing to even wait for AMD to come up with their Mobile Ryzen series, if ever. but realizing that it might be a looooong wait, i'm willing to settle for Intel)


Hinge design? well, ****. If Dave Lee is to be believed, then this particular laptop isn't going to last very long from repeated opening/ closing of the lid. the same was also said about my zenbook UX303lb series, but after 1 year of usage (1 year 4 months, i checked the purchase receipt 😮 ), i find that the hinge was still tight as ever. i believe if i took extra care on the laptop, it shouldn't wear out that quickly. but certainly, if the Hinge design is superior, that's certainly a big brownie point.

GTX 1050Ti graphics? and 4 GB VRAM? sweet jesus! (check!)
Battery life isn't excellent, and that's fine with me. i'm already used to looking for wall plugs and carry with me the laptop charger wherever i go. also, perhaps, i'm pretty self conscious about battery wear level that i'd try to avoid as much charge/ discharge cycle in order to help the battery last as long as possible. this is probably true for any laptop from any manufacturer.



Optical drive? i don't need any optical drive. if the space for optical drive could be used to further cram more stuff into the laptop (more battery, more horsepower), that'd be swell. after all, i can just rip whatever optical media and load it onto virtual clone drive at home or at office. but the existence of an optical drive, i can tolerate it.

Storage? 256 GB SSD (either sata3 or NVMe interface) is plenty good enough for me.
of course, NVMe interface would be really delicious! but it's not a must. if at all possible, i'd like to avoid the zenbook's HDD+SSD cache design (1tb hdd + 22 GB SSD Cache). reason being: while it performs great on the surface, but everytime after a big Windows 10 anniversary update, the zenbook took an extraordinary amount of time to restart. the problem was perhaps that it had something to do with the caching algorithm that confused the controller. i find myself worrying everytime a big update happens.

as such, i now prefer a dedicated SSD for OS drive, and maybe a secondary drive as steam library. i'm even willing to compromise with just a 256 GB SSD when push comes to shove.


The question:
so, today i ask the Shop where i bought most of my computer stuff locally, and he offered me this : ASUS GL553VE-FY117T.

before biting the bullet, would anyone who owned this unit be kind enough to tell me if there's anything i should be worried about in this laptop model? or if there's a better ASUS alternative model that fits the criteria i need, please do tell me!

i realize the nature of these question(s) can be rather... queer? but i do want to avoid a disappointing purchase if at all possible.
if it means forking more money out, i could be willing to bite an even bigger bullet so i can get the best kind of laptop for my own needs.

the games i play were mostly: Diablo 3, Sid meier's Civ5, Heroes of the Storm, Might and Magic series. this is where i feel 1050Ti should already fit my needs.

Thank you,



Sincerely,
Hane.