Can a 14 Year Old Gaming Laptop Survive 2024? (Spoiler: It Doesn’t) – Asus G53J in 2024
Gaming laptops have come an awfully long way in 14 years. This absolute behemoth is an Asus G53J – a chonker of a 2010 gaming laptop. It was a fairly high end machine, sporting an Intel i7 740QM quad core CPU with hyperthreading, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and a dedicated NVIDIA GPU – specifically a GTX 460M with a full 1.5GB of VRAM. That’s a formula we are pretty familiar with these days, right? I mean an i7 and NVIDIA graphics. That’s kind of standard now, but in 2010 that was more of a rarity.
What wasn’t so rare was the thickness. This thing is all but exactly TWO inches thick at the back, it’s 50mm thick at the back. That is insane compared to today’s thin and light machines. The wedge shape was fairly common though, meaning it wasn’t too uncomfortable to use, housing most of the heat producing components up at the top, leaving space for things like dual 2.5 inch bays and an optical drive bay under the palm rest area. Oh, yeah, you heard me right, dual hard drive bays – one of which is now populated with a 512GB SATA SSD, AND an optical drive! Fancy, I know! IO isn’t too bad either, with a total of FOUR USB A ports, one of which is USB 3, separate headphone and microphone jacks, ethernet, DC in, HDMI and VGA. You even get an SD card reader!
Display wise, this is a 15.6”, rather wide bezel-ed, 1080p 60Hz TN panel, with frankly atrocious viewing angles. Remarkably, despite its age and the fact this is a gaming display, not one made for colour work, it would still just about pass for a budget laptop display today, with 93% coverage of the sRGB spectrum and 250 nits of peak brightness – that’s better than the MSI Bravo 15! It does have a disappointing 600:1 contrast ratio, but that’s to be expected, and the colour accuracy is just hilariously bad, with an average DeltaE of nearly 10 – remember under two is the target we’re normally aiming for.
As you might expect, response times are utterly horrendous, averaging around 25 milliseconds to complete a transition. Considering the display is already painfully slow at 60 hertz, that’s 16.67 milliseconds per frame, 25 milliseconds is pretty naff – although it’s actually only one ghosted frame at a time. Have a look at the high speed footage and you’ll see that there’s only one remaining copy of the last frame on screen at a time. Now that isn’t amazing, but considering the hardware, the display is actually the least of our worries here. If you were wondering, latency is actually spot on at just shy of 9 milliseconds, with basically no runs taking longer than one frame to display. Good job 2010’s Asus!
Now I mentioned that the display is likely the least of our concerns here, and that’s for good reason. The gaming experience on this bad boy is… lacklustre. For some context, here is data from a modern Asus laptop running at much higher settings – in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, a game that isn’t exactly known for being an incredibly difficult game to run – on the High preset at 1080p the much newer STRIX Scar 16 offered an excellent 182 FPS average, compared to the G53J at just 720p on the Low preset with just 17 FPS average. That… that’s a slideshow. That isn’t a playable experience, and that’s pretty much the bottom of the barrel for settings too.
More esports style titles are more playable – in fact I played a round of Rainbow Six Siege on the G53J and even managed to get a couple kills (on bots anyway). The display was painfully slow, but amazingly even at 720p, low settings and 50% render scale, Siege still only offered 48 FPS average – compared to over 300 FPS from the STRIX Scar 16 at 1080p on medium settings. It is technically playable, but you wouldn’t really want to.
CS2 is the same story. I gave it a go playing against some bots at 720p on low, and it was technically playable, although it felt considerably less stable than Siege, and outright just not a fun experience. That’s backed up by the performance data, where charitably you could say this ran slightly faster at 49 FPS average, but practically I’d say felt worse. That’s compared to over 300 FPS at 1080p from the STRIX Scar 16 from 2023.
If you were wondering if the CPU was any better, in short, no. Cinebench R23 has the quad core in this offering less performance all core than the 13980HX in the STRIX Scar 16 does from a single thread. Seriously – under 1500 points all core from the 740QM, and over 2000 points in single threaded on the 13980HX. Blender is even worse. The BMW scene – which is normally done in between one and two minutes took basically 30 minutes, and the Gooseberry scene which takes between 10 and 20 minutes took 2 hours. This is seriously slow.
Now you certainly can still use this for web browsing and word processing, but compared to even an ultra-budget modern machine you’d have a worse experience in basically every way. While I don’t like throwing away technically still functional things, I think it’s time to put this old girl out to pasture. A similarly priced – at least comparing new to new – like the Scar 16 runs rings around this, is lighter, a third the thickness, has a much, much, much better display, and is all-round a considerably better experience. It also has a battery that works – if I unplug the power cord here the G53 shuts down immediately. Oh, and the Scar can actually play some games! Things have changed a lot in 14 years, and a lot of it is for the better.
