How to upgrade your Asus ROG Strix G15

You can configure the Asus ROG Strix G15 to have 64GB RAM, 17-inch screen, and GeForce RTX 2070 Super… but the asking $2999 price was too much. Going in for sub-$1000 for the Electro Punk edition meant that some sacrifices had to be made… meaning a smaller screen, a less-powerful GPU, less storage, and RAM.

With the ROG Strix laptops, Asus made it really easy to open and access the storage and Ram, so upgrading your Ram and adding storage is a snap.

I decided to replace the Micro 8GB Ram that came with the laptop with two 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 2666Mhz Unbuffered SODIMM (for a total of 32GB). While it’s true that the installed Ram is clocked at a higher 3200mhz, in my tests, it shows a slower speed of 2900mhz (I believe you may have to manually overclock it in BIOS to get the maximum clock). The new Corsair DDR4 Ram showed a much faster read/write speed (23GB a second) than the Micron DDR4 Ram (11GB a second).

As for storage, I have added two 2TB NVME PCIe. The two SSD drives I used were Inland 1TB NVME PCIe and Western Digital 1TB Blue NVME PCIe. The WD drive is rated, and tested, faster (at 1.3MB a second) than the “genetic” Inland brand (at 1.1MB a second). It’s only by a hair, so I recommend saving some money and using the generic brand.

The new parts I added were:

For about $350, I was able to turn my Asus ROG Strix G15: Electro Punk into a respectable gaming laptop with enough storage (2.5TB) to store and carry around a lot of large triple A games.

Note: While some gamers might think 15 inches is too small, I think it is fine, especially because I want the lightness and portability of a laptop. In fact, I would’ve preferred a smaller screen. Since the screen can only handle 1080p, the 1650Ti GPU is perfectly fine for that screen. I was able to push 120 frames a second running Doom, and every game runs smoothly at 1080p (providing I use the power adapter).