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120 of 128 people found the following review helpful.
Gaming Powerhouse for a reasonable price.
By Bradley Proctor
So I noticed some weak reviews for this product and am quite disgusted. I bought this unit from Best Buy and have so far been impressed. I typically am a desktop user, in fact, I normally custom build my own rigs. I was in the market for a laptop, and didn't want to frustrate myself with custom building one so I shopped around a lot. For the price, it will be difficult to beat this machine. The only laptops that will come close (Dell XPS, AlienWare, and MSI) would all likely cost and extra $500-$1000. Every game I have played so far (Portal 2, Skyrim, etc) have ran on ultra settings with extremely great frame rates. Now for the Pros and cons:Pros: Great heat displacement, it has two large exhaust ports on the backside of the machine. This keeps the heat off of the bottom and allows for "lap-top" computing. Processing speed is amazing. Cost is low, but shop around, I got it at Bust Buy for $200 cheaper (though the build is not exact to this model make your own decisions as to what you need). Back-lit key board is extremely neat. Large vibrant HD screen. Its not loaded down with a bunch of bloatware and demos. GTX 660M is a great GPU for most all (with the exception of the have to have the most expensive and overkill, melt your face GPU) users. Additional port for secondary HDD. Easy access for upgrades to HDD an memory. Ivy Bridge! This thing has blistering fast multi-app processing power!Cons (and the reason for 4 stars): The biggest drawback for me is the 1TB HDD, as it is slow (7200 RPM). For this reason alone Windows Experience Index rated it a 5.9. All other ratings were mid to upper 7's. Shame on you Asus. For $130 buy a 128GB SSD from Amazon and up your computing potential. Just use the 1TB as a slave. It is bulky, but to be expected as it is a gaming lappy. Good luck trying to find a case that fits it.Lastly the power brick is enormous and the battery is lucky to give you 1.5 hrs unplugged. Again, this is a gaming laptop so this is to be expected.Other thoughts: The pros highly out weigh the cons! For the price this Republic of Gamers laptop by Asus is a great investment.
46 of 51 people found the following review helpful.
Great machine for the money!
By technojunkie
I'm not a super gaming computer geek, but i know computers well and am an avid console gamer. I like playing fighting games like SFIV and the like and I also love first person shooters, action games, etc. Well so far I am VERY impressed with this behemouth of a machine! Not that street fighter is the most graphically intensive game, but i was coming from runing on my macbook pro under bootcamp with windows 7. Night and day difference. I can crank up all the settings including 8x antialiasing and the frame rate is stunning. no lag whatsoever. full screen full resolution all the bells and whistles enabled. Just Cause 2 i couldn't get the same with everything maxed out, but you probably would need a higher end machine to do that. With everything maxed out i was getting like 20fps but when i turned off the GPU water effect and toned down a couple other things i was getting a solid 60fps on the in game benchmark tests. Batman arkham asylum and the newer arkham city look positively stunning and smooooooth. The picture is great on this machine and the sound is quite good especially with the subwoofer. The power supply practically needs it own carrying case! Seriously this is the biggest brick i've ever seen on a notebook. The keyboard is very nice as is the track pad. the buttons on the trackpad have quite a bit of travel and feel kind of soft, but not mushy. The track pad also supports two finger rotation and pinch to zoom and 2 finger scrolling and 3 finger aero conrol of the windows 7 windows ala macbook (although it's nowhere near as smooth as the mac, but i didn't get this machine for smooth window navigation). I LOVE the rubberized feel of the plastic of the case. I also love that the machine doesn't come with 100 pieces of "bloatware"the 750gb hard drivecomes partitioned with about 300 (drive c) for OS and other programs and then a drive D (presumably for your gaming data) is about 400gb. There is still an open expansion bay for another hard drive I believe. Now remember, this is kind of the "bottom of the line" G75 with the 2gb graphics card (the 660) and the processors on the higher end units run a bit faster. So far the machine stays quite cool and it not even as noisey as my macbook pro (and not nearly as hot, you could make toast on my macbook when i was runing games in bootcamp). I don't know a lot about gaming machines but i've read that you can't just look at the graphics card or the processor but you have to look at everything together including how well the machine can cool itself because that can affect how well the gpu runs. I'm sure there are faster notebooks out there, but for 1500 bucks I am beside myself. I use an xbox 360 wireless controller and it works flawlessly, just make sure you download the 64bit driver from microsoft. For steam users, install it to the larger partition (the D drive). There is plenty of room on the 400gb partition. Even if every game you use is 10gb (which they usually are not) That's a lot of games with no external drive and you still have the C partition to store files on, plus you can always get another drive installed. I'm giving it 4 stars just to be conservative, but so far the only thing that's a bit off-putting is it's sheer size. it's much deeper than my 17 inch macbook and won't even fit (width-wise) into the sleeve of my 17inch backpack although it barely fits the length. I had to order an alienware backpack that accomodates the larger machines with the 17.3 screens. I travel A LOT and it is going to be really fantastic to have a complete gaming library with me wherever I go! Unless you're an uber-geek I would highly recommend this unit. Im sure it will do me for several years, but then again, technology is such that you're constantly kicking yourself for not waiting for the next better, faster, quieter, cooler, more power efficient thing to come along.Oh, by the way, the unit is lighter than it appears. Still heavy, but it is a desktop replacment, so that's just part and parcel...Hope this helps
29 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent power, annoying audio bug.
By Greg Siegel
Everything you've read in the other reviews about its power is true. Portal 2, Skyrim, etc. all look beautiful on this laptop. The matte screen with full 1080p resolution is very nice and easy on the eye. The jet engine fans on the back of the laptop have allowed for hours of gaming without feeling like I could flip the laptop over and grill an egg.Now, some issues. One is that the space bar is not as responsive as I would like on a gaming keyboard. If I have my thumb too far over to one side, it will fail to register the press. This being the jump key in a lot of games, one can imagine the annoyance this has caused (I've run straight off of platforms like a dork).The major issue, however, is that the subwoofer will sometimes play when you have headphones in. For a while, every time I started a media source that had audio, I would have to pull out my headphones and reinsert. This is quite annoying when you are trying to play something in a crowded room, or when someone in your house is sleeping. I uninstalled the drivers and let windows install its own, but now it mutes the audio until I click mute then unmute again. I don't know what is going on with this audio chipset, but there appear to be some kinks to iron out.The audio issue is not a dealbreaker for me, as the laptop really is quite nice looking with excellent performance.I am hoping an update in the future will make my $1300 purchase perform as it should.
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