Asus G73SW: A High-End Gaming Laptop Without the High-End Price

To start with glance the Asus G73SW desktop replacement laptop appears to get its inspiration through the F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber. It's all angles, that has a matte-black complete that seems to be both understated and killer at the same time.

Underneath the hood lurks a quad-core Intel Core i7 2630QM processor which has a base clock frequency of 2GHz but can drive to 2.93GHz in Turbo Increase mode. Toss in 8GB of fast DDR3-1333 RAM plus an Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M discrete GPU using a dedicated one.5GB frame buffer, and you also hold the guts of the dandy gaming system. The unit also rewards from a 17.3-inch, LED-backlit LCD supplying 1920-by-1080-pixel Hd resolution.

All that CPU and GPU horsepower will not likely be a lot of of a burden on by now tight budgets. Our model, using a Blu-ray push along with a pair of Seagate 7200-rpm, 500GB tough drives, costs about $1650 (as of March 25, 2011). Alternatively, while your wallet may possibly not experience the strain, your back again and shoulders may in case you lug this laptop computer around regularly. With out the 150W power brick, the G73SW weighs eight kilos, eleven ounces--not terrible to get a laptop computer within this class. That 150W power provide, nonetheless, adds a complete two pounds to your load. Sure, the battery daily life is good for this laptop group at nearly three.five several hours; but if you plan on prolonged gaming sessions, you are going to want to retain the energy brick useful.

All round gaming efficiency was a nice surprise. I was concerned the GTX 460M may be somewhat underpowered. As a substitute, the system chewed by means of our most demanding Far Cry 2 check, reaching about 56 frames per 2nd. At the "high" setting, F1 2010 ran at 65 fps. Just Cause two took the system down a notch at ultrahigh settings, as the laptop eked out only 16 fps, but that sport incorporates a huge amount of settings which you can progressively dial down without having resulting in a significant reduction in visual quality. The G73SW also performed well on normal desktop applications, powering through our WorldBench 6 benchmark having a fantastic score of 128.

We found a few niggling shortcomings, even so. The G73SW ships that has a Blu-ray player, however the Roxio CinePlayer BD application's picture high quality appeared a bit within the soft side; the system would occasionally crash on exit, too. Audio top quality is good, offered you ensure the incorporated Imaginative THX TruStudio processing software program is enabled. If you leave it disabled, the overall audio quantity and sound high quality are quite weak. With TruStudio on, the sound high quality and volume levels are considerably much more pleasing.

The G73SW ships with plenty of ports, like four USB (two on each side; one of the correct facet ports is USB three.0 capable). You may also discover HDMI and VGA video clip outputs, in addition an SD Card slot. The Blu-ray disc-loading tray pops out within the left facet, but two USB ports straddle the optical-drive bay. Ethernet and audio jacks also dwell about the left facet.

The Asus design and style crew did a fantastic job of developing in very good ventilation to maintain the unit cooled without creating disturbingly high noise ranges. Sure, you can listen to the cooling fans spin up below a large sport load, but the impact isn't as objectionable as it is on another gaming laptops I've lived with. And when you are donning a headset, you might not hear the fans whatsoever.

The keyboard delivers good tactile feedback, but the depth of important presses appears shallow in contrast together with the sense of other gaming keyboards I've used. The spacing between keys is very very good, and my all round impression is good.

The storage configuration on our examination unit appeared a little weird, even so. The G73SW-A1 unit we examined arrived having a pair of Seagate 7200-rpm, 500GB hard drives. Which is all well and great, but every single push shipped with two separate partitions, which results in 4 whole partitions you'll want to deal with. Within a dual-drive program, I'd a lot prefer both two drives every with 1 massive partition, or perhaps a RAID 1 configuration for the small additional data security.

Overall, the Asus G73SW presents excellent performance at a sensible price. It isn't specifically svelte, however it just isn't too much of the dilemma to have close to. Given the overall efficiency, that's not also big a burden whatsoever.