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 (5400 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.
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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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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
Honest reviews on ASUS Republic of Gamers G75VW-AS71 17.3-Inch Gaming Laptop
I just bought my new Asus Laptop June 2 at a Best Buy. The unit I received has slightly different specs than the one listed here however they are minimal. The laptop I purchased has only 8gigs of RAM instead of 16 but has a 1TB Hard Drive. Besides that it is the same machine. However, I found it at Best Buy for 1299 instead of 1499 (which is rare because I never expect Best Buy to have the best price). I ended up paying 1566 after 5% tax but that included two year comprehensive warranty, Microsoft office, and two years of antivirus which I couldn't pass up. I went straight home to try it out and so far I am impressed. The unit looks beautiful with the matte screen and the fingerprint resistant finish. The resolution is stunning and the backlit keyboard is solid. (though the keys feel a bit cheap I am not at all concerned)
As my main concern was graphics, the first thing I did was download Skyrim from Steam. Booting up the game for the first time showed me how this unit is worth every penny. Many reviews talk generally about the graphics of their system but at the end of the day, I want to be able to say how it handles specific games. That being said, Skyrim looks FANTASTIC. I played it on my xbox360 in HD and the performance on this laptop makes the 360 version look like its from the 90's. The lighting effects, graphical details, and resolution are all amazing and the smooth framerate blew me away. I couldn't believe how well it was rendering the dense foliage and textures without missing a beat. I am confident this baby will run anything I throw at it for years to come. I also noticed that getting my music onto ITunes was fast as well. On my old computers, uploading hundreds of files into the program often caused it to crash and took hours. I got all my music up in a matter of minutes.
One thing I did notice was the vibrations of the DVD drive when it is reading a disk. I didn't worry at all but you always prefer quiet disk drives. As I don't plan on using much media from DVD/CD's the concern is minimal. Also the sound quality is rich and there seems to be a built in sub woofer but the volume doesn't quite reach loud enough for my tastes. However, I have external speakers whenever I really need great volume so this is another non issue for me. I have yet to find any real cons to this system yet although I have only had it for a day.
The computer runs very quiet and looks like a professional/nerdy mix of materials and design. I would also like to emphasize that I did lots of research before arriving at this laptop. I found that it had minimal negative reviews with many good ones that matched my graphical expectations and price point. While some people may complain about the hefty size of the computer or the large AC adapter brick that accompanies the unit, you must remember that this is a desktop replacement gaming laptop and it serves its role admirably. I would strongly recommend this laptop to anyone looking for a gaming powerhouse laptop without breaking the bank and is willing to sacrifice portability for power.
**Update**
I bought a SanDisk 120 GIG SSD on Amazon and went to Best Buy to let them install it. The warrenty I purchased covered the instalation and migration of the OS to the SSD. It took them three days to complete the job and I now have both hard drives in the machine: the 120SSD and the 1Terabyte 5400RMP-HHD. I have to say it was a great idea to upgrade. My computer boots in 20 seconds (as oppsed to about 60 before)I was able to load saves in Skyrim in five second as opposed to 10-15 seconds. This is as fast as I have ever seen a computer run. I store all OS related files and programs as well as games on the SSD and my music, docs, and movies on the HHD. The people at best buy did remove the recovery partition, but I can take it back if something happens. I highly reccomend doing a similar upgrade if you have an in store warrenty or if you know how to do it yourself.
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I have only had this notebook for two days now and would like to focus this review on my first impressions and experiences with it. I received it two days ago when I got home from work. After charging the battery for a couple of hours I turned it on and it went through a process of setting up some things in Windows and I had to enter my wireless key. Everything went smoothly. I was surprised to see only five icons on the desktop-Recycle Bin, Asus Vibe Fun Center (whatever that is)Asus Web Storage, eManual, and McAfee! I suspected that there might be some anti-virus software lurking and sure enough, a one month free trial from McAfee which I had five days to activate! Amazon didn't say anything about that.
So, knowing I would need to have an anti-virus program, I went to the McAfee website to activate the temporary account and ended up buying a year's subscription online for around $70 and downloaded it. Before it could download, McAfee had to first uninstall the free one month anti-virus trial program. I guess if I opted out it would have been up to me to figure out how to uninstall it entirely before installing Norton. Anyway, I bought it from them and everything seems OK.
Now the first order of business was to create the four Recovery DVD's. Using some HP DVD+R 4.7GB, the first DVD took 45 minutes to burn, the second and third 10 minutes each, and the fourth 7 minutes for a total of 72 minutes. Had I checked the box "Fully verify data when burning disc" it would have been longer.
After waiting through many Windows updates, the machine seemed to be functioning very well. I downloaded Google Chrome and installed Adobe Lightroom 4 without any problems at all. I noticed a previous reviewer had a blue screen due to playing a you tube music video, so I tried one from Little Richard and it worked perfectly. If Richard can't give you a BSOD, nobody can!
I was hesitant to get a 17 inch screen, thinking that it would be too small for gaming, but when you sit in front of this notebook it looks a lot larger than 17 inches! I love it, and the matte finish is excellent, as is the illuminated keyboard (you can vary the intensity). I feel very good about buying this notebook. I originally ordered the model with the gtx 670 video card, but I had it backordered for ten days and nothing was happening, so I got this one. I don't think it will matter much to me because I am more interested in photography than gaming, except when it comes to Thief.
