Customer Reviews

ASUS Republic of Gamers G75VW-AH71 17.3-Inch Gaming Laptop

5 star:		(105)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

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.

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

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.

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.

I purchased this laptop from Amazon around a month ago. I planned to use it for analyzing my data in Matlab and gaming. Mainly as desktop replacement, but also for travels to conferences, collaborators, etc. I think I made the right choice, since up to now I am completely satisfied. Computer performance is extraordinary good, design is neat, keyboard is good.

I experienced one unpleasant problem which I managed to solve. The computer every now and then (couple of times in an hour or so) makes a latency spike for about 1-2 sec, during which nothing works and if you happen to listen to music or watching a movie, it will make horrible screeching sound. I am pretty tolerant person, so I didn't care until this thing started to interfere with my League of Legend tournaments (2 sec lag in a wrong place equals to loosing a 45 min game). So I went online, and found this thread on the Republic of Gamers forum rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?14960-G75VW-random-audio-and-graphics-spike). It turns out that many people have this problem with G75. Someone on the forum reported that uninstalling McAfee antivirus worked for him. I tried and it worked for me too. I do not experience this problem anymore. But I have to warn you that some other people report that this solution doesn't work for them.

There are other minor problems, which I want to report.

1. When the computer came, the bottom rim of the screen was detached, that is, disconnected from the screen itself. I fixed it by gently pushing onto the rim, so the holders on the other side went inside the corpus where they belong.

2. Sometimes, if I use a headset, the computer doesn't give audio output into earphones, but instead gives it to the speakers (sometimes both speakers and earphones at the same time). So I have to unplug headset and plug it in again.

3. Touchpad works strange in double touch mode. It is supposed to implement mac-like scrolling with double touch, but it works only half of the time. I found that it works better if you touch it sort of ridiculously gentle, like almost to pressure at all. Well, anyway I don't use this function.

Update-02/12/2013: Still very satisfied. Had no further problems, computer works very stable. Problem with headset has been solved in latest audio card patch. Touchpad scrolling works fine too, turns out I wasn't using it right: for bottom-up scrolling you are supposed to make double touch in vertical axis, but I was making in horizontal.

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.

I have had this laptop for a few weeks now and I am very impressed,I am an avid gamer and I did upgrade the single 750 gig harddrive to dual SSd drive shortly after I recived it. not that the original harddrive did not work correctly I am just a performance geek.

So far all the games I have ran so far I have been able to run on the highest settings the games will alow, WoW, Age of Conan, LOTRO, Crysis, Guild Wars 2, Skyrim, Dungeon siege 3, Diablo 3, Star Wars the old Republic, witcher 2, and a few others. and the machines runs them great, and remains pretty cool compared to my last gaming laptop.

I love the backlit keyboard,and the hotkey setup, another thing is the USB 3.0 with the smart charge port, this port charges my cell phone in about half the time of the standard 2.0 ports. and will also charge when the laptop is turned off and unplugged.

The only thing I have found is that the laptop is abit heavy but concidering the size this is to be exspected, and the touch pad configuration which is not a real issue as I use a gaming mouse anyway.

All in all I have been very happy with the purchase and would recomend the laptop to others.

Its rare to see such specs with such low price, i bought early last jun and been using it since then.

this laptop is amazing for gamers, it run Diablo 3 and SWTOR on max smoothly. my only take is its wight, the thing really heavy to take around (but personally i dont mind :)

it has alot ports and a very nice screen, if u need a gaming laptop with limited buget this is your choice!

Best of luck, hope this helps. Ali

I bought this review because of the excellent specs for a fairly reasonable price. I had this laptop for no more than a month when a bright pixel appeared on the LED screen. Since the sticker on the box said "0 bright dot guarantee", I didn't really worry about it. However, after contacting customer service, I was told that the "0 Bright dot guarantee" only covered you if you hade 5 or more bright dots. I don't know how my definition of 0 managed to be different than Asus's, but being basically told to go screw myself after spending $1500 on a gaming laptop makes me sick to my stomach. So now I can just walk into dark rooms in games, and say hello to my little green dot that apparantly "Does not impact the perfomance of the machine". Just a horrible annoyance that will ensure that if I purchase another gamning laptop, it will ASBOLUTELY not come from Asus!

EDIT:
Well @ the beginning of November I did a BIOS update from Asus website (.AS221 file) using EasyFlash and immediately after the G75 rebooted I observed that the backit goes out past the ROG login screen. Thinking nothing of it used it for some time and finally rebooted after updating GTX660M driver. The G75 is bricked @ this point,only the power light is on and the fans. Screen, gpu, hdd, sdd, usb, dvd - DEAD !!!
Now, I live in Brooklyn so I hand delivered this Asus to Datavision in NYC on Nov. 11th, today is Nov. 27th and I sitting here writing this on a '06 Toshiba Satellite A135 :/ & my damn Asus is still in Datavision.
The people there are telling me Asus DID NOT SEND THE MOTHERBOARD YET !!!! They tried to contact Asus headquarters in Cali. by E-mail - no response for two days !!! I'm trying to call them myself, but there's never anyone available.
So now I'm here for 15 days without my G75 and the goddamn company is not responding, @ Datavision I don't even have to give them the repair # the guy just knows me by voice :(
ASUS Support sucks just like many people said. I wish I could just get my PC back fast, exchange it, get my money back and go with MSi brand, since I tired of waiting for a High-End GPU option in Asus G, or even the damn G75VX release.
ASUS WARRANTY REPAIR IS TRASH !!! ZERO COURTESY !

The five stars remain since the G75VW is amazing when working, but people representing the company are good for nothing.

ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Asus G75VW-AS71: This is my first 17+" laptop.
I did own Asus K53SV-A1 which I loved, but I just shipped it today since I got this beast.
In a glance the G75VW doesn't look as elegant and sexy as my K53SV. I'll go further and say it looks kinda boring with it's shades of gray, but that all changes when You start it up the first time.
If You're buying a PC for it's looks then this isn't the one for You, but if You're a pro-gamer on some days and like to get in 1080p HD action and destruction then You've found a match!!!!
Since last year when I got my previous Asus laptop I'm hooked on their products. Fair pricing with great value and reliability make this brand my first choice every time.

This G75 is no different and comes packed with high-end hardware that will keep You in the game for the next year or two.
Since it's a gaming PC I have to mention BF3.

Battlefield 3 runs like a monster: 1080p + ambient occlusion + anti-alising + ultra detail (shadows on high) and I run @ 45 - 60 FPS.
My kill ratio and points/min jumped like crazy since everything runs so much smoother. The GTX660M never gets hot like GT540M (85*C @ BF3) I had before and manages to squeeze out so much performance, 16GB SO-DIMM RAM loads all games @ lightning speeds and the i7 3610QM processor edits 1080p video like my i5 2410M did on 480p - super fast.
This here is a Battlefield 3 Certified Gaming Laptop in my book :D I'm a Bf fan so I don't really know how other games will run, but with these specs You just can't go wrong!

I'm a proud new owner of this Asus G75VW ROG for less then a week and realize that it's too early to give it a mark, but so far the ROG delivers everything that was promised to me.
In some time I'll do an update on this product to let anyone interested know it works out.
'Till then Peace!

UPDATE:
Well we just passed September and the G75 is running as strong as the first day I had it............
Tried a couple of more games (Ultra detail) GTA4 + car mods + IC Enchancer 1080p 30-50fps :) the game looks amazing. Since I have the G75 I think I edited over 3TB of 1080p and HD+ video and uploaded to Youtube using my old Toshiba Satellite, the i7 had enough power reserve that it never gets hotter than 70*C working for straight 30min. of video conversion. Since last time I had a pleasure of using a MSi GT70ONE with GTX 670M 3GB, 12GB RAM & 3610QM i7 and gotta say even though the GTX 670M has more power and is definitely faster mine the temps this MSi reached were just sad. 80*C after 20min. of BF 3 1080p gameplay :/ GTX 660M should have more memory (I wish:D) since this GPU never, let me repeat this NEVER gets hotter than 64-65*C - You can keep it on Your lap making this rig the only gaming laptop I've seen that is capable of this :D

In general: I read many bad reviews mentioning the screen or GPU not working, myself never had even the slightest problem with this G75VW, just like the K53SV it's a great machine that makes me happy every time I start it up and never wastes my time with blue screens and freezes (come to think f it I never seen a blue screen since my K53 or had a AsusTek product fail - that speaks to me about their quality, since I had PCs that showed me nothing but errors in the past).
Every product has defects and writing reviews about those defects doesn't make sense to me, one should only review something You were actually able to use, that said I do understand the frustration coming from a broken computer as well.

Anyway, in my opinion this is the best PC I ever had I can't really think of any major negative I should mention.
One thing I would like to see happen would be AsusTek releasing a GTX 680M 4GB powered G75VW - it's long over due .
Peace.