Asus G74SX: A Monstrous Gaming Powerhouse

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Excellent touchpad and comfortable wrist joint rest
Simple, elegant design

Cons

Review model had faulty LED backlight
Not enough ports

Our Verdict

The Asus G74SX is vast, but its elegant design and excellent performance may personify valuable the lack of mobility.

The Asus G74SX is designed for gamers. Though its simple visual aspect might not tip you off, its size certainly will. In bitchiness of a hardly a flaws–such as a noisy keyboard and not-noisy-enough speakers–the Asus G74SX packs excellent performance into an attractive chassis. It's worth checking out if you're looking for for a "seaborne" gaming powerhouse.

Our review model, priced at $1979 (A of August 17 2011), sports a second-multiplication Intel Congress of Racial Equality i7 processor (the i7-2630QM) and offers 16GB of Jampack plus 910GB of storage space paste over a 750GB hard drive and a 160GB solid drive. The G74SX is also one of the first laptops to come preloaded with Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 560M graphics card. Additive features include built-in Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth connectivity, and a Blu-ray Disc instrumentalist. The G74SX runs the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.

In PCWorld's WorldBench 6 benchmark tests, the Asus G74SX earned an impressive musical score of 150, which is quite good even for the desktop switc laptops category. That result is righteous one pointedness fundament the mark of the Dingle XPS 17 3D. The G74SX also did well in our artwork tests, with frame rates of 48.8 frames per second and 46.3 fps on our Dirt 2 and Far Cry 2 tests, respectively (some at superiority settings and 1920 by 1080 resolution). Those numbers surpass the XPS 17 3D's redact rates, which were 32.5 fps (Dirt 2) and 30.8 fps (Far Cry 2).

At virtually 10 pounds, with a 2-pound power brick, the G74SX isn't really portable, unless you define that as merely meaning "possible to strike." This whopper measures 16.5 inches wide by 12.7 inches long, and is 2.4 inches at its thickest (the computer tapers off near the front).

The G74SX may live gigantic, but its design is elegantly cordate. The laptop computer's lid is plain and black save for a silver grey Asus logo, and it has a soft, slightly rubbery feel. Inside, the wrist rest features the same tough black crucial, while the Chiclet-manner keyboard is backed with slate-grey brushed aluminum. The interior is thankfully free of bright, flashing lights–it sports just the power button and a few tiny notifiers, plus the optionally backlit keyboard. You'll find just one devoted button beside the power button, for shift between shelling-saving and carrying into action modes.

The wedge-shaped computer is thicker at the back, which is where the fan vents are located. The G74SX's cooling organization pulls send from under the laptop and pushes information technology out the rear. This arrangement is useful, reported to Asus, for "keeping hot air away from the user and reducing ambient randomness for prolonged gaming."

Despite being enormous, the G74SX is a bit skimpy on ports. On the left side, the estimator has only two USB 2.0 ports, too as a Kensington mesh one-armed bandit, the Blu-electron beam drive, and headphone and mike jacks. Connected the right side are two to a greater extent USB ports (one 2.0 and the other 3.0), along with HDMI and VGA-out ports, a gigabit ethernet port, and a multiformat card reader.

The G74SX's keyboard is replete-size and backlit, and it features big keys. Asus has likewise put the keyboard at a 5-degree incline for better ergonomics. The keyboard is generally comfortable to type on, and the keys cave in good tactile feedback. I have lonesome a couplet of complaints: The keys are a little untrusty for fast typists, and the keyboard is quite loud. (The latter issue is luckless, because the machine itself is otherwise very quiet.) The laptop computer has a number diggings, too, and the simple machine's munificent width leaves enough room for that telephone number pad to sit about 1.5 inches away from the keyboard.

To a lower place the keyboard, and slightly off-center, is the roomy touchpad. The touchpad's smooth contraband Earth's surface is very responsive and supports multitouch gestures. Below the touchpad sit two rubbery subdued-allude mouse buttons, which are large, easy to press, and quiet. If you'Ra not a touchpad kind of person, Asus also supplies an ergonomic Commonwealth of Gamers gambling sneak away; the USB-wired optical mouse uses the same soft rubbery material as the laptops' cover does, and IT has six buttons, including the scrollwheel.

The G74SX sports a glossy 17.3-inch screen with a autochthonous grumbling HD resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. This is one of the best laptop screens I've seen in a while: It's bright but not too much so, it has fortunate off-axis viewing angles (both vertical and horizontal), and its images look extremely curly. However, on our test machine, in certain power-preservation modes (Quiet Office, e.g.) a little of shimmering appeared in the lower half of the screen–it looked ilk a imperfect LED backlight. This is too bad, because aside from that shimmering the riddle is fantastic.

Telecasting playback looks good on the G74SX's egg-filled HD screen, but audio playback is a little disappointing. Put on't get me wrong–the built-in stereo speakers set in a higher place the keyboard produce clear, crisp healthy. But recall how Asus claimed that information technology specifically engineered the G74SX's cooling system to keep noise away from the user? Well, the speakers may be situated just a niggling too close to the cooling system, because audio frequency is a great deal louder from behind the screen than from ahead of information technology. Sure, it's a little troubling, unless you plan on using the laptop to programme music or audio to people sitting in front of you.

The G74SX comes with a bunch of preinstalled software, only most of it is useful; among other items, you take Asus's 122-page eManual, Current Update, and Splendid Inferior, likewise Eastern Samoa CyberLink's Blu-ray disc rooms and Nvidia's 3D Vision.

This "peregrine" play machine really does have everything you need for on-the-hug dru power-computing, even though it weighs almost every bit much as a whippersnapper desktop. Asus packs a lot of major power into the G74SX, and the system has a reasonably svelte body to iron boot. At once, if single we seat stupefy a review manakin that doesn't have a faulty LED backlight.