[ViciousXUSMC]

Introduction:

What is the G73JH?

Well the G73 is Asus's new single gpu high end gaming laptop. Its priced considerably lower than any competing companies product. Asus truly is going with the "sell more for less" not "less for more" mentality with their sales.

Despite the low cost there was no holds barred for system specs and power. A 64bit Windows 7 OS, 8GB of ram 2x500GB HDD's, and the newest/best single high end gpu the ATI 5870....

This pays off for everybody. I think even amongst those willing to pay the extra money for the other brands there have been several Asus converts that have traded out there multi colored comrade for the smooth sleek G73.

This model comes in a few different variations depending where you buy it from and what options you want. They are all essentially the same core system.

G73JH
A1 - Bluray Optical Drive, 2x500gb HDD, Bag & Mouse
A2 - DVD Optical Drive, 2x500gb HDD, Bag & Mouse
X1 - DVD Optical Drive, 1x500gb HDD
X3 - DVD Optical Drive, 2x320gb HDD

Those are the only changes so far.

My unit is a G73JH-A2


Specs as configured

Operating System	Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
Processor & Cache Memory	Intel Core i7 Processor 720QM 1.60-2.80Ghz, 2.5GT/x, 45nm, 6MB, 45w
Chipset	Intel HM55 Express chipset
System Memory	8GB DDR3 1333Mhz
Display	17.3" 1920x1080 FHD Color-Shine (Glossy)
Video Graphics & Memory	ATI HD 5870 1GB GDDR5, DX11
Hard Drive	Dual 500GB (500x2) Seagate 7200RPM
Optical Drive	8x DVDRW Super Multi
Card Reader	8 in 1 (SD, MMC, MS, MS-Pro, Mini SD w/ adapter, MS-Duo, MS-Pro Duo via adapter)
Video Camera	2.0MP
Fax/Modem/Lan/WLAN	10/100/1000 Bate T Built-in Bluetooth V2.1+EDR 802.11 Wireless LAN a/b/g/n
LED Status Indicator	Power-on/Suspend Capital / Scroll / Number-Lock Wireless on status (optional) Bluetooth on status indicator (optional)
Interface	1x Microphone-in 1x headphone-out 1x VGA-out 1x HDMI-out 4x USB 2.0 1x RJ45 LAN
Hot Keys	Instant launch Keys, 3 Buttons: System Lights On/Off, Twin Turbo Mode On/Off, Splendid Preset Toggle Function Keys: FN+ F1 - Sleep Mode (Suspend) F2 - Wi-Fi On/Off F3 - Keyboard Backlight Down F4 - Keyboard Backlight Up F5 - Screen Brightness Down F6 - Screen Brightness Up F7 - Screen Backlight Off F8 - External Monitor Toggle F9 - Touchpad Toggle On/Off F10 - Sound Mute On/Off F11 - Sound Volume Down F12 - Sound Volume Up
Audio	Built-in Azalia compliant audio chip, with 3D effect & full duplex Built-in 2 speakers + subwoofer and array microphone Support Dolby Home Theater Altec Lansign co-brand speakers
Keyboard	Full QWERTY + Numberpad w/ fully illuminated keys
Battery	8 cell 5200 mAh
AC Adapter	Output 19v DC 6.32A, 120W Input: 100~240 VAC, 50/60 Hz Universal
Dimensions & Weight	8lbs with 8cell battery 16.6" x 12.8" x .8"-2.3"
Security	BIOS Boting / HDD User Password Protection and Security Lock Kensington Lock Hole
Supplied Accessories	Optical Mouse Backpack
Warranty & Support	2-year limited global hardware wrranty 1-year battery pack warranty 1-year accident coverage warranty

View Full Specs, Stock Unit Pictures, Pricing & More: HERE


Where Purchased:

My unit came to me from GentechPC (GentechPC.com) based out of California. This is my 6th laptop from them and they took really great care of me like usual. I was able to be one of the first G73 owners in the world because of the their great staff and commitment to service. Many other G73 owners and soon to be G73 owners have also placed orders with Gentech and spoken with Ken here on our forums and all of them have nothing but glowing things to say because the service is the same for all of us, everybody is treated like a VIP and I just wish every business treated its customers this way.


First Impressions:

Moving from the Asus W90 a big powerful 18.4" Asus unit first impressions are usually based on comparison against your last laptop.

So for me the first things that came to mind were. Wow this box is a lot smaller than I thought it would be, and Wow this box is a lot lighter than I thought it would be .

Once I got the unboxing done though and got to lay hands and eyes on the actual unit I was amazed with how much better the new design translated into person than it did images from the internet. It really is light, and for a gaming laptop its really thin. But the colors are nice and the rubberized finish on the lid and palmrest area just bring it all together.

Take a peek at the unboxing pictures I took and see what I saw for yourself:



View Gallery - HERE


Pictures:

These are flash based sideshows, just click the navigation arrows to scroll through the pictures. Optionally you can click the link for the gallery below the sideshow and view them in your browser with a larger size (and click the magnifying glass to zoom in further) It makes the review look a lot smaller to do it in this fashion rather than chain post like 40 pictures but makes it so much more effective.



View Gallery - HERE


Build & Design:

A lot of thought went into this totally new design. Asus marketed it as being "stealthy" like the stealth bomber with nice angles and this dark black matte finish. It actually is quite reminiscent of a F-117 stealth bomber and lives up to its stealthy claims due to its dead silent cooling system and there is nothing flashy on the unit like blinking LED's or a built in disco ball.

Things to note of most importance. The cooling system is totally redesigned in more than one way. The GPU & CPU have there own fan and heatsink and they are located on opposite sides of the machine so that they can not share heat with one another. Whats really unique about the new cooling design though is the air intake. The air is pulled in from a mesh vent at the top of the laptop above the keyboard and maybe also from the keyboard area itself. This idea means that the unit has constant access to the coolest air in the room and not suffocating trying to pull in air from underneath. There has been some debate as to this change was for better or worse. On the side of "worse" there were people that said this means you cant run the laptop with the lid closed. For the better it means it runs cooler than other laptops would, it also means this unit is bed/lap friendly. Considering what ever situation you would be in to run the unit with the lid closed (and this is a bad idea for any laptop) you can always have the option of using it with the lid open so there is no real loss, but take any of todays gaming laptops and put them on your lap or bed and watch them (and your lap) burst into flames so I think this new type of cooling is for the better and maybe even revolutionary. Air still needs to come out of the two "jet" vents in the back so make sure you do not cover those!

The body of the notebook is all plastic, but its a strongly assembled chassis, no creaks or weak spots. They have given the entire lid of the laptop and the palm rest area this neat fusion of rubber/plastic so it has this softer grippy like texture to it.

There has been no gimmicky extras like touch to activate media controls this time around. No doubt a good thing and both adds to the stealth look of the unit and reduces the cost to us buyers. It does have 4 buttons besides the keyboard. Just power on the right side, and the 3 quick buttons on the left.

First of these buttons is for the system lights (There is a thin blue strip of light under the bottom of the lid you can only see from the user angle really cool) the system lights are 3 presets. All Off, All On, or just the button lights and the lid light off. The next button is the twin turbo mode that is on/off, it boost the cpu speed from 1.6ghz on the 720QM to 1.7ghz and also does a mild GPU overclock. And the final button is presets for the Asus splendid utility that changes the color/contrast of your screen for different things like movie watching or video gaming.

I found the weight of the laptop to be very light for what it is, its just about 8lbs and I think that is a very fair weight. Most of it is based near the rear of the unit because both the battery and the metal heatsinks are located there so keep that in mind when picking up the unit. For a 17" it just feels so small though due to that low profile and also it has a pretty thin bezel for the screen so the unit is just barely larger than the keyboard/screen, not bad at all for something packed with the newest 5870 video card, an i7 cpu, 2x 500gb hdd's and 8GB of RAM eh?

The G73 for sure is a 10/10 for Build & Design, they did a great job here. Its a unique enough design to keep even the most avid LAN gamer happy to show off to his fellow redbull infused red eye gamer buddies, yet sleek and professional enough that I would have no problems walking into a business meeting with suit & tie on and going over quarterly sales revenue trends with the CEO next to me.


Screen/Monitor:

The G73 has a nice thin lid with strong hinges. No wobble of any kind when moving the unit about.

As previously mentioned the screen is a LED screen. Some people dont actually know what this means. They think the actual screen is composed of LED lights but what that really means is the conventional method of lighting up the screen from behind with CCFL has been replaced with LED lights.

This offers more than one advantage. First is the appearance in general a good LED screen offers a more even lighting across the entire screen with no noticeable bright/dark areas and no backlight bleed. Also it just seems that the colors on the screen are more vivid and with more contrast though that is most probably due to the panel they pair the lighting with and not the lighting itself. The other benifit is that it drains less power so longer battery life. A gaming laptop should never be expected to have a super great battery life, but if you can add another 10 or 20 minutes to the hour or so it already has thats nothing but good news.

I hold a high priority in screen quality, I feel that no matter how great your hardware is its just about useless to you if your stuck viewing all those games or doing all your working looking at a cruddy screen. For that reason I run each new laptop through a strong benchmarking process. The pictures of these benchmarks are posted below, keep in mind what you see here is not what I see when running the tests. A camera can only capture a small range of contrast compared to the human eye. This is often called the dynamic range. In addition to that, they then suffer what we call .jpg artifacts where it loses quality, and then loses more quality when uploaded to the web. Still despite that they are nice to share and some of them are quite useful for readers like the view angle pictures.



See Gallery - HERE

So lets talk about these pictures and test and how the results were.

Out of the box I found the RGB spectrum to be pretty good. On a glossy screen colors are often exaggerated some so that taken to mind it scores very well in that.

Moving up to the black levels & white levels testing is my first less than perfect score. It was quite clear the the monitor is not able to display the small differences between the darkest blacks and the whitest whites. This is not professional level photoshop monitors like I have at home, and to be expected. This is actually one of the reasons you will find things to look better to you on this screen than many other you have seen before it. There is a sharp contrast curve and strong vibrant colors on every image you see and this tests confirms that.

Text test was 100%, the Gradients were smooth with no banding showing that the monitor is showing true color but fading dark a bit sooner than normal again showing off the high black levels.

Then comes the view angles. This monitor has average view angles not poor and not great. I say only 15 degrees away from center and you start to see some kind of shift in brightness, though colors seem to stay pretty close to normal even at far angles.

Summing it all up into one easy to read score. I have to give the monitor a 9/10 it looks fantastic and will quite possibly be the nicest laptop screen you have ever seen but the 10/10 has to be reserved for a perfect screen that is capable of displaying graphics for professional work.


Keyboard & Touchpad:

Keyboard & Touchpad are really important on a laptop the two main input devices to let you control and use the system. So they deserve to be fully evaluated for ergonomics and performance.

I know there are many of you that want a laptop where the keys are illuminated in the dark and its hard to find a good laptop that has this feature. Well the G73 has it, it has small leds under each key that will offer a backlight effect to the keys and also the keys have a translucent lettering on them so the letter/number on the key itself also lights up in the dark.

The lighting can be set to multiple brightness levels or off completely as well so that you do not have to use it when you do not need it. The keys are a chiclet style hybrid. Its my first keyboard of this kind and I am getting used to it, other users that have had chiclet keyboards before say it's not quite the same and that this keyboard is unique amongst itself. So expect to have to get used to a new keyboard with this unit.

I was able to type fast right away with no problems but I do miss a key here and then because the short stroke of the keys makes me think I pressed it down all the way when I did not.

Another major interface is the touchpad. This laptop has one HUGE touchpad it takes up a lot of space and makes navigating with the touchpad easy to do. The texture on it is really smooth and easy to glide on with your finger, it does not require a hard press of any kind to activate. This touchpad best of all is multi touch compatible. Out of the box it only has one multi touch feature: the pinch to zoom. However with some new drivers posted on the forums (I lost the link I'll find it later) it adds the standard multi touch gestures we are familiar with. I did have a problem accidentally touching the touchpad once in a while while typing since its so big and right next to the keyboard, this problem made easier to exhibit since the keyboard is recessed a small amount into the chassis.

I have not had the problem anymore just by not being a lazy typist and not resting my hand there, but there are two good ways to resolve this problem if you have it besides being a better typist. First of all if you use an external mouse just activate the automatic touchpad disable function. With this on when you plug in an external mouse the touchpad turns off so you cant mess with it. The other option and I tried it and it works great as well is to use a simple 3rd party program called TouchFreeze (http://code.google.com/p/touchfreeze/) Its sits quietly running in the background and knows when your typing to not let the mouse cursor click on something so that you can catastrophically destroy what ever it was you where typing by pressing somewhere else on the screen. Its a nice program and should work for almost any laptop.

The button for the touchpad is just one big button but its still two buttons left/right click depending what side you press down with. Its a quiet click but you definitely know when it has been pressed all the way due to its great tactile feedback.

I think my only qualm with the keyboard & touchpad is the truncated numberpad and embeded arrow keys. I expect these to be present on a 15" model but would hope a 17" can find space to give you that full desktop like keyboard. There is not much wasted space on the unit though so I feel that maybe increasing the size of the keyboard to allow for this may not have been possible without great sacrifice to the structure or function of the machine.

Overall package here is above average, the keyboard is very typeable and the touchpad way more usable than average. With all new things like this it just will take time to get acclimated to it.


Speakers:

The unit has 3 speakers. Two of them near the lid under the mesh material and one under the unit near the front is a dedicated subwoofer.

The subwoofer really works, it does add some bass to your music and games, but by laws of physics you cant expect a small sub like this no matter how great to ever do what a real sub can do in the 10"+ range like you find in a home theater or a car system.

The two main speakers are crisp and LOUD, I am so happy to say LOUD! as this is an ever lasting problem with laptops that the preset volume levels are just not high enough for everything. You may be just fine listening to your music at 2/3 volume then go play a youtube video and it was recorded with a low volume and so even at max volume its just not loud enough.

Well the G73... my music is like less than 1/2 volume and its loud enough for the whole room to listen too. Its probably 20% louder than my old W90 was and that unit was already above average in the sound department.

I think this gives the G73 the award for best sound in a laptop so far that I have heard, though the 5 speakers in the W90 did have a more "full" sound to it. Dont forget the G73 has this creative control panel that lets you do a lot of tweaking to the sound including bass boost.

(Warning! I found a strange problem if I had steam crash on me every time I booted it after having the unit for 2 days, after long thought and much research I found out it was the creative audio software causing the problem the only web solution to fix this was to uninstall it, but I realized the only change I made since the unit was new was turn on that bass boost... so sure enough turning that off and steam worked again. So dont uninstall your software just be conscious that this problem exist and turn it off before using steam if you turn it on)


Heat & Noise:

Heat & Noise are terms that do no apply this this little stealth bomber except the noise of its blasting speakers when cranking up the jams or the heat of your opponents as you crush them on the top score charts after yet another headshot lands just before the 0:00 timer.

Really I already expected it to be this way as I have had good experiences with my last Asus laptop. The cooling system is super well designed and does its job. The most demanding tasks will only cause the cooling system to put out a calm "whoosh" of air from the back that is not even audible unless your in a quiet room. No high pitched noises or heat problems.

I ran the OCCT death test that is 120% guaranteed to take this machine to the absolute limit and it never got into temperatures that were even considered high for the equipment that it has. Meaning under normal use you wont even be able to stress this system, it will take anything you toss at it and just shrug it off and laugh.

Same goes with the Furmark test, another of those Death tests (seriously people have killed there GPU's with it) the highest I got was 82c on the core at load... that is just laughable.

Cooling for the G73 is top notch!


Ports & Features:

Ok so the all mighty stealth bomber cant be the star of the show in every aspect. The G73 is only average here.

No extravagant extras like display port, or even somewhat standard extras like an express card slot (though that is kinda getting phased out)

It does have a good amount of USB 2.0 ports (4) and HDMI & VGA out so you can use it with both an external monitor or a HDTV with ease.

Some are upset to see no E-SATA or USB 3.0 but look at the system specs, this is the most fully loaded and well built laptops on the market with a price tag of only about $1500.00 to me from a marketing standpoint Asus had somebody with a good enough knowledge of what we want/need and said. "What will it take to make the best overall & highest selling gaming laptop ever?"

They probably said:
> It needs to have a great video card
> It needs to have a powerful cpu
> It needs to have a nice screen
> It needs to have great speakers
> It needs to be cheap

When you start making the what we wants turn into what we gets... reality strikes that the more you add the more it costs. So I think they shaved off these small extras for the sake of making the more important things make it on this laptop instead. They could have easily given us E-SATA and Firewire and cut the screen from LED to CFCL and kept the cost the same. To the average person just reading the specs that may look better.

But for us the actual users of this machine I think they managed to achieve the best possible balance of performance & cost and got everything right that was critical for the success of this laptop.

Battery:

The battery is 8 Cell and rated above average, the unit also is pretty good at power consumption so the unit as a whole is better than average with battery life for this type of machine.

Still no replacement for your 7 hour netbook but you can get over 2 hours with this unit doing stuff like web surfing on battery save mode.

I do not yet have my own max battery life figures, I need more time to properly wear the battery and some free time not benchmarking the machine to test it in various circumstances.


-Power Draw Statistics

No battery in the unit, pure AC adapter using a Kill A Watt meter to measure wattage taken from the wall by the unit.

G73 Power Adapter: 7.7A 19.5V = 150.5W

So the adapter is capable of delivering 150W standard and usually they can do more. What I am looking for is to make sure nothing reaches that 150w level or close.

Tests:

Desktop Idle - 60w
Youtube Video HD Full Screen - 75w
Wprime 4 threads maxing out CPU - 87w
Wprime 8 threads maxing out CPU - 95w
Furmark Maxing out GPU - 130w
Dead Space Game using GPU & CPU - 135w
OCCT Power Supply Test - 175w

And yeah OCCT did it.. lol but I do not think you can reach that kind of load ever in normal use its literally like a 100% load on every system component. The adapter held up though, computer did not crash.


Performance:

Often times more often than not this is the section of the review most people are looking for. How does this mini beast perform? (mini beast is my G73's nickname since the W90 was "the beast" and this is so much smaller and lighter)

My performance section is long and involving. All the benchmarks are performed out of the box. So no updated drivers, no overclocking. I want you to know how this laptop performs for anybody and everybody without needing the knowledge or time to do the more advanced things like overclock the system or update to unofficial drivers.

So these are worst case scenarios really and your scores can only get better if your willing to do things to make the machine run better.

How the testing is done: I have a new testing process this time around that I think will work out better just takes longer. For games/programs that have there own built in benchmark or a benchmark tool for them I will just run those as normal and post the results.

For the games with no benchmarking tool I will use FRAPS and use its benchmark utility. It will record the frame rates and report back to me the Min/Avg/Max frame rate. I will be doing 3 sets of these benchmarks for each game on a given stage (2 minutes each set) and then average all 3 together for a final single score.

The reason behind this is the erratic behavior of Min/Avg/Max monitoring. You can have a game that runs 45fps 99.9% of the time and just for one faint second for some odd ball reason drops to say 20fps due to some kind of texture loading or AI calculation. If doing a single benchmark test this would make your Min FPS reading say 20 and this is not a real true representation of the game and how it runs. So now by taking 3 sets and averaging them if I have any anomalies like that they will be offset some by the good scores and give us a mutch better overall picture of game performance.

Note all test were also done with twin turbo mode OFF.



View Gallery - HERE

Conclusion:

Time to bring our time together to a close.

Im not shy to point out any flaws I find in a unit and I have been hard pressed to find anything I can say is wrong with this unit. I looked hard and deep into the problems we have seen on other laptops from Asus and from other brands, and so far not a single one of them exist in the new G73.

I like to have a general "reasons you should be interested in this laptop". But I think that is something only you yourself can decide.

Still a gaming laptop is usually the top tier of laptop models and if your willing to spend the money for one it can do anything you want it too. The G73 is not very expensive though so you may be surprised to see this free upgrade to mutch better specs than what ever laptop you just bought or were about to buy from somewhere else.

As of right now as a computer enthusiast I have started to look for ways to make this machine do what its not supposed to. I want to overclock it like mad and find its maximum performance point. The GPU is showing great overclockability with good gains using the AMD GPU Clock Tool. the CPU however is the thorn in my side the new i7 CPU is better than the old Core2Quad & Core2Duo cpu's in just about every way, but currently I have no method to overclock the cpu, so that is disappointing to me. Things like overclocking are "extras" though so its not fair to hold that against the system.

Moving from a rare and super powerful W90 to this G73 was a hard move to make and now after a week with the unit I can say there are no regrets. There simply has not been a better laptop to buy for the money in my lifetime. No matter what other brands come up with its going to cost a lot more or cost the same with some kind of major deficiency. Asus is one of the worlds largest leading laptop manufactures and they used that to there advantage to produce this cheap, stylish, and powerful delight known as the G73JH.



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