Asus has supercharged its gaming laptops with the G750, a 17in desktop replacement monster powered by the latest Intel 4th generation Core processors and Nvidia's 700M series graphics cards. We spent some time with one of the first units on the Computex show floor to bring you our first impressions.
In keeping with the Republic of Gamers (ROG) design ethos, the G5750 is big, black and menacing. The sharp, angular lines and huge air vents at the back of the laptop are more than a little reminiscent of a Lamborghini supercar or Blackbird SR-1 jet. It certainly isn't light, and will likely sit on a desk for most of its life, with only the occasional trip to a LAN party unless you get a heavy duty laptop bag to pair with it.
Open the lid and you'll see the entire front face of the laptop, including the keyboard tray and wrist rest, is finished in brushed aluminium. It makes the black Chiclet-style keys really stand out in the daylight, but you'll have to enable the white LED backlight if you want to keep gaming at night. We typed out a few lines and found the keys very responsive, with plenty of travel and a reasonable amount of tension, springing each one back into place after we let it go.
The touchpad, on the other hands, often struggled to pick up our fingers – even during the short time we spent with the system. This could just be non-final touchpad drivers, but we'll pay close attention to how well it works when we come to giving the G750 a full review. The physical touchpad buttons were chunky and had no such problems.
The 17in, Full HD display has a matt finish which helped us see the screen clearly, even under the harsh show floor lighting. It appeared bright and colourful, but naturally we'l be waiting to get one in to the labs to put it through our rigorous display tests before passing judgement.
The model on display was powered by an Intel Core i7-4700HQ running at 2.4GHz, paired with 16GB of RAM. Twin 5,400rpm mechanical hard disks in RAID provided 2TB of storage, but customers will have the option of either 1.5TB of 7,200rpm mechanical storage or a 256GB SSD. Connectivity looks excellent, with VGA, mini DisplayPort and HDMI video outputs, four USB3 ports, a Blu-ray optical drive, Ethernet and twin 3.5mm audio jacks - they are connected to an internal amplifier, which should really give your gaming sessions an extra audio kick.
The Nvidia GeForce GTX 770m dedicated graphics card seemed to struggle with Metro: Last Light, but had no trouble playing Resident Evil 6 at maximum details – these wouldn't be our games of choice to put the laptop through its paces, but we'll have to wait until it comes to the UK to run our own gaming tests. The 3GB of dedicated video memory should make light work of even the newest titles at high resolutions.
Asus has yet to announce pricing or availability for the G750, but we imagine it will cost a similar amount to the current range of 17in ROG gaming laptops.
