Asus G73JH-RBBX05 user reviews

Pros The i7 processor with the Radeon graphics card cannot be beat at this price. The rubberized surface and look is great. No worry about the fingerprints you get with a glossy plastic surface. The backlit keyboard is excellent.

Cons The first one I received had a bad pixel smack in the middle of the screen. I was astonished at the great service from Best Buy. They sent me a replacement overnight. I have read where other people also had bad units out of the box.

Summary I travel alot and size does matter. This is a monster...not for sitting on your lap. I use a Logitech gaming pad, gaming mouse and headset when playing WoW. I can crank the video settings and have no latency. I see no need to pay for the higher priced model. 6 GB of RAM is perfect as is a 500 GB HD and the screen res is more than acceptable. Save your money and buy this model. Now...it did not fit in my Kensington case. After much searching I found the case that other G73 owners have found, the M.A.S.K. KOA Custom backpack from Slappa (www.slappa.com). Check it out and read the reviews. Yes, it is not cheap but its awesome. This computer is not a replacement for my home gaming PC. I invest much more money on that computer because I use it the most. But you cannot go wrong at $1199 for a gaming PC with these specs. Happy Gaming!

Pros Powerful machine, beautiful design, back-lit keyboard and games like Crysis 2, CoD Black Ops, Fallout, Avp, Bulletstorm, Starcraft 2 on ULTRA details and highest resolution didn't even break a sweat. Best possible performance for the price.

Cons Where do I begin. A month into purchase graphic card started to act up freezing, crashing to the point that playing a game became impossible and working on documents risky. Asus had no clue what the hell is going on and denied such issues. After hours of

Summary Way too many issues with this model that seemed like it was launched prematurely likely in order to get competitive advantage. Asus support is not much help and for the price of this model ***. Overall great machine and shame to ASUS for their support. Thanks to gaming community geniuses for the solutions and hope you are working on more.

Pros Simply put - powerful laptop with top graphics at a very affordable price. My processor is a i7 - 1.73, and it is powerful. I use mine more for processing photos than games. Adobe photoshop CS5 just "sails" with this laptop. True colors, and powerful pr

Cons Personally I haven't had drawback with my G73. It's a large laptop, I'd say it's really more of a desktop replacement. - for me that's not a drawback, but for some it might be. It's hard to find a laptop bag to hold it - she a big "girl"

Summary I bought my G73 at bestbuy in march. I know it's not the newest model, but it more than meets my needs. the ATI graphics card is very powerful.

I also own a ASUS G53JW-A1, and a Alienware m11x. The alienware, in the first month had problems. But my ASUS laptops work great. I think it's hard to go wrong with this laptop, especially for the money

Pros Extreme power and speed, comfortable to use for long periods, nice keyboard, great sound, fast bootup

Cons Poor color calibration on the monitor, occasional freezes requiring a cold reset, sometimes slow filesystem

Summary My PCs usually last about 3 years or so, so I wanted to get one powerful enough to last 3-5 without getting too obsolete. And the G73jh certainly doesn't disappoint when it comes to power and speed. It's also very comfortable to use with a large keyboard (for a laptop) and soft wristwrest. The numeric keypad is small, but at least there is one, so I no longer need my external keypad. One really nice touch is that the keys are somewhat clicky; not as much as an old IBM model M keyboard, of course, but they give much better feedback than most laptop keyboards. The speakers are quite powerful and clear. I leave them turned down low so as not to disturb the neighbors and they still fill my office with sound.

The screen is large and bright, but unfortunately it has a distinct blue cast that I was unable to get rid of with any combination of settings and calibration (lowering the gamma, increasing the contrast, and setting it to gamma correction mode helps a little, but doesn't solve it). This, along with the powerful backlight, means that unless you turn the brightness all the way down, black is never really black and other colors all look weaker than they should. As with most modern PCs, it unfortunately has a glossy finish, so expect to spend a lot of time looking at your reflection and squinting through the glare if you use it in a bright room. The vertical angle of view is rather limited, although horizontal is good. This display has been my biggest disappointment so far. When doing graphics work or watching movies, I use my external monitor for better colors and sharper-looking images.

I've seen others report problems with the touchpad, lost keystrokes, and overheating, but I haven't had any of these problems. I detest touchpads, so turning it off was one of the first things I did. The G73jh actually runs much cooler than any of the other laptops I've used - no need to underclock it. I have had a few freezes where all response is lost with no way even to get to the task manager or soft boot the system. (Three to five times in 7 months.) I think that's likely due to a driver issue, but hasn't been enough of a bother for me to try to fix it yet.

One problem that I haven't seen mentioned by others is that I sometimes seem to have a slow filesystem. In fact, basic file operations (copy, move, delete) or installing programs can take a ridiculously long time. I think that this is due to Windows 7 rather than the hardware, but it's the only performance bottleneck I've seen on this otherwise superfast system, so worth mentioning. It worried me when things that took maybe 5-10 minutes on my old XP system took 45 minutes to an hour on this system. But it doesn't seem to affect normal program usage much, if at all, only large-scale batches of file operations.

A couple of ways to make use of its power:
* Plug in an external monitor and run Ubuntu in a full-screen VirtualBox on it, while using Windows 7 on the main screen. Put XP in a window using VirtualPC. Now you can program, play, and test on multiple platforms simultaneously, and the performance is fine.

* Setup WAMP and drop a large, complicated dynamic website on localhost. You can run a webcrawler against it -without having to throttle it- and it can still handle the combined load of the crawler and the servers while doing other day-to-day things.

* Large batch automated testing, OCRing, or other data processing can run in the background without affecting your normal work or play.

* And of course, put your favorite games on and finally you can crank the settings all the way up.