Asus ROG G750JX review: Asus ROG G750JX

Looking like it's just been wheeled out of the Skunk Works aircraft factory, maker of the stealth fighter, this striking gaming machine wears its gaming intentions on its sleeve. Designed from the ground up to incorporate the latest tech from Intel and Nvidia, this 17-incher takes no prisoners in the AU$3000 price range, but has it got the guts to power through today's most demanding games?

8.8

Asus ROG G750JX

The Good

Sexy design. Very quiet. Excellent overall performance.

The Bad

Still can't run max detail in most demanding games. Average battery life.

The Bottom Line

Asus has delivered an attractive yet powerful gaming laptop that doesn't howl like a banshee under load.

Design and features

Gamers will love the stealth fighter design employed on the G750JX, and the angular lines help to hide its bulky dimensions. Weighing a whopping 4.5kg, this is one of the heaviest gaming laptops on the market — a full kilogram heavier than the similarly sized Toshiba Qosmio. Most of the extra weight comes courtesy of an eight-cell battery. The huge 17.3-inch display provides ample screen real estate, and the resolution of 1920x1080 is relatively clear, without incurring the tremendous performance hit of a 2560x1440 display.

The chassis is built from the usual mixture of aluminium and plastic and feels up to the task of being lugged along to a weekly local area network (LAN) event. Our only concern is the slight flex of the backlit keyboard, which isn't anywhere near as sturdy as the likes of Toshiba's rock-solid Qosmio series. The touch pad buttons also have a slight rattle to them, but most gamers will be using a mouse anyway and so probably won't notice.

Connections, performance and battery

Like most gaming laptops of this size, the G750JX includes a huge variety of I/O options. All four USB ports are of the latest 3.0 spec, and there's the usual mic-in/headphone out that gamers demand. A Blu-ray burner slots into the left-hand side, while the right is home to the A/V outputs in the form of HDMI, D-sub and mini DisplayPort out. Finally, Gigabit Ethernet delivers cabled connectivity alongside the 802.11b/g/n networking, which can be upgraded to 802.11ac if you've got the cash.

Tucked away inside is a machine that mirrors the latest Qosmio's specs, with nearly identical components. The CPU is one rung down, though, in the form of the Haswell quad-core, Hyper-Threaded Core i7-4700HQ. This tops out at 3.2GHz, 200MHz slower than the Qosmio. However, it's paired with Nvidia's excellent GTX 770M GPU — a power sipper that churns through today's games. A crazy 32GB of DDR3 1600 memory is great for graphic designers but overkill for most, while the combination of a 1TB mechanical drive and 256GB SSD offers the best of both storage worlds.

To our surprise, this potent combination of hardware remained incredibly quiet during testing, posting one of the lowest sound meter results we've recorded, at just 40dB. Considering the blistering performance, this is simply incredible, and Asus' thermal engineers should be commended. As our benchmarks show, this laptop performs neck and neck with the identically priced Toshiba Qosmio — fast enough for most games, yet still not quite up to the task of maximum detail in the most demanding titles. When it came to battery life, the Asus simply demolished the Qosmio, posting more than twice the lifespan, at 159 minutes in the demanding PowerMark battery benchmark.

Conclusion

Choosing between this and the Qosmio is a very tough choice, as they're so darn similar. We have to give the edge to Asus, though, thanks to the longer battery life and whisper-quiet performance.