Asus G750JZ-XS72 review: Asus takes Nvidia's top-end GPU out for a spin

While much of the public discourse about laptops and mobile PCs is taken up with ultrabooks, hybrids, and other ever-slimmer devices, there's still room for the traditional 17-inch gaming desktop replacement.

8.4

Asus G750JZ-XS72

The Good

The <b>Asus G750</b> is one of the first laptops with Nvidia's new top-end GeForce GTX 880M graphics cards. The hefty keyboard is great for WASD gaming, and a generous selection of ports makes it easy to add accessories or external monitors.

The Bad

For a $3,000 laptop, this still looks like a thick, clunky box. The screen skips the higher resolution and touch functionality we're seeing more often in premium laptops.

The Bottom Line

The Asus line of gaming laptops has always offered excellent high-end configurations, along with custom software and hardware tweaks. This latest version of the G750 bets on Nvidia's brand-new line of GPUs, and includes the current top-end card for great gaming performance.

As it happens, we tend to see an influx of such systems just after Nvidia (or AMD) introduces a new generation of mobile graphics cards. In this case, it's a new GeForce 800M series from Nvidia, and we've almost simultaneously seen new gaming laptops from Asus, MSI, Razer, and others.

The very first gaming laptop with Nvidia's highest-end GeForce GTX 880M card that we've tested is the Asus G750. The specific model number for our configuration is the G750JZ-XS72, which in our random-model-number-to-English dictionary means this is a $2,999 configuration that includes twin 256GB SSDs, a Blu-ray burner, and a whopping 32GB of RAM, on top of the already high-end CPU/GPU combo. For $2,499, you can cut the SSD and RAM, and downgrade to a simple Blu-Ray read-only optical drive.

In either case, it's a lot of cash for a device with a 1,920x1,080-pixel non-touch display and an industrial design that feels locked in the past. That said, performance, especially in games, is fantastic. This system easily beat similar models from 2013 with that year's high-end GeForce GTX 780M GPU.

No one, aside from Razer, really makes a gaming laptop with modern aesthetics, but Asus has invested heavily in its gaming line for years, with included overclocking and audio tweaking software and rear-vented exhaust ports, plus some very high-end configurations with plenty of ports and connections. It's about as specialized as a gaming laptop gets without going to a build-to-order boutique such as Origin PC or Maingear.

Design and features
Even big, bulky gaming laptops now have brushed-metal lids and keyboard trays, matte chassis, finger-friendly keyboards and touch pads, and other nods to minimalist design (and thankfully, a lack of chrome accents or flashing multicolored lights). That's not to say that these sort of systems -- not to single out the Asus G750 -- look like truly 2014-era products.

In this case, you get a big black box with a massive desktop footprint. The chassis angles down toward the front, but the front lip is still one full inch off the desktop (and nearly two inches high in the rear). Exhaust fan ports, which use internal copper tubing to direct heat away, are on the rear edge panel, which is preferable to the side edges, where they can blow hot air on peripherals, cables, and so on.

The overall look, while not garish, is largely the same as the last several generations of Asus gaming laptops. Few do better, but that's a low bar. Razer is one of the only companies doing anything really innovative with gaming laptop design, but those slim systems include their own trade-offs.

The keyboard is a standard island-style model, easily fitting in a full number pad, thanks to the large keyboard tray. The main concession to gamers here is deep key travel, with hefty keys offering satisfying tactile response. The keyboard is also backlit, but offers no game-centric specialty keys or macro keys.

The large touch pad feels dated, with its separate left and right mouse buttons, while most other laptops have moved to clickpad-style touch pads. For PC gaming, one could argue that clickpads are suboptimal, but most gamers will be playing with a mouse or game pad in any event, so your touch-pad interaction will generally be for Web surfing and productivity tasks.

Of course, any gaming laptop lives or dies based on its display. In this case, you get a 17.3-inch 1,920x1,080-pixel screen that works well, but doesn't distinguish itself from the competition. On the plus side, the screen has a matte antiglare finish, which I've always thought added realism and immersion in games. Off-axis viewing is decent for a non-IPS screen.

However, laptop displays are in a far different place than they were just a couple of years ago. Touch is practically standard and finally showing up in systems with discrete GPUs (but still not really in desktop replacements). And higher resolutions are showing up at lower and lower prices, such as the 13-inch Yoga 2 Pro, which hits 3,200x1,800 pixels for under $1,000. In the gaming department, the upcoming 14-inch Razer Blade has a 3,200x1,800-pixel touch screen for $2,199, and the new Lenovo Y50 gaming laptop promises 4K resolution in a 15-inch display.

Connections, performance, and battery
One of the fun things to do with a big gaming rig is hook up multiple external monitors, and with the HDMI and mini-DisplayPort jacks on the right edge, you can do just that, with the high-end GPU allowing you to drive each one at HD resolutions.

The Intel Core i7-4700HQ processor matches up well against other recent gaming laptops, and actual application performance is not much different than you'd find in recent 17-inch systems from Alienware, Origin PC, and others (in fact, the Asus CPU is a hair slower than some of the others, but the practical effect is nil).

What we're really interested in here is the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 880M graphics card, and this is the first laptop we've reviewed with that just-released component. As we pointed out during our initial tests when the 800-series Nvidia GPUs were announced, the GTX 880M churned out more frames per second in our gaming tests than a similar system with last year's GTX 780M GPU. Likewise, a new MSI laptop with the GTX 860M beat out a 2013 laptop with the GTX 760M.

So, this Asus is the fastest gaming laptop we've ever tested, right? Not quite. We did find one gaming laptop with better frame rates, and that was the ridiculously indulgent Origin PC EON17-SLX. That $4,400 monster included two GTX 780M cards in an SLI configuration, and easily beat the single-card Asus.

That means the Asus G750 ran Metro: Last Light (a very challenging test) at 30.7 frames per second, while last year's Alienware 17 (with a one-generation-behind GPU) ran the same test at only 18.7 frames per second. However, the dual-card Origin PC laptop, with two last-gen cards, beat them both, at 41.7 frames per second. You can see further comparisons in our benchmark charts below.

A separate Asus software app, called GPU Tweak, allows you to do some software-based overclocking of your video card. It can squeeze another 5 percent out of your GPU, but messing with the settings should be left to experts, as you can create excessive heat and stability problems (although Asus claims the version of the app bundled with this system is perfectly tweaked for this hardware and its cooling system).

Despite all the CPU and GPU power, the Asus G750 actually does well on our video playback battery drain test, running for 5 hours and 17 minutes. That's better than any other recent 17-inch gaming laptop, and thanks in part of Nvidia's Optimus technology, which switches off the GPU when it's not needed. Nvidia is also promoting a new feature of its GeForce Experience software app, which promises game settings tweaks to prolong battery life. That's not fully functional yet, but we'll take another look at it when it is.

Conclusion
Gamers with deep pockets have a lot of options, including Alienware, Origin PC, Maingear, and others. Asus has always made great gaming laptops, and can offer some tweaks hard to find elsewhere because the company designs and builds its own chassis, with excellent cooling systems and reasonably low fan noise. In the G750JZ, you'll find some useful GPU-overclocking software, decent subwoofer-driven sound, a Blu-ray burner, and plenty of ports. But the real reason this laptop got me excited was the chance to test-drive Nvidia's new GTX 880M graphics card.

Still, $2,999 is a lot to invest (as is $2,499 for a slightly stripped-down model), when you get a decent-but-pedestrian screen that lacks touch or higher resolutions -- both features I would want in such an expensive piece of hardware.

Find more shopping tips in our laptop buying guide.

System configurations
Asus G750JZ-XS72
Windows 8.1 (64-bit); 2.4GHz Intel Core i7 4700HQ; 32GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 4GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 880M; 256GB SSD (X2), 1TB 7,200rpm HGST hard drive

Alienware 17
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.7GHz Intel Core i7 4800MQ; 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 4GB Nvidia GTX 780M; HDD#1 256GB LiteOn SSD, HDD#2 750GB, 7,200rpm Western Digital hard drive

Maingear Pulse 14
Windows 8 (64-bit); 2.6GHz Intel Core i7 4720MQ; 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 760M; (2) 128GB SSD RAID 0 1TB 5,400rpm WD hard drive

MSI GE60
Windows 8.1 (64-bit); 2.4GHz Intel Core i7 4700HQ; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M; 1TB 7,200rpm HGST hard drive

Origin EON17-SLX
Windows 8.1 (64-bit); 3GHz Intel Core i7 4930MX; 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz;(2) 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M; (2) 120GB SSD RAID 0 750GB 7,200rpm WD hard drive