Asus G75 Gaming Notebook Review

The performance of notebooks, particularly gaming notebooks, has slowly but surely been catching up to their desktop counterparts. We are at the point now where a high-end gaming notebook is only about 2 generations behind in performance compared to a desktop PC with similar specs.

The 17.3″ Asus G75 (and its little brother the 15.6″ G55) feature the latest Ivy Bridge processors and (depending on the model) nVidia Kepler or Fermi based GPUs. The G75 is built upon the same successful design of the G73 and G74 series but there have been some significant changes.

Unboxing

 
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In the box you will find the 180 watt AC adapter, 8-cell 74whr battery, extra dust filters for the fans (more on this later), a user manual, warranty card, microfiber cloth for cleaning your screen, and a DVD containing all of the utilities and drivers. No Windows disc is included… instead you must make your own recovery discs (which takes a whopping 4 DVD-R’s for some reason). Instead I prefer to install a fresh copy of windows using an untouched Windows 7 SP1 ISO (you can download the 64-bit home premium ISO directly from Microsoft here) then install only the utilities I want from the Asus disc.

Specifications & Upgrading

The particular model I have is the RS72-CA. There are a lot of different models which vary based on your country. They all have different hard drive, memory, display and video card configurations but keep the same Ivy Bridge CPU and basic design. Here are the shipping specs for the one I’m reviewing:

• Intel Core i7-3610QM (2.3GHz, 3.3GHz turbo) Processor, 8GB DDR3 1600MHz memory
• nVidia GTX 670M 3GB GDDR5 video card, 17.3-inch 1920×1080 matte screen
• 750GB 7200rpm hard drive (Seagate Momentus), DVD±RW/CD-RW drive
• Gigabit ethernet, 802.11n Wifi, Bluetooth, 4x USB 3.0, Displayport, HDMI, card reader, VGA port, headphone and microphone
• Windows 7 64bit Home Premium

The Asus G75 has two 2.5-inch hard drive bays plus two DDR3 SODIMM slots that are accessed from the bottom panel. Mine only shipped with one hard drive but still came with the extra hard drive caddy. I put a 128GB Crucial M4 SSD in the other bay to use as a boot drive. It’s just a matter of removing 2 screws and pulling the caddy out. Asus included 4 extra screws to install the drive into the caddy. My model also only shipped with 8GB RAM and those slots were the harder to reach ones under the keyboard so I took the opportunity to add 8GB more beside the hard drives. Also on the upper left you can see one of the removable dust filters. The other one is under the small removable panel on the upper right. Asus includes an app that will remind you to clean these at an interval of your choosing I’d recommend doing so every month or two. Don’t just clean the filter but also take the opportunity to clean the fan blades which you have access to under the filter.

 
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Removing the bottom panel was fairly easy, it is only one screw and then you can use a butter knife to help you get started in popping it off. Putting it back on was a nightmare though. There was always one or two clips that didn’t go in while the others did. I spent about 20 minutes trying to put the panel back on completely flat. Finally I was able to do it by pushing in the troublesome clips with a knife after I had screwed it in. The clips on the panel can easily break so be careful. I am hoping it gets easier with repeated openings.