Asus G75 Gaming Notebook Review

Gaming Performance

The Asus G75 features a nVidia GeForce GTX 670M graphics card with 3GB of GDDR5 memory in a 192-bit interface. The 670m is essentially the same as last year’s 570m except it has a slightly higher default clock speed.  There are some models of the G75 that feature the GTX 660M. You can subtract 15-20% from these benchmarks to get an idea of what a card like that will do in this notebook.

3DMark 11

With default settings the G75 scored 3100 in the Performance benchmark and 968 in the Extreme benchmark.

    

Battlefield 3

For this benchmark I played a section of the game’s second single player mission and performed everything exactly the same on each run. All tests were run at 1920×1080 resolution.

Quality Preset	Average FPS	Min. FPS	Max. FPS
Medium Quality preset	45.8	35	77
High Quality preset	35.3	26	56
Ultra Quality preset	23.3	16	39
Auto detect (Medium everything except Ultra quality textures)	45.2	33	76

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

This benchmark consisted of a run through the town of Riverwood and surrounding area from the same save point. All tests were run at 1920×1080 resolution using FXAA instead of MSAA and also using the official Bethesda high-res texture pack.

Quality Preset	Average FPS	Min. FPS	Max. FPS
Medium Quality preset	86.3	75	99
High Quality preset	64.6	56	77
Ultra Quality preset	47.1	42	53

 

Some other games I tested were World of Warcraft (was able to run everything maxed with 8xAA/16xAF and maintain 90+ FPS in a somewhat crowded Stormwind), Diablo 3 (perfectly smooth with everything maxed), Starcraft II (the excellent Ivy Bridge CPU helps this game a lot), Mass Effect 3 (flawless with everything maxed), and Crysis 2 (excellent at High settings).

With such tightly packed pixels (1080p on a 17 inch screen) you can usually get away with none or very little anti-aliasing compared to a larger PC monitor. This helps a lot in games where the laptop may struggle but overall the G75 can run any modern game at 1080p at high settings at a playable frame rate. Even if you need to run a game in Medium settings, feel free to crank the textures to the highest possible quality since the G75 has 3GB of video memory. As you can see in the Battlefield 3 benchmark, adding Ultra quality textures to the medium preset did nothing to the performance.

Finally we have the Windows Experience Index for those interested (note the Hard drive score is due to the installed SSD).

Overclocking

A small amount of overclocking (10-15%) can be done on the video card without really risking anything. I was unable to adjust the voltage of the video card so I could not overclock much more, but here are some results using a moderate but very stable overclock of 700MHz core and 1600MHz memory (note the default clocks are 620MHz core and 1500Mhz memory).

Benchmark	No overclock	Overclocked	Gain
3DMark 11 Performance	P3100	P3430	10%
3DMark 11 Extreme	X968	X1077	11%
Battlefield 3 – High	35.3fps	38.9fps	10%
Skyrim – Ultra	47.1fps	52.6fps	12%

 

With an approximate 12% overclock, this means the games are scaling well with the extra performance.

Final Words

The Asus G75 really is the definition of a desktop replacement. Aside from a few shortcomings it is an excellent machine overall.

Pro’s:

• Cooling performance
• Solid construction with comfortable palm rest and keyboard
• Excellent gaming performance
• Relatively easy access to HDD/RAM/fans

Con’s:

• No easy access to wi-fi card or 2 of the 4 RAM slots (thankfully the 2 hard to access ones are the first populated at the factory)
• Speakers feel like an afterthought for such a high end notebook
• Mediocre wireless card, but it works
• Difficult to put the bottom panel back on after upgrading or servicing

Rating

Information

Asus G75 availability: $1399 – $2000 at Amazon depending on model.

Asus ROG Site

[amazon_search design=”4″ width=”550″ market_place=”” color_theme=”Onyx” default_search_term=”Asus G75″ search_index=”Electronics” columns=”1″ rows=”2″ outer_background_color=”#000000″ inner_background_color=”” background_color=”” border_color=”” header_text_color=”#FFFFFF” linked_text_color=”” body_text_color=”” shuffle_products=”True” show_image=”True” show_price=”True” show_rating=”True” rounded_corners=”False”/]