Thursday 18 August 2011

A Monstrous Gaming Powerhouse

The Asus G74SX is designed for gamers. Though its simple appearance might not tip you off, its size certainly will. In spite of a few flaws--such as a noisy keyboard and not-noisy-enough speakers--the Asus G74SX packs excellent performance into an attractive chassis. It's worth checking out if you're looking for a "mobile" gaming powerhouse.

Our review model, priced at $1979 (as of August 17 2011), sports a second-generation Intel Core i7 processor (the i7-2630QM) and offers 16GB of RAM plus 910GB of storage space spread over a 750GB hard drive and a 160GB solid-state drive. The G74SX is also one of the first laptops to come preloaded with Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 560M graphics card. Additional features include built-in Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth connectivity, and a Blu-ray Disc player. The G74SX runs the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.

In PCWorld's WorldBench 6 benchmark tests, the Asus G74SX earned an impressive score of 150, which is quite good even for the desktop replacement laptops category. That result is just one point behind the mark of the Dell XPS 17 3D. The G74SX also did well in our graphics tests, with frame rates of 48.8 frames per second and 46.3 fps on our Dirt 2 and Far Cry 2 tests, respectively (both at high quality settings and 1920 by 1080 resolution). Those numbers surpass the XPS 17 3D's frame rates, which were 32.5 fps (Dirt 2) and 30.8 fps (Far Cry 2).

At nearly 10 pounds, with a 2-pound power brick, the G74SX isn't really portable, unless you define that as merely meaning "possible to move." This whopper measures 16.5 inches wide by 12.7 inches long, and is 2.4 inches at its thickest (the computer tapers off near the front).

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