About to pull the trigger on a G55

I fear buyer's remorse. What should be wary of? Any known issues with Asus laptops that I need to know about?

 

The only thing of note would be that ASUS is going to add additional SKU's with thunderbolt.

If thunderbolt is important wait a month

 

They are not the easiest laptops to upgrade for certain items.

Also, you should know that the G55 has only 1 HDD bay. It does offer an mSATA port, but you have to disassemble the entire laptop to get the mSATA SSD installed.

Asus does build a very solid laptop, and they have improved the touchpad and buttons on the G55 as well as the keyboard compared to the G53. Other improvements are the easy access to the one HDD bay and 2 of the 4 RAM slots.

 

my friend bought one and the build quality definitely improved upon the g53.

 

One thing to note, the G55 will be WAY bigger than any other 15" notebook on the market by massive margin. That hump in the back is huge. And it adds a lot of dimension to the laptop. Wouldn't surprise me if the G55 at 15" is as large as a Clevo P170EM at 17".

Price: You can get a 1080p screen, 3610M, GTX 670M and more ports and options on a Clevo/Sager for $1050. Granted no free backpack or mouse. But even buying a better quality backpack after, still much cheaper than a G55. Just throwing that out there. That is just one competitor, possible HP/Dell/Samsung alternatives may be cheaper as well.

Lack of support. Now their warranty is great and if you RMA a notebook for repair from Asus, sure it's decent. But any problem you have with an Asus, the tech support will be useless and you'll end up RMA'ing, which can be a gamble as some people have had their notebook returned in terrible shape.

Last I checked, Asus also began OUTSOURCING notebook repairs to cheap alternatives, authorized repair centers who fix notebooks of various different brands. You can demand your notebook to be sent to an Asus repair center in Fremont, CA or some horror in IL, but last I checked, they will try to have it sent to a local ARC that is just fishy. It's really weird.

What do I mean by lack of support? Asus doesn't listen to their customers, or only listen selectively. And they do their utmost to keep enthusiasts from treating their notebook as enthusiasts. Asus notebooks are definitely tailored to be sold by huge retailers like Amazon, NewEgg, TigerDirect and Best Buy. Yes there are great resellers like PowerNotebook who sell Asus, but Asus focus is now to be #1 notebook brand and going for quantity over quality now.

I would consider Clevo/Sager. You get a more personable 24/7 tech support from the resellers here, some of them are authorized service providers as well for Clevo/Sager. And Sager/Clevo seem to be very in tune with their customers and any issue have, Sager is notified by their resellers.

Asus doesn't even really listen to their resellers, since again, it's about the big number now for them. And it shows, their notebooks are designed for the lowest denominator now, for the person who just walks into Best Buy looking to buy a notebook that day or impulsively buys on Amazon/TigerDirect/NewEgg etc. The person who doesn't know enough or enthusiastic enough to tinker with the notebook looking to maximize their purchase and then discover the corners they cut for profit and make a ruckus about it...

FOR EXAMPLE
And Asus behaves like a corporate behemouth only focused on profit. So they will assess how much does it cost to provide proper support vs don't provide it and save money? For example, they know the HD5870M was borked and yet they sold it. They set the memory on the 5870M at 1000 across the board, from high performance to maximum battery savings. They claimed it was because in their testing didn't matter. But it does matter, reduce in heat, fan noise and battery life. GDDR5 consumes a lot of power and generates a lot of heat. EVERY other brand had memory changing speeds dynamically properly. Then you discover if you change the vBios yourself, everytime the memory downclocks on Asus, your screen flickers and the memory changes erratically when using programs like Steam or web browsers with hardware acceleration. That's the REAL reason and Asus knew and sold it anyway. And after being caught, they did nothing about it. Just made the excuse above. Now if this was Clevo/Sager or Alienware, guaranteed they would have worked with AMD to provide a proper vBios that functioned correctly. But wait, Asus are too cheap to use the cards that everyone else are provided with and create their own weird MMX boards with borked vBios. Awesome.

 

I agree with you. Even my P150EM with GTX675M was just a little more expensive than the G55. The HD 7970M in your signature is only roughly $100 more expensive than mine too.