Anandtech review of G74!

AnandTech - ASUS G74SX: Noteworthy Updates to ASUS' G7 Series

My only complaint is once again they go on about Floptimus...NOT having it is one of the big reasons I bought the G74, and I'm sick and tired of hearing about ridiculous switchable graphics

The one they reviewed apparently has 16GB instead of 12 like mine, and a 160GB SSD, but I upgraded to a 300GB Intel 320 SSD, and my GPU has 3GB instead of 1.5GB (not that that probably matters, but that's not upgradeable while I can always add more RAM).

"under maximum load the G74SX still only hits 37.3dB"

^ THAT is seriously impressive.

 

With a system this big and heavy, you really have to stretch the argument to say you're going to need a large margin of battery life, especially for gaming (decreased performance). It's a desk in itself. When I had a g73 I was never away from mains power for long, I had a 12" notebook for portability. The g73 was a desktop replacement and sat on my desk. Of course opinions can vary wildly here.

They seem to be generally complimenting the design, which I agree is a nice refinement from the 73. I also like how they give a mention of the lack of NVIDIA's support for optimus on linux.

 

Yeah, for me my G74 is just as portable as my Macbook Air, though I never use either not-plugged-in (well, actually I don't really use the Air at all since buying my G74, but...)

Power gating would be cool, and seems like the real solution there. I mean it just disturbs me that we've got 200 million transisters sitting on the CPU that are just redundant...when you look at the die, it appears they could fit in a fifth core and/or more cache...or use less power/hit higher clocks perhaps.

To me it just feels like Intel's abusing their duopoly power :-/

 

Redundant is fine, but is it eating power at idle for the integrated graphics when it's not even initialized by the BIOS? I haven't seen any evidence, would be interesting to find out.

Edit: alright I seem to have found the answer, it's on pages 45 & 46:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us...d-gen-core-family-mobile-vol-1-datasheet.html

You can see in table 4-8 a D3 mode for the GPU (powered off) and with any C state for the CPU allowed. That means it's not stealing power as long as the BIOS doesn't enable the integrated graphics. The GPU portion is not even running at its base frequency in that case, it's just off.