Asus G73SW-XT1, G74SX-BBK7, and G73JH-BBK7

Hi Everyone

So in the next week I will be buying two of any of the above machines, for myself and wife. We are not "hard core" gamers, she plays Guild Wars, I play DDO, Battlefield Bad company 2, Witcher 2, and Battlefield 3 when it comes out.. So as you can see not big game players, but we both use our PC for our at home jobs.

I have a couple of questions about the above machines, obviously I don't want to replace laptops in the next 2 years at least..

On the G73SW-XT1, it has 4 memory slots, and comes with 8 gig, would that be 4x2gig or 2x4gig..Also on this laptop I see it takes two drives does it come with the extra drive caddy or not?

On the G73JH-BBK7 again that can hold two drives would that come with the drive caddy.

On the G74SX-BBK7 I see that is the best buy version, and that it comes with what some people refer to as a 'Gimped" video card, how much does that limit the card, would it be as fast as the 5870 (G73JH-BBK7) or the 460M on the XT-1, or would you keep away from it?

Thanks for taking the time to look at this question, I am quite excited to be joining the Asus owning family in the next week or so..

 

If I had to choose probably I would go for the g73sw-xn1.
First you should worry about the overall performance instead of the disk space.
It offers the newer sandy bridge platform, i7-2630qm which beats hands down the other two models.
Also it uses the full gtx460m,192bit,1,5gb of VRAM.
My second choiche would be the JH model although it's the best buy version.
Afaik that hd5870m isn't gimped like it happened with nvidia cards; the raw power is on par with gtx470m, but you loose CPU performance because it uses the precedent generation core i7.
The drive caddy should be already mounted or available in the box of the xn1.
Even if you loose a bit of gpu power with the xn1, you're still able to push the gtx460m with overclock, the cooling system is awesome and even overclocked the card stays well below the average thermal of the other cards, rarely you will see it going above 75c.
So speaking of a "general view" I would advice the first laptop for various reasons, and the second one only if you want to upgrade the CPU to an xm version in the future, but still it's already a predent generation machine.
Plus in speaking as an nvidia fan, I've always had trouble with ATI and their drivers, on desktop and laptop (I had a few 5870 in crossfire).
Switching to greenteam sorted my pain with the added bonus of a solid driver support and cuda/Physx features.
To make an example Alice Madness Returns runs maxed out at 1080p even with Physx on high on my gtx460m, having Physx enabled in these supported games seriously add depth and eyecandy that are crazy.