G73JH refreshed!

I haven't been on here in a while. My G73 was overheating pretty badly(98-102C when under gaming loads, touchpad was going dead, and I was just overall losing interest in the machine.

I finally got the time and space to pull it completely apart to do a clean and repaste job, as well as do the touchpad fix. I'm enamored with this system once more. Idle temps of 53C and load temps of 75C, touchpad is now super-responsive and it's ready to take anything I throw at it. Next up is to get my office setup just the way I want it so it can take its place as my proper desktop replacement. Thanks everyone for posting all the resources I needed to fix my machine up right.

That said, I ran into an acquaintance who just picked up a G74 from Best Buy, and he's been raving about how awesome it is. I was wondering how my older G73 stacks up, generally? It looks like at the very least he has a 900p display while I swapped out to my awesome matte 1080p. I'm curious if my older system still has some punch left.

 

In my opinion, the G73's are great. They are still very sought after actually. The obvious difference would lie in the components therein, but it is still a wonderful system no doubt about it.

The biggest difference is in the video card: The G74's use the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M is based on the GF116 core which is basically an optimized GF106 core with the same features. The chip offers 192 shaders and a 192 Bit memory bus for GDDR5. While the G73JH models use the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870, which is based on Broadway-XT core which has 800 shader and 128 bit memory bus.

Some games were tested by NotebookCheck to compare the gaming performance between Nvidia GTX 560M and Ati Mobility Radeon HD 5870. The frame rates of these graphics cards were always high enough to be playable in low to high details and all resolution settings, except some high demanding games like Crysis, Crysis 2, and Metro 2033.

The GTX 560M even doubled the FPS results on Dirt 2. While other games have only a slight gap. Though the AMD’s slightly win the FPS battle in Metro 2033 test, on overall, HD 5870 is leaped by GTX 560 in gaming performance manners.

Hope this assist you in knowing that the G73 is a great machine.
Cheers!

 

Your system will easily compare to the Best Buy version of the G74 performance wise. You will easily match his 128bit GPU with the 5870M because of its higher bandwidth 24gb/s faster at stock which makes a big difference as Michael said above in games that require faster processing from the memory, even more so at 1080p.

The difference in benchmarks will also not give a true light because the G74 will be running on the new sandy bridge and yours on the older Gen 1 CPU so if you upgrade to the 920XM for instance you will easily match or slightly surpass the BB G74. Refresh models from Asus so far have not been upto scratch, they conveniently pass off new models as new tech when they are no different and in many cases weaker than their previous counterparts for a much higher price, it works because too many of us read a book by its cover and think that new means better.

The news that the G75/55 is going to pack a 670M is a much better choice by Asus to jump in between the mid/high end GPU's and it is really something they should have done with the G74 and punched in a 570M instead of the 560.

That being said if I had not been forced to upgrade I would still be sitting comfortably now on my G73JH and would probably not upgrade until later this year if that was the case when the Ivy refresh comes out and drops in price.