G75vw-bbk5

So owning a few high end gaming laptops i decided to put up a little review as well as point out some things about the G75VW. This is the Unit from Best Buy that Retails for $1,299.99

Specs.

Core i7 3610QM
GTX660M
8gb DDR3 1600
1tb 5,300rpm drive
Dual Layer DVD/DVD-RW
B,G,N Wifi
1920X1080 display
4 X USB 3.0 ports.
150w ac adapter

Nothing to impressive on the specs. I consider this to be a low end gaming laptop. Single GTX680M would be mid. and the high end would be 2 X GTX680M's in SLI.

So how does it stack up against other systems in this price rage?

The Sager NP6370 will set you back $1,159 with the same specs other than a 500gb 7,200rpm drive. That leaves you $150 for a SSD or another upgrade like 3720QM.

The Orgin EON17-S starts at $1,585 but has much better specs but this still is way over our price limit of $1,299.99.

The MSI GE70 0ND-033US will set you back $1,211.53 And is pretty much the same specs as the G75VW-BBK5.


Seems that Asus has lost the Value war now and is pretty close to other offerings so lets see what this thing has.




Display. 1920X1080 matt display. Color looks good. Viewing angles are nice however its not a IPS. I would really like IPS displays on all so called gaming notbooks. The Display on the G75 is not the worst i seen however it is not the best.

Sound. Sound is "ok" The system is loud subwoofer works but its nothing that i would brag about. In terms of other high end systems the sound is subpar at best and they really should of used something better. But i never gotten any cracks or pops from the sound system.

Keyboard. Keys have a nice feel to them however the back light on this keyboard is pretty fail. Its super dim cant change the color. Its not the best but then again its not the worst but i will say the back light is the worst i have ever seen.

Graphics. GTX660M is the same as the cheaper GT650M however the GTX660M's are binned higher so should run cooler and overclock higher. With a core oc to 970mhz turbo to over a gig. "Turbo works well when i was testing it" temps never went over 60c on the gpu.

CPU. Its a i7. Its 3rd gen nothing much more to say.

HDD. 1 tb seagate/samsung 5,300rpm advanced format. Slow but its 1tb. Switch out to a SSD or a 7,200rpm drive.

Ports. Well some online sites lead you to baleave it has a Mini Display port/Thunderbolt port and theirs event the icon above the port. But the system has no thunderbolt. Guess one of the engineers at Asus thought it would be cool to add that. I wounder if the guy has a 6cyl Mustang with the Cobra fender badges under a set of GT badges. But you get a HDMI, Mini Display, 4 USB 3.0 old school VGA "Why" SD card combo port. Dont get a lot of ports but keep a gaming pc clean. HDMI and usb is all you need.

Overall look of the laptop. I like the silver and matt black. Looks clean and simple.

Cooling. Its about time we get to something no other maker can come close to Asus on. Hats off to whoever did the cooling on the G series "other than the G74" The G75 cooling is the benchmark of what gaming notbooks should be. Its loud but not to loud and does a awesome job at keeping the temps low wither its on your lap, chill par or hovering in air with a book under each corner. Then Asus knocked another one out of the park with making the fans user accseable for cleaning and putting on fan filters. They also give you a extra set of filter. However i oped to remove the filters since i clean my heatsinks every 3 months and wanted every last bit of flow i could get. But awesome job on this hats off to the engineers who did this.

Bloatware....Why Asus why? Please include a driver cd so people can decrapafie this thing and do a fresh install when they get it. We dont need all the crap that you pack into it.


Well the system is nice. If your worried about the heat a gaming notebook will put out and do alot of gaming on your lap or long sessions "wow players im looking at you" this is the system you want. You really dont want to keep your cpu and gpu at 90c for 8 hours at time. This system will run cool and provide all the power you need. But if your looking for the best value i would have to tell you to look into Sager and MSI's offerings .




So you got a G75VW cool welcome to the club. You should get a SSD asap. Samsung 830's are nice as well as Kingston Hyperx 3k's. A cheap raid on this laptop will get you over 1gb's reads and writes.

Improving boot time. The G75 even with a fast SSD is a slow booter. Easy fix head over to Samsung and download/install easy settings for the Chronos 7 notbooks. Under Boot management pick fast boot mode. Your boot time will be faster now. Software also works with other stuff like display settings and UAC control.

Its not a bad system. And if you pick it up from Best Buy you get 30 days to try it out and see if you like it and want to keep it. So you do pay more buying it from them but you get a very nice 30 day test drive.

 

Nice review +1

A single 680M is high end these days fella It is the same as 2 and half 660M's

One point about the SSD I don't think Asus offer RAID in these laptops at least it is not advertised. An SSD instead of the 5400 would be very nice and then have that as the secondary is what most find is the best option.

 

Yeah i been playing with the laptop and you can get TRIM in Raid on this system intel should be releasing the official support for it but no ETA on that. In order to enable trim you need to do some stuff so its best if i just let people look for that on their own because if they cant find the guides online chances are they wont be able to do it.

But for Cheap SSD's i been testing out the Kingston HyperX 3k's in 120bg in this system raided together and my friends been using one since launch and we never had any issues. So if you cant get the cash for a Samsung 830 the HyperX3k is a nice alternative.

I will advise people that if they want a high end laptop please know what your getting into. 2 X GTX680m's is a massive amount of heat. In school i would play wow behind my friend and he would tell me i was burning off the hair on the back of his neck. If your looking for a system to use for hours on end on your lap or a table at a friends the G75 is pretty nice due to how cool it stays.


But i really really really wish Asus would of put nvidia optimus in this. You cant game on the battery the frame rates are very spiky. I'll try downclocking and report back and even lowering settings but maxed out how i use it on the AC you cant. The HD4000 is enough to play WOW at mid settings at 1920X1080 with the shadows a little lower. This would of been very useful on this system and improve the battery life. I would also like to see in a bios update the ability to see the battery max charge to 80 or 90% so the battery never gets overcharged since most will be using this as a desktop.


I am talking to Asus about the whole Thunderbolt issue. I contacted a reviewer who was sent a sample from Asus and he confirmed that his sample did have thunderbolt and he did test it on a Apple display and some thunderbolt harddrives. Production versions never had this despite the port being a mini display/thunderbolt port. This was pretty dishonest of Asus to do this and get the reviews to say it has Thunderbolt. I am seeking a letter of apology to all who bought these systems and on the systems official webpage that it be noted production versions do not have thunderbolt dispute what reviews say. And those effected the ability to ship in their G75's and have the motherboard switched to one that has this feature when it becomes available "Some say they are shipping now why other say they never planned on adding thunderbolt to this."



Also some time this weekend i will be starting work on a guide on improving the cooling further in the G75 as well as replacing the stock speakers with something higher quality.

An update to the KB backlight brightness. So i been checking this out and i found the LED's at max brightness are only getting about 1/2 the power they should and what they are rated for. I'm going to be testing out some things and working on a mod to improve this however i wont post anything until i test it for at least a week's worth of use.


But a update. three weeks of heavy every day use on the system. No issues running like a champ.

 

do U play any games on it?

 

Just World Of Warcraft. If i can get some demo's i'll test out games but wow is the only game i have.

So time to hotrod this thing and see how much power shes got. Im not pushing any limits this is on a stock bios no vmods and im not maxed out on the gpu or memory i'll figure out the max's soon then do some vmods. Temps went up 3c load pushing these new clocks what is pretty impressive. The cooling system is taming this gpu pretty good. max load was 65c after looping 3dmark for 2 hours.

14,312 over all. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3610QM Processor,ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. G75VW score: P14312 3DMarks Not bad considering this is a every day system with no tweeks and a ton of running processes. This puts it pretty close to a GTX470 desktop. And close to a GTX675M there is no dought in my mind i can get this card faster then a stock GTX675M It loves to overclock and destroys the GTX670M. Makes less heat takes less power and overclocks like a monster making this card a far better choice then a GTX670M until a Kepler version comes out.


NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3610QM Processor,Alienware M17xR4 score: P3374 3DMarks 3D Mark 11. Not a record setter but its one of the fastest single GTX 660M set up's useing a i7 3610QM and i still got some more room to oc. Testing out some new memory timeings on the card so i will be deff. running some higher clock benches and i might even toss in the i 7 3920XM out of my EON17 and see if it will work in the Asus and get few more points on 3D Mark lol.

 

You say that 660 is better than 670?
I want o buy G75.