The G73 Best Buy info thread

this would be a deal breaker for me, i want to use and ssd + 500gb hdd, anyone else can check if their 2 hdd bay is at least recognized?

 

That would be extremely helpful, if someone could swap their drive that is already in it to the other bay and see if it shows up in the bios.

So far I have tried 3 different drives in that bay and changing between ide and ahci and no luck

 

In G51 sometimes when you added 2nd hdd it didnt work either, but a Load user default setting in the bios and exiting and re entering the bios showed it, maybe it works.

 

Haha! your the man abula! popped the drive back in and went into the bios loaded the defaults saved and rebooted and bam now it shows up! thanks!

 

Glad to help, nice to see 2nd bay works. Btw did your had 2 hdd brackets? just wondering if the bestbuy has 2 so i dont bother trying to get one.

 

lol phased! same here! had the geek squad checkingout my g73 at cust service ... just left bb... will be home in a bit

 

Nope it didnt i just grabbed a thin piece of sheet metal here in our prototype shop at work and cut/bent/drilled one up really fast

 

Whew, I officially decided to go for the G73JH-RBBX05 and canceled my order on the N61JQ-X1! Now the question is when the heck will it be available online? =/ Tax is 7% here so I'd really rather use bing cashback. And do you guys think it's going to be sold out really quickly and I would have trouble getting my hands on one?

 

Hmm! dang.. shoulda waited for this to come out!!!!! looks like ill be selling my N71JQ-X1 to hop on this deal

 

I could be wrong but I think these are going to sell out fast online.... instantly.

They havent been advertised or put on display in my area, and every store has already sold out with me getting the last one today! lol

 

Its gonna sell out soon, given the price n performance, even the G71 sold out really fast at least the first batch, if you are already sure you want it, then dont hesitate, else you might have to wait for it, even the A1/2/X1 sold out really fast. I had to buy a G51 cause my G71 was stolen and it was out of stock for like a month.

 

Meh I guess I'll do some calling around tomorrow and face the tax... $84 of tax is just horrible!

 

Still waiting for an answer from some1 who allready bought the 05

 

how do i find out if i have the asus warranty? would it be in the box?

I know when i opened the box up there were a sheet that said "Before you return this product to the store, call us first!"

 

should come with the Asus warranty registration card.. it should be in the box with you disk/manual

 

I've been doing a lot of research about the pros and cons of buying the Asus G73jh online vs. brick-and-mortar, and from what I can tell, Best Buy has a "proprietary" build of the laptop, right? Take a look at this link:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage...p=&qp=&list=n&iht=y&usc=All+Categories&ks=960

Looks like Best Buy has two different models of the G73; both of them have 1600x900 LCD res instead of the normal models. Now the first one for $1599 seems like it has pretty much the same specs as the A1, except the screen res obviously. What's confusing is why the SECOND model is so much cheaper ($400 less)...just because it has 2GB less RAM and 500GB less HDD? That doesn't seem like it would add up to 400 bucks, but apparently that's the only difference.

Right now I'm trying to figure out if I should wait for the Best Buy version or get the full G73JH-A1 from another store here in my hometown that's holding one for me for 24 hours...It's the full A1, and this other store is charging $1699 + tax, which obviously sucks.

What sucks even MORE with ANY of these brick-and-mortar stores is that the G73 will only come with a 1-year warranty, both at Best Buy and the store I'm holding one at. I know it's because they wanna sell you their own extended warranty packages, but it seems really unfair that we end up paying the same price for only 1 year instead of 2 years of warranty, and no accidental damage 1 year warranty at all (which is what all the G73's come with online).

Anyway, anyone wanna give me a little advice? I really need this computer soon for work (I'm a video game journalist and my main laptop died 2 weeks ago), so I'm trying to figure out how substantial the pros and cons are of buying the full A1 for $1800 including tax locally and NOW, or possibly paying a lot less via Best Buy, or even online? But from what I've heard, all the online retailers are pretty much back-ordered right now as well, up to mid-April or so....

Thanks

 

I'm so excited I just got my G73JH-RBBX05 from BB an hour ago. I'm still setting it up right now but so far so good !

 

Give a quick review and pics if you have the opportunity to.

Thanks in advance.

 

I'll buy a few and resell them to people if I can find them. If I get some, who would be interested in purchasing them? I'll ship internationally as long as payment is via wire transfer.

 

I'll try to post pics, but I just wanted to say that I'm just browsing the web with this puppy on my lap and it does not get hot at all, it's quite pleasing.

 

What kind of warranty do you offer

 

That's odd that some people are reporting the stores are actually selling them on the floor, while other areas (like mine), the BB clerks are saying it's a delivery-only item (the girl from BB I talked to on the phone today said they won't even be carrying them on the shelf, but I realize she could have been wrong)....hmm...kinda makes me wonder if I should actually go into one of my local stores and have someone go in the back and really look for it.

As I mentioned in my post above, I still can't decide to wait and buy the $1200 BB model or just buy the actual A1 model from another store that's actually holding one for me until tomorrow, for $1800 including tax.

Biggest issues:

1) Screen res: I hear a lot of people saying that games will actually perform BETTER on a native res of 1600x900 rather than the 1920x1080 of the A1. Is this true? If so, what about manually lowering the res to 1600x900? Not the same performance gain since it's not NATIVE res?

2) The warranty...ugh, the warranty...I can't stand the thought of only having a 1-year warranty on a notebook, especially when everyone else online gets a 2-year plus accidental. However, people have pointed out cheap after-market warranties like SquareTrade...

3) Time. I can have the A1 in my hands by Monday if I go ahead and spend the 1800 bucks, which is important because of my job. On the other hand, saving 500 bucks or so for the Best Buy model would probably be worth it if I knew for sure they would have them in stock within the next week.

By the way, if anyone is interested in where they can buy an actual A1 and have it shipped to them within 5-7 days, Nebraska Furniture Mart is actually carrying the full A1 model both in-stores and in-warehouses. The one in Omaha here only has one left in-store, which they're holding for me. But the other NFM stores might still have them in-store, and they will ship. Plus I think they have them in their regional warehouse. Sorry I didn't announce it to you guys earlier, but I found out they had 4 of them left the other day and I knew if I announced it to the board, they would sell out in an hour. Had to wait until today to put it on hold so that I can buy it tomorrow after my paycheck clears.

Just go to Nebraska Furniture Mart's website and search for G73JH and the listing should come up...they are only selling the A1 model, which last I checked, said "in-stock with delivery available," with delivery less than a week. Maybe I should make new forum post about it, actually...I haven't heard of any other retailers being able to ship out the A1 before April 5. The only downside with NFM is that you only get the 1-year warranty. If you don't care about waiting an extra week or two, it would probably be worth it to wait and get one from another retailer with the 2-year warranty.

 

1)
Yes playing games at lower res (1600x900) will yield you better FPS.
Now if you have a higher res screen and lower the res to get better FPS the games often don't look as sharp.
Decent but not as good as whatever the native res on that screen is.

 

Looks like the memory's not 1333.

 

If only canada didn't tax imports, I'd be interested 5150 :/

And my guess is that ALL g73 models from april onwards will have 1066 ram standard equipped TJ - not that there is really any difference between it and 1333.

 

Even the stock version at etailers has memory only at 1066MHz. 1333 costs a decent amount extra.

Also, one thing I'm curious about is what it takes for the Best Buy model to accept a second hard drive. Is the bay capable of just a plug in and go, or do you need some adapter?

I'm not real thrilled with the 1600x900 resolution though. Even my Sager has 1680x1050 which can display 1280x1024 which is important for me on a couple select games.

 

They probably won't include the hard drive housing bracket (seeing as though Asus didn't with the BB G51/G60) so you'd need to buy that online from Asus when/if it comes out.

 

damnit not a single picture of the screen?

 

I agree - sales tax sucks in most states... our texas 8.25% tax just ate up most of my discover 10% coupon at the register

Mew, pics coming soon ... hey this is the first post I"ve seen from you in which you seem just a tad bit optimistic about asus ... you thinking about coming over to the dark side? lol

 

Does the RBBX05 have illuminated keyboard too?

 

yes the keyboard has the led backlight

 

We need benchmarks on this badboy!
Something, and I agree we need the lowdown on the lower res screen.

 

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We need pics of the screen. Bonus points if you have a known good quality screen to compare it to in the picture.

 

*SQUEAL* Local BB has 1 left!! It's the first BB I called. Picking it up today!

 

hurry!!!

btw, for anyone in the DFW area - they have at least 1-3 units per shop... the most I found in the dallas area were at Park Ln in dallas, 3 brand new sitting below the displays behind the glass, very easy to find (some have them up high in the cages, more difficult to see)

 

I have been playing Left4Dead2, and Dragon age, both are at max settings. This rig does not even get hot. I played lfd2 for 4 hours last night and 4 hours this morning. Not at all hot, and quiet.

This thing is a dream. The Screen is quite nice even at the lower resolution. Buy it. This is the only g73 model you have a chance of getting without a waiting time. Don't wait!!!

I cant run 3dmark vantage as it is looking for a directX 1o file and this card is directX 11. any ideas?

 

Mine shows the frequency as 667mhz ill post the Picture in a few. maybe i am reading it wrong.

 

Can someone post some temps please under full load?
Thanks!

 

isn't it the same as the A1/A2 from retailers ?

 

=[ I got it, but it has a dead pixel...

 

It might have almost the same specs but you never know.
Just wondering how temps are
Some units have run warmer than others

 

What is the best program for checking temps on this notebook?

 

I use Coretemp for my cpu.

 

I imagine that NFM has you to thank for quickly selling out their stock of G73JH laptops I checked a few hours ago and they're all out now.

 

I think the usuals cant read the at least the gpu, i think hwinfo is what most of the G73 users use. Also new GPUZ out ( GPU-Z v0.4.0) not sure if yet recognizes the 5870m.

 

Abula is 100% correct hwinfo is what all G73 users use,for some reason hwmonitor does not work with it.

 

There is a review from Vicious for the original A1 model.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=459400

Some pics inside as well...

 

Just picked up one of these bad boys at my local Best Buy and I'll sell it to you still sealed in box. See here for more info...

 

Okay, I lied. It wasn't a dead pixel. It was some kind of dust stuck behind the screen.

So now I'm on my second one. I had a problem with this one too actually. It's supposed to come with 6GB of RAM, but Windows only detected 2GB. My friends were trying to figure out what was wrong since I'm not very tech savvy and found that BIOS does say 6GB was installed. After 30 minutes of talking to tech support, we eventually got it to read all 6GB of RAM. No idea how really to be honest. So now it's running fine, and no dead pixels.

 

Here are some pics from when I went to turkey for business on the screen, they were taken from a nikon d40.

Personally I think the screen looks good, but I might not be the best judge. there isnt any black light bleed that I can see, colors look good, lighting is very even across the screen. Its fairly bright, not the brightest but fairly bright.