Asus G751 Review

When it comes to gaming laptops people immediately think of Alienware and rightly so; they've been making high end hardware for years and with their purchase by Dell they've hit mainstream popularity. Having said that, one area that Alienware have been found to be lacking in is their aftersales care. When you couple this in with their excessive pricing it makes their gaming laptops something that is only a pipedream for many.

Seeing this, Asus released their Republic of Gamers line of components, to the extent that they even made a laptop line out of it. These have done extremely well over the years, and this time they've released the G751 series which gives you a lot of bang for your buck.

As you'd expect from a gaming laptop, the G751 isn't the smallest. It has a 17.3" IPS, full HD display and comes in at a whopping 8.5 lbs. It's a fair size and not something that many would actively carry around with them, so in that sense you could class this is a portable desktop replacement.

This isn't a bad thing at all though. It's a well made and sturdy design and it could take a fair amount of bumps (not that you should treat this rig badly). The screen itself is beautiful, in that from a wide array of viewing angles the picture still looks great.

One of the things with the screen is that with a handy tap of the ROG button on the keyboard you're given a few options to adjust the colour balance settings with there being three built in profiles for those that don't want to meddle with the display too much. Rest assured, no matter what you're viewing you'll be giving your eyes a real treat.

For a gaming laptop the one question that should be on your lips is what GPU is running in it. Thankfully Asus have decided to put in the highest quality mobile GPU currently available in the form of the nVidia GTX 980M. This is a seriously impressive GPU which has 4GB of DDR5 RAM. Suffice to say you'll be able to play a lot of games on this, even ones that haven't been the best optimised for Windows such as GTA IV. Ranking up all the settings in game for Battlefield 4 managed to net a healthy 100 fps, and doing the same for Crysis 3 bagged a respectful average of 40 fps.

At this point it would be good to point out that this rig runs on Windows 8.1 which isn't really a deal breaker but for those that feel this OS hampers their gaming experience you can easily change the OS to Windows 7 although you'd need to buy your own license for this. Windows 8.1 isn't actually that bad and this laptop will also perform great on Windows 10 when it is released next year.

On the base model of the G751 you'll be getting a 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7-4710HQ which is a serious contender at the best of times. With this CPU you'll be able to zip through numerous tass including gaming and video editing at a respectable speed.

Coupled with this is an exceptionally high level of DDR 3 RAM, with it coming in at 24GB! This alone should tell you that this is one serious laptop and not just something for a bit of light gaming (although you could happily do it on this).

To further show that this is a laptop worthy of the mantle of the ROG badge, Asus have put in two storage devices on it. This might not seem like a revolution (an old laptop of mine had 2 HDD's on it). However, one storage device (the boot device) is a 256GB SSD and the other is a 1TB HDD. The end result of this is that you're looking at about a boot time of around 5 seconds although this will vary depending what start up programs you have on your computer.

With regards to how you can connect your other devices to the G751, it of course has the obligatory HDMI output should you wish to connect it up to your TV, as well as a VGA output which is actually a rather nice touch.

All in you're also treated to 4 USB 3.0 ports (two on each side of the unit) as well as a Blu Ray rewriter. This is actually a pretty novel addition to a laptop. Unlike days gone by where you would get a DVD burner in nearly every laptop, this hasn't been the case with Blu Ray. This however is due to the processing power needed to author Blu Ray discs. Thankfully though if you've got a Blu Ray collection they'll look amazing on your Full HD G751 display.

There's also a built in SD card reader which can also read SDXC. This option is great for content creators since the SSD along with the powerful CPU and GPU makes tasks in Photoshop and Premiere Pro a real breeze.

This seriously is an amazing laptop and should see you well for a long time! Feel free to check it out on Amazon in the link below, and since it's from Amazon you know you'll be saving a fair amount of money than you would if you buy it in a retail shop.

Whilst not strictly connectivity, the keyboard and built in trackpad are amazing. The backlit keys are excellent and when gaming you don't need an additional keyboard since it's exceptional when it comes to playing games.

I've included an Amazon USA widget below for you to buy this at the lowest price possible. If it's the case that you're in the UK, you can get the laptop from Amazon UK via this link.