TAIPEI—PCMag has covered a lot of the announcements of new systems and other products made at Computex 2012 here. But one we were particularly interested in was one of the gaming laptops Asus unveiled at its Republic of Gamers press conference on Tuesday. While touring the Nangang Exhibition Hall, we got a chance to spend some up-close-and-personal time with the G75VW.
This system typifies everything you would expect from both a gaming laptop and an Asus product. The system, which measures about 0.7 by 16.3 by 12.6 inches (HWD), has a luxurious, 17.3-inch LED backlit screen that delivers an astoundingly crisp picture at its native 1,920-by-1,080 resolution. (If the shots of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim you see in the slideshow look blurry, it's because it was playing in stereoscopic 3D mode. It looked terrific through the glasses, but of course we couldn't easily photograph it that way.)Inside the G75VW was a top-tier Intel Core i7-3720QM mobile chip (part of the third-generation Core, or Ivy Bridge, family) running on the Mobile Intel HM77 Express chipset, and a full 16GB of RAM. The graphics chip was Nvidia's GTX670M, which was loaded with 3GB of GDDR5 VRAM—that would definitely help explain the smoothness of its gameplay (and, because of the Nvidia LightBoost technology used as part of its 3D vision package, why Skyrim looked so bright). We're not sure exactly what storage Asus's display model used, but dual 5,400rpm hard drives up to 2TB or up to 1.5TB with 7,200rpm hard drives (in either case configured with RAID Level 0 or 1), a single 750GB hard drive (again at a 7,200rpm spin rate), or a 256GB solid-state drive are all available options. Naturally for a laptop this size, there's an optical drive, too.
The chiclet-style keys have a fine travel, and look and feel similar to the keys on many other higher-end Asus laptops. Also notable here is the full-size, 10-key number pad (some Asus models use half-size keys instead). There's a good selection of ports on the G75VW: microphone and headphone; a three-in-one card reader; VGA, HDMI, and Thunderbolt for outputting to external monitors (or, in the case of the last, to other speedy external devices); Ethernet to complement its 802.11ac Wi-Fi capabilities (this will reportedly be the first laptop in the world to use the 5GHz band); S/PDIF for digital audio; and a healthy three USB 3.0 ports. We couldn't test battery life, obviously, but the laptop comes with an eight-cell, 74Wh battery that should last a respectable amount of time unplugged. (Well, respectable by gaming laptop standards, that is.) Given that it weighs about 10 pounds, chances are you won't be lugging it around much anyway.
Clad entirely in gray, save for Asus and Republic of Gamers logos on its lid, the G75W is austerely attractive (although the keyboard's backlight provides a nice amount of flash. A rear-facing exhaust port keeps hot air as far away from you as possible.
Our preliminary play time with the G75VW was pleasurable, to the hands (the keyboard deck's rubberized palm rest was a nice touch) and ears (thanks to the fine-quality SonicMaster Lite audio, with built-in subwoofer, that delivered strong battle sounds) as well as the eyes.
PCMag's planning to get one of these in to test and review, so be sure to check back to see whether the Asus G75VW is an attractive performer, too.
For more from Computex, see the slideshow below.
